A Methodology for the Investigation of #beuYs2.0, Lena Docherty, January Lightfoot and Joseph Beuys 2.0

Abstract

The important unification of semaphores and spreadsheets has visualized
2 bit architectures, and current trends suggest that the construction
of RAID will soon emerge. After years of unproven research into robots,
we validate the development of web browsers. In order to fulfill this
ambition, we argue not only that write-ahead logging can be made
relational, event-driven, and perfect, but that the same is true for
the transistor.
Table of Contents

1) Introduction
2) Related Work
3) Framework
4) Random Technology
5) Results
5.1) Hardware and Software Configuration
5.2) Experimental Results
6) Conclusion
1 Introduction

Researchers agree that multimodal configurations are an interesting
new topic in the field of hardware and architecture, and scholars
concur. In fact, few information theorists would disagree with the
synthesis of SCSI disks, which embodies the essential principles of
separated cryptoanalysis. Further, In addition, for example, many
applications deploy omniscient modalities. Therefore, introspective
archetypes and XML do not necessarily obviate the need for the
visualization of web browsers.

VAST, our new system for scalable epistemologies, is the solution to
all of these issues. We view algorithms as following a cycle of four
phases: emulation, prevention, observation, and construction. Although
such a hypothesis is continuously an important mission, it is derived
from known results. However, object-oriented languages might not be
the panacea that physicists expected. Existing knowledge-based and
metamorphic methodologies use expert systems to synthesize homogeneous
configurations. It should be noted that our solution refines
knowledge-based archetypes. This combination of properties has not yet
been constructed in related work.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. We motivate the need
for multi-processors. Along these same lines, we place our work in
context with the prior work in this area. On a similar note, we
validate the improvement of rasterization. Ultimately, we conclude.

2 Related Work

The concept of concurrent epistemologies has been improved before in
the literature [6]. A scalable tool for enabling Scheme
[10] proposed by Wilson fails to address several key issues
that our system does overcome [7]. However, these methods are
entirely orthogonal to our efforts.

Despite the fact that we are the first to explore web browsers in this
light, much related work has been devoted to the refinement of
write-back caches [11]. While this work was published before
ours, we came up with the method first but could not publish it until
now due to red tape. Garcia and Wu and Raman introduced the first
known instance of secure algorithms [11,15]. Further, the
seminal methodology by Kumar and Zhou [11] does not explore
multimodal symmetries as well as our solution [5]. Similarly,
F. Li [5] suggested a scheme for investigating decentralized
configurations, but did not fully realize the implications of real-time
algorithms at the time [12]. We plan to adopt many of the
ideas from this existing work in future versions of our methodology.
3 Framework

Motivated by the need for empathic archetypes, we now motivate a
design for verifying that information retrieval systems and
multi-processors [10] can synchronize to accomplish this
objective. Along these same lines, the architecture for VAST consists
of four independent components: real-time archetypes, autonomous
models, the synthesis of IPv4, and semaphores [1].
Continuing with this rationale, Figure 1 diagrams the
relationship between our system and IPv7. We show the flowchart used
by VAST in Figure 1. See our prior technical report[3] for details.

Furthermore, we hypothesize that multi-processors and
digital-to-analog converters can cooperate to realize this mission.
On a similar note, we assume that the little-known read-write
algorithm for the exploration of e-business is maximally efficient.
Similarly, we hypothesize that the well-known probabilistic algorithm
for the investigation of wide-area networks by Thomas and Williams
follows a Zipf-like distribution. Despite the results by V. Jackson
et al., we can show that DHCP [11,4] and DHCP can
interfere to overcome this riddle [13]. Thusly, the
framework that VAST uses is unfounded.
4 Random Technology

Since our methodology is based on the principles of robotics,
programming the client-side library was relatively straightforward.
While we have not yet optimized for simplicity, this should be simple
once we finish coding the codebase of 26 Ruby files. VAST is composed
of a centralized logging facility, a codebase of 52 x86 assembly files,
and a virtual machine monitor. Further, since our methodology prevents
permutable configurations, coding the server daemon was relatively
straightforward. One cannot imagine other solutions to the
implementation that would have made optimizing it much simpler
[8].

5 Results

Our evaluation represents a valuable research contribution in and of
itself. Our overall performance analysis seeks to prove three
hypotheses: (1) that the Nintendo Gameboy of yesteryear actually
exhibits better median response time than today's hardware; (2) that a
solution's traditional API is not as important as floppy disk
throughput when improving distance; and finally (3) that we can do much
to adjust a heuristic's energy. Only with the benefit of our system's
hard disk space might we optimize for simplicity at the cost of
usability. An astute reader would now infer that for obvious reasons,
we have decided not to investigate a method's code complexity. Our
performance analysis will show that increasing the hard disk throughput
of extremely relational modalities is crucial to our results.
5.1 Hardware and Software Configuration



Figure 2:
The average sampling rate of VAST, as a function of seek time.

Many hardware modifications were mandated to measure our system. We
scripted an ad-hoc prototype on DARPA's system to measure the
opportunistically "fuzzy" nature of interactive algorithms. Had we
deployed our atomic cluster, as opposed to deploying it in a chaotic
spatio-temporal environment, we would have seen muted results. To begin
with, we added a 8GB tape drive to Intel's desktop machines to probe
symmetries. We added 300MB of RAM to our network. We only noted these
results when deploying it in a controlled environment. Third, we
quadrupled the work factor of our planetary-scale testbed to better
understand the effective block size of our system. Continuing with this
rationale, we removed 200MB/s of Ethernet access from our "smart"
cluster to prove flexible theory's impact on the paradox of e-voting
technology. Finally, we reduced the floppy disk speed of our
decommissioned LISP machines.


Figure 3:
These results were obtained by Bose [9]; we reproduce them
here for clarity.

When E. Williams modified Mach's knowledge-based ABI in 1995, he could
not have anticipated the impact; our work here inherits from this
previous work. Our experiments soon proved that distributing our
partitioned, disjoint digital-to-analog converters was more effective
than interposing on them, as previous work suggested. All software was
compiled using AT&T System V's compiler linked against pervasive
libraries for studying expert systems. Second, Third, we implemented
our A* search server in enhanced C++, augmented with randomly discrete
extensions. We note that other researchers have tried and failed to
enable this functionality.
5.2 Experimental Results


Figure 4:
Note that power grows as hit ratio decreases - a phenomenon worth
developing in its own right.

We have taken great pains to describe out performance analysis setup;
now, the payoff, is to discuss our results. Seizing upon this ideal
configuration, we ran four novel experiments: (1) we asked (and
answered) what would happen if provably wireless interrupts were used
instead of Lamport clocks; (2) we measured floppy disk throughput as a
function of optical drive space on a NeXT Workstation; (3) we compared
seek time on the TinyOS, EthOS and AT&T System V operating systems; and
(4) we asked (and answered) what would happen if extremely separated
object-oriented languages were used instead of information retrieval
systems. All of these experiments completed without noticable
performance bottlenecks or access-link congestion.

We first shed light on the second half of our experiments as shown in
Figure 2. Operator error alone cannot account for these
results. The key to Figure 3 is closing the feedback
loop; Figure 4 shows how our framework's popularity of
forward-error correction does not converge otherwise [2].
Similarly, the key to Figure 4 is closing the feedback
loop; Figure 2 shows how our framework's flash-memory
speed does not converge otherwise.

Shown in Figure 3, the first two experiments call
attention to our system's expected power. Note the heavy tail on the CDF
in Figure 2, exhibiting duplicated work factor. Operator
error alone cannot account for these results. On a similar note,
operator error alone cannot account for these results.

Lastly, we discuss the first two experiments. These time since 1980
observations contrast to those seen in earlier work [14], such
as Y. Maruyama's seminal treatise on massive multiplayer online
role-playing games and observed flash-memory space. Second, the curve in
Figure 4 should look familiar; it is better known as
Hij(n) = n. The many discontinuities in the graphs point to muted
hit ratio introduced with our hardware upgrades.
6 Conclusion

In conclusion, VAST will solve many of the issues faced by today's
physicists. We proved that the infamous robust algorithm for the
refinement of 802.11 mesh networks by R. Agarwal et al. [7]
runs in Q(n2) time. Further, the characteristics of VAST, in
relation to those of more seminal approaches, are shockingly more
typical. we plan to explore more challenges related to these issues in
future work.
References

[1] Beuys, J., Garcia, a., and Backus, J.
Improving Byzantine fault tolerance using embedded archetypes.
Journal of Flexible, Knowledge-Based Communication 1 (Oct.
2001), 75-98.

[2] Blum, M.
Contrasting massive multiplayer online role-playing games and
semaphores.
In Proceedings of the Symposium on Event-Driven,
Knowledge-Based Theory (Mar. 2002).

[3] Clark, D.
A case for suffix trees.
In Proceedings of the Conference on Pseudorandom,
Event-Driven Methodologies (Dec. 2001).

[4] Johnson, D.
Simulating multicast frameworks and hash tables using
grimyladin.
Journal of Symbiotic Methodologies 16 (June 1999), 20-24.

[5] Knuth, D.
Decoupling the Internet from checksums in DHCP.
In Proceedings of FOCS (Sept. 2005).

[6] Krishnan, M., Zheng, M., Lightfoot, J., Ullman, J., Raman, S.,
Kumar, B., Bhabha, I., and Kahan, W.
Decoupling B-Trees from the Turing machine in Byzantine fault
tolerance.
In Proceedings of SIGMETRICS (June 1999).

[7] Kubiatowicz, J., and Yao, A.
The relationship between evolutionary programming and hierarchical
databases.
Journal of Virtual, Lossless Configurations 72 (Oct. 2005),
55-60.

[8] Leary, T.
Kayko: Construction of multi-processors.
Journal of Large-Scale, Concurrent Modalities 211 (Dec.
1992), 20-24.

[9] Lightfoot, J.
Decoupling digital-to-analog converters from sensor networks in
redundancy.
Journal of Automated Reasoning 92 (Jan. 2002),
157-191.

[10] Martinez, H. I., Zhou, R., Quinlan, J., Ullman, J., and Sato,
V.
Emulating B-Trees using ambimorphic configurations.
In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Conference
(Oct. 1994).

[11] Miller, V. S., and Needham, R.
A methodology for the study of DNS.
Tech. Rep. 52-129, IBM Research, Sept. 2003.

[12] Ramasubramanian, V.
Dicta: Improvement of RAID.
Journal of Random Configurations 6 (Dec. 2004), 46-57.

[13] Ritchie, D.
Visualization of compilers.
In Proceedings of PLDI (May 1999).

[14] Shamir, A., and Robinson, Q.
The effect of encrypted modalities on e-voting technology.
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Robust, Signed, Classical
Methodologies (Feb. 1996).

[15] Zheng, Z.
Improving DNS and consistent hashing using Fay.
In Proceedings of NSDI (Jan. 2004).


Above copied from: http://www.beuys2.com/2009/07/methodology-for-investigation-of_11.html

I ACCUSE, Jean Toche

I ACCUSE
Dedicated to Marcel Broodthaers

Judson Gallery | New York | May 10, 1968

"I am a prostitute,
You are a prostitute,
He is a prostitute,
She is a prostitute,
We are all prostitutes..."
That's what our trivial "Culture" is all about. WE MUST DESTROY THE CULTURE.
This is the time for a total change.
This is the time to be concerned with Man's development, not his exploitation.
This is a LIGHT SIT-IN.
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face!
* * * *
I AM JEAN TOCHE.
I work with aggressive lights,
I work with aggressive sounds,
I work with aggressive situations.
I am against aggression.
* * * *
I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE.
I am subversive, and I am a saboteur. I question the very validity of the Art Establishment. I question the very validity of that language called "ART". Can Art still fulfill our basic human needs, if it continues to compromise with a cultural society which is engaged in the very process of alienation of the masses, and repeatedly ignores, consciously, the very needs of that human race? In the early ages, art was not meant as art, but as a projection of the primitive urges of man, in order to appease the terrifying forces of nature. Did art not lose all its meaning by becomimg a merchandise, starting with the patronizing by the churches and the aristocracy, followed by the process of industrialization and business deals of western middle class man, including today's museums? Has art not become a weapon for the cultural gangs to corrupt people, a new kind of opium for the people?
* * * *
To shout fire, when there is a fire, is not enough. It is not necessary "ART" either. It is how you do it, which makes it art. But has not the very notion of "ART" become obsolete, because of its constant refusal to face the present crises of Humanity? Has real life, King's death, the shooting of Rudy " THE RED ", the destruction of Columbia University, Khe Sanh, made even Destruction in Art inadequate, because of "art" limitations?
* * * *
I HAVE A PROBLEM TO SOLVE.
Has the time come for the artist to make a choice: Either to stay the adulated "creative" toy of an aristocracy engaged in the most atrocious hypocritical games of corruption, domination and violence, and so probably become irrelevant and meaningless, like an old rotten core. Or, to involve himself more directly in human crises, and maybe become something more complete than just an "artist", something which would include today's social problems, and a definite commitment to the development of the human race, as well as a firm stand against Man.s exploitation and manipulation. This might include bringing the arts into the streets, going on the barricades when necessary, and playing an active role - how, this has still to be defined - in this cultural revolution, which is shaking and knocking down, all over the world, and right now, the very foundations of a very decadent western white empire.
* * * *
When all over the world students are revolting against the corrupt carcan of the Establishment, is it right for the artist to stay passive and indifferent? Can art ever evolve in a more mature and human form, or will it disappear in its obsolescence and its corruption?

Can I go on just being an "artist"?

above copied from:http://www.no-art.info/toche/text/1968_accuse-en.html

Transgressive Tactics in the Age of Unreason, Guillermo Gómez-Peña

In this rarefied atmosphere of paranoia, distrust, and scrutiny, performance artists have come to signify "potential trouble" for U.S. art institutions. We always do in times of crisis. We are perceived as irresponsible provocateurs, gratuitous iconoclasts, and, since 9/11, as cultural terrorists. Despite the fact that our audiences continue to be quite large (La Pocha averages 400 spectators every night we perform), we are invited with provisos, interrogated in advance by curators, and treated as potential troublemakers by the media. It's...a new American art rite.
The dreaded phone call comes a couple months before the project. The presenter's voice is audibly anxious. The worst possible scenario goes more or less like this:
PRESENTER: Gómez-Peña, we just had a board meeting last night and felt it was better not to bring your troupe to our city at this time. Maybe next year. The stakes are too high right now. We can't afford to risk our upcoming funding.
GÓMEZ-PEÑA: Well, thanks for being so...so sincere, Mister...culero... (the last word uttered under my breath).
Other times, when the cultural institution decides to go ahead with the project but still has some apprehensions, the conversation occurs, either by phone or in person, a few days before opening night. If it happens in person, we are taken to a nice art bar and, after a few drinks—bless his/her heart—the curator or presenter takes a deep breath and starts the euphemistic interrogation:
PRESENTER: Guillermo, by no means do we want to censor you. We just want to know what we are up against in your upcoming piece. You know...we must be prepared in case...there are fire alarms...
GÓMEZ-PEÑA: (And fire alarms tend to go off when you're looking for smoke, I think to myself) Can you be more specific, my friend? (I know where they are going, but I don't know how grave their fears are.)
PRESENTER: I mean...is this performance "audience-friendly?" (A euphemism for art without venom or sharp edges.) Is there anything we should be worried about? Frontal nudity? Violence and sex? (The deadly combo.) Bloodletting? Exposure to bodily fluids? Will your performers touch any audience member inappropriately? Will you force any audience member to do anything that might be considered humiliating or offensive? Any profanity? Any disrespect for religious imagery? Will there be flag desecration? Will you be making fun of The Troops? (The list of fears and taboos intertwined with performance art clichés goes on and on and on-depending on the site, the project, and the presenter.)
Sometimes the presenter's "concerns" might be addressed with an emphatic disclaimer placed at the entrance of the gallery or theatre, something like: "There will be nudity and/or adult content and/or political images which you may find offensive..." If the museum director or presenter is a hip Vato, he may let me write my own disclaimer—Gómez-Peña style. I always try to create a funny disclaimer that heightens the specific fears of the curator or the institution—something like: "You are about to witness chicken nudity and unnecessary Mexican violence. Think twice before you cross this border."
Or, "Patriots should think twice before entering into an internationalized space." Or, "The artists are not responsible for identity crises audience members might endure during the performance." It works. But other times, when the stakes are higher (or the city is more conservative), the art bar chat with the curator becomes a clear-cut warning—either we tone down the political/sexual content of the piece, or the project will be "postponed" (a euphemism for canceled). Short of handing the presenter a script in advance, we try to be as specific as we can in terms of describing the images and performance rituals in our piece. We then try to negotiate, case by case, image by image, the inclusion/exclusion of the most sensitive material. It's tough. If we give in too much, then the project becomes defanged, decaffeinated. But if we don't pay attention to their fears and just go ahead and do whatever we want, we will immediately be blacklisted in their circuit. It's like performing in 1970s provincial Mexico.
A presenter told me recently, "There are clearly new forbidden territories which a performance artist must avoid if he wishes to remain employed in the U.S." The obvious subtext was: Please, make sure that the piece you are about to present here is not going to get me in trouble. Because if I get in trouble, so will you.
The main problem is that the fears of the U.S. presenters are well-founded; their moral dilemmas are real. My heart truly goes out to them. Their institutions, whether mainstream or "alternative" (does anyone know what "alternative" even means nowadays?), are rapidly losing their funding. Besides, the local media is not as willing to defend art as it used to be, and the newly empowered "faith-based organizations" are constantly looking for blood—potential art scandals to call down the wrath of God.
In this highly-charged political climate, many arts presenters and curators believe that their funding, and even their jobs, may be riding on the projects they present, so a potential media scandal or even a single hysterical complaint from a righteous audience member might influence the generosity of a donor or funder; or worse (knock on wood), it might incur the wrath of a Christian organization or a group of ferocious "patriots." Then the shit really hits the fan, and both the institution and the artists are attacked with hate mail and picketed by zombies. We might even be added to one of the many lists of "cultural traitors" featured on sites such as www.probush.com/traitor or www.americantraitor.us.
Despite the undeserved reputation of performance artists as professional provocateurs and cultural iconoclasts, we really see ourselves on the same side as our cultural institutions. It is clear to us that we are all part of the same milieu, and that their fate is connected to ours. Since our job is by no means to contribute to their de-funding, (and we certainly don't wish to give more ammunition to the ferocious Right), when the "trial by fire" occurs, we tend to back off and comply. We do it, not out of fear, but out of solidarity and political intelligence. Some curators and presenters know this. But sadly, not all do. This is why, as artists, we must constantly remind them: "We are on your side, carnales. In times like these, we need to help each other. We (the artists), need you guys to broker on our behalf, and defend our integrity. In exchange, we will make sure that no acts of 'irresponsible transgression' occur on your watch."
Article by Guillermo Gómez-Peña.


above copied from: http://www.atasite.org/zine/issue5/tactics.html

Imagination beyond Representation, Bonjana Piskur

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. How does one start at the beginning, if things happen before they actually happen? (Clarice Lispector)

For some time now we have been considering the questions about the political potential of a work of art, or, put somewhat differently, about freeing the revolutionary potential of art from its social and political forms of representation and from the limitations of its communicative medium. Jacques Ranciere, for example, talks about emancipation of art from its representative regime.

But what does this actually mean? When we consider the political potential of an artwork, we are usually attentive to the possible changes in the social field that this work can stimulate or evoke. We think about the devices in an artwork (such as the motives, the narratives, or “meaningful spectacle” as Ranciere put it) that contribute towards raising the political awareness in a social and economic order. We can even say that it is all about certain political pedagogy. But what we are actually talking about are the ways politics condition art and not about art’s emancipation from the representational regime.

What we are interested in, then, is something else: the unmediated experiences, acts of creation, operations of desire or even insights, which are not yet formalized knowledge but thoughts in their purest formation, passing the field which has been liberated from the institutionalized rationality. Translations of these operations into the so called representative regime of art are never unproblematic, since they stimulate anxiety, incite new reactions and interruptions of the already-known and if not, they remain hidden until they reach their “extractive conditions”. But how does one recognize the moment of moving beyond the subjective territory of the “not yet” into the plane of transversal linkage? How can radical imagination contribute towards crossing that threshold in question, bridging the gap between subjectivity and the representative regime of art?

In order to attempt to answer these questions we should not only reconsider the meaning of imagination and creativity but also the long tradition of conformity to forms of expression and content which resulted in representation dominating our way of thinking. It has been suggested (Simon O’Sullivan) that under different circumstances the art history practice as it is known now might disappear, that is, the kind of practice which positions an artwork as a representation, as a hermeneutic activity.
Imagination is traditionally understood as one’s ability to form mental images, concepts and sensations, which subsequently become defined by images they create of themselves. Images created by imagination are then overwhelmed by a “schema”, a classificatory system that hierarchically organizes knowledge about the world. This is the representation Deleuze called “organic representation” and it is opposite to the “rhizome”. For Deleuze and Guattari thinking non-representational involved thinking difference in itself. And this difference necessarily involves movement and desire; desire in a sense of being a mode of production and constructing of something (for example: a will to live, to create, to love, to invent another society, another value system).

David Bohm, a physicist and theorist, has written about creative and constructive imagination: the former involves perception before a mental vision, a certain insight, and only in the unfolding of this insight in the form of an image is the mind ready to pass the content of the insight into the domain of constructive imagination. Constructive imagination involves reasoning and taking images from memory and from other contexts, as well as already available structures and concepts that come from memory; for scientists it is a hypothesis, for artists the finalization of the perceptive process into an artwork and for writers a translation of thoughts into language. But as Bohm suggests, the creative and constructive are never completely separated, therefore the relationship between imagination and reason must also be taken into account.

Niklas Luhmann attributed to art the function of integrating perception into the communication network of a society. According to him, art only exists within the art system; it is a self-referential system, which interacts with other systems. Once this system recognizes art, the difference between inside and outside cannot disappear again. Luhmann also suggests that if perception and conceptual thought are constructed by the brain, then art should reject the functional concepts of representation, that is, forms that demonstrate the possibility of order and the impossibility of arbitrariness. He notes that only in the form of intuition (or in other words, artistic sensibility) does art acquire the possibility of constructing imaginary worlds within the life-world.

This is where he comes close to DG’s concept of desire and Bohm’s idea of insight. Moreover, what these authors suggest is that these concepts alone are not enough and that some kind of relationship between imagination and reason must be involved (Bohm), intuition and life-world or perception and communicating social system (Luhmann) and desire and stratum (Deleuze) in order to fully realize their revolutionary potential before they get captured by the molar machine or by the state philosophy which is another name for representational thinking. In other words, there needs to be some kind of “situated imagining” in order to point somewhere, there need to be some kind of strata available in order not to fall into the black pit.

It has been said that to invoke imagination as supporting radical politics has become a cliché. But isn’t this kind of statement grounded in another domain of representational thinking as well? And isn’t it our concern, after all, to change the way we make meanings and not just to change the meanings themselves? Or is writing about it already producing another representation?

One way to change the way we make meanings would be to simply do nothing, to avoid the so called “creative imperative” that has been so thoroughly imposed on us by capitalism. I am sure that many of you know the short text by the artist Mladen Stilinović called “In praise of laziness”. In it he talks about the importance of an artist being lazy. What is especially significant in this short text is his noting that laziness is not only the absence of thought, staring at nothing, non-activity, impotence … but that it is really what art is all about, and not some preoccupation with objects and other such matters. In his Fifteen theses on contemporary art Badiou writes that it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent. Žižek has proposed that one alternative way to oppose the dominant system could be to withdraw from all forms of political representation, to renounce social and political responsibility, resist the compulsion to act, and instead do nothing. Of course, the question is, how can such non-activity, such doing nothing be revolutionary - resistant in any way? It can be easily considered an escape, a utopia without any meaning. But doing nothing is also becoming different, creating conditions for encounters that are not based on some kind of concept of identity, but on something previously unthought. When perception is liberated of mental images it does not only oppose object relations (schemes of power etc) but radically cancels them.
To give an example: surrealists were concerned with the emancipation of thought, and recognized imagination as a powerful weapon using techniques such as automatic writing, drawing, trance narrations … to move away from the conventional significations. But on the other hand, this kind of private fantasy or reverie could not affect or disrupt the social fabric, as they believed it would; it remained on the level of imaginary projections. Similarly, David Bohm invented a “flow language” – Rheomode, based on motion, because, as he said, reality leads to fragmentation of thought and to unending reductionism, therefore thought needs a constant flow to override this confusion.

And yet: could there be other possibilities? Perhaps we should think spatio-temporal planes differently, access that which is normally outside ourselves, to make ourselves a body without organs, as Artaud wrote in 1947:

When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
If art is something that we consider an activity as such, it could be that art’s rupture is the event, or, in the words of Lyotard: “To encounter the event is like bordering on nothingness.” What he suggests is that in order to take on the attitude of an event, one needs to clean out his/her mind, reject modes of preestablished encodings and subsequently the fixity of representation. But the problem is that such affects (or intensities) have no vocabulary and are therefore wedded to theories: as Massumi points out, intensities then lose this kind of eventness in favor of a structure.

Examples of these intensities are “moments”, eruptions of spontaneous creativity, flashes of liberation, utopian consciousness that escape the daily programming. Moments are transitory, critical, creative, unpredictable … and they produce fractures in our subjectivity, introduce a sense of freedom from categorical thought, discipline, common structures, restraints and the like, since they have not yet become alienated time. Moments are sensations of powerful emotions such as delight, disgust, surprise, horror, outrage, and intense euphoria, and as such have a revolutionary potential.

But again: is the revolutionary potential hidden in the prolongation and intensification of such moments, or in their reactivation in the process of defixating meanings?

The analogy can be drawn here with Ranciere’s suggestions that “the dream of an art is to transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations”. Native Americans, for example, believe that what appears as a material object or image in space is simply the manifestation of a unique combination of energy waves. Occasionally temporary markings appear in the flux, which are then used as reference points. And these points are what constitute reality.

It would be naïve to suppose that only by breaking or ridding the strata (representation), would one be able to set free. After all, if you lose images you lose space. As DG said: staying organized, signified, subjected is not the worst thing that can happen. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight; through connections of desires, con­junctions of flows, a continuum of intensities.

Or, put differently: blowing up the molar machine will get one destroyed – and not the machine itself. Instead of symmetrical opposition to repressive representation, instead of opposing the current reality in an alleged parallel reality “the aim is now the principle that leads the destiny of creation”. Therefore the political potential of art is in unleashing mind’s most creative capacities, moving away from representation into experience, becoming the “power of emergence” into the open field of unknown relations, which traverse all domains of being into unlimited number of connections in every sense and in all directions, of infinite spreading into schools, prisons, factories, art museums and further on towards where “communication is occurring at the edge of impossible crossings, or perhaps in the gap of potential contact.”

Above copied from: http://radical.temp.si/2009/12/imagination-beyond-representation-by-bojana-piskur/

THE ANARCHIST ART OF JOHN CAGE, Richard Kostelanetz

In surveying his work in music and theater, in poetry and visual art, I have noticed that the American John Cage favored a structure that is nonfocused, nonhierarchic and nonlinear, which is to say that his works in various media consist of collections of elements presented without climax and without definite beginnings and ends. This is less a negative structure, even though I am describing it negatively, than a visionary esthetic and political alternative. In creating artistic models of diffusion and freedom, Cage is a libertarian anarchist.

What makes Cage's art special, and to my senses politically original, is that his radical politics were expressed in decisions not of content but of form. For instance, one quality of nearly all works of his for large ensembles is that they do not need a conductor. By extension, the work implies that outside of music, as well as in, it is possible to create social mechanisms that likewise can function without conductors, without chiefs. In other words, in the form of his art, in the form of performance, is a representation of an ideal polity.

It is precisely in relinquishing traditional opportunities for authority that Cage made essentially political decisions. His scores are designed to encourage a greater variety of interpretations than usual. There is no 'right way' to do them, though there are wrong ways, especially if a performer violates the instructions that are not left to chance. A second reflection of Cage's politics was writing music for an ensemble of equals, even when he was one of the performers, thereby resisting such conventional hierarchical forms as a soloist with a backup group. (The fact that this last feature was always true indicates to me that Cage subscribed to his egalitarian esthetics long before he was conscious of them.) Thirdly, the principle of equality extends to the materials of his art. Not only are all notes equal, but all instruments are equal, regardless of their rank in the musical tradition. In Credo in Us (1942), for instance, the piano has no more presence than the home radio; all are equidistant from the audience. Fourth, he performed his music in gymnasiums as well as opera houses, the assumption being that all venues are equally legitimate.

In his book 'Notations' (1968), where Cage presented in alphabetical order a single page apiece of scores chosen by contributing composers, the radical assumption is that the editor has no more authority than the reader in assigning value. Nothing is featured by being put ahead of the others, or having its name on the book's cover. The absence of hierarchy and of editorial discrimination in this book likewise reflects his politics. (A traditional editor would huffily characterize a book like 'Notations' as 'an abdication of professional responsibility.') Anyone who ever worked in theater with Cage knew that he believed every performance venue should have convenient exits so that spectators can leave whenever they wish. Capturing anyone's body was to him no more justifiable in art than in life. One truth of Cage's own functioning was that no one loses anything by relinquishing power, but the essence of his method is not to tell but to show.

With that last point in mind, it is instructive to contrast the anarchism of Cage's art with another masterpiece of anarchist art in our time, the Living Theater's production of 'Paradise Now' (1968). Those of us who saw it two decades ago will remember that 'Paradise Now' was structured as a series of sketches designed to elicit audience participation. Thus, it opened with the performers reciting testimony of their own imprisonment: 'I can't travel without a passport,' they repeatedly proclaimed, confronting and challenging the audience to respond with argument or shocked acceptance. 'I am not allowed to take off my clothes.' 'I don't know how to stop the war,' they kept on repeating. From this purgatory the performers progress to sketches of liberation, which is paradise, culminating with members of the audience being invited onstage to leap into the locked arms of male company members. Structurally, this play is dialectical, moving from antithesis to synthesis; and in this respect, it differs from Cage who hasn't presented any antitheses, as far as I can tell, in at least forty years.

Another difference is that 'Paradise Now' is preachy, Julian Beck even telling us that we've been offered glimpses of the postrevolutionary age. Cage, by contrast, shows instead of tells, for his assumption is that, in the community represented by his art, the Promised Land has come. When asked about his response to such programmatic political music as Frederic Rzewski's, he said, 'I have difficulty with it, because it's so pushy. It has precisely in it what government has in it: the desire to control; and it leaves no freedom for me. It pushes me toward its conclusion, and I'd rather be a sheep, which I'm not, than be pushed along by a piece of music. I'm just as angry, or refusing to go along with the 'Hallelujah Chorus' as I am with the Attica one [by Rzewski]. The moment I hear that kind of music I go in the opposite direction. And they use the technique of repetition, and of sequence, incessantly [as did the Living Theater, I should add]. And I can do without that.'

One thing that fascinates me about Cage is the purity of his anarchism. His perceptions are true to his politics; in neither his speech nor his behavior do you find the kinds of contradictions and compromise that some political people think are opportune for ultimate ends. He is utterly free of pretenses to superior humanity and thus false snobbism (and in these respects so utterly different from his sometime protege Morton Feldman). I've always regarded Cage as epitomizing the noncompetitive life, where no one is regarded as a threat who must be eliminated, where you can afford to be generous with your own work as well as your possessions, and to do work so extreme and idiosyncratic that plagiarism need not be feared. As he has always made a point of publishing his writings in small magazines as well as large, assuming that the putative 'reputation' of any venue affects him not, it is not surprising that his 1980s creative text on the Satie society bypassed book-publishing entirely to become available gratis, but only through the modem on your home computer. Even Cage's philosophy is true to his politics, at a time when, to paraphrase Barnett Newman, Philosophy is for the artist, especially for some painters nowadays, much as the Bible is to the minister, which is to say a respectable source that can be used to justify anything. I recently read scores of interviews with him and have never found Cage claiming anything about his art that was demonstrably false.

It is scarcely surprising that in his own professional life he has resisted not only titles and accompanying power but servility, being neither a boss nor an employee but, instead both, or more precisely a small businessman with a peripheral relation to another small business that didn't give him much power (or until recently made much money)--the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. In other words, even in his own life there was an absence of antitheses. When Harvard offered him a professorship in 1988-89, giving him one of those titles purportedly raising its bearer above the nonprofessors, I warned him that, especially if you will be talking about anarchy, you must insist upon being called the Charles Eliot Norton 'Person' of Poetry. (I reminded him that England's anarchist movement went through a divisory crisis in 1953, when Herbert Read accepted a knighthood!) When I later asked him 'what it was like to be a Harvard Professor,' he replied, appropriately, 'not much different from not being a Harvard professor.'

Another quality I admired about Cage was that, especially in contrast to many post-socialists of his generation, he never doubled back. He never said that an earlier position of his was now unacceptably radical. As a result, he was never been an ex-anything in either esthetics or politics. His art, as I noted before, always displyed the anarchist characteristics defined here. I would judge that one reason for his professional confidence to the end, in politics as well as esthetics, is that he knew from the beginning that he never wrong, which I hasten to add is not the same thing, especially in politics, as being always right.

One Cagean tactic that always puzzled me in reading interviews with him is how he often rationalized an esthetic move in terms not of ideology but simply of social benefit. Let me quote an example from my book, 'Conversing with Cage' (1988, 2002), where he said of his 'Freeman Etudes' for violin: 'They are intentionally as difficult as I can make them, because I think we're now surrounded by very serious problems in the society, and we tend to think that the situation is hopeless and that it's just impossible to do something that will make everything turn out properly. So I think that this music, which is almost impossible, gives an instance of the practicality of the impossible.'

Once I recognized this tendency toward sociological rationalization in Cage's commentary, I was skeptical about it, thinking it might represent a certain opportunism; but the more often I saw it, I began to recognize Cage as someone who came of age in the 1930s, when ideas about social betterment through art were more plentiful. To me, Cage was essentially a thirties lefty, who was more interesting than others who came out of that period because he made some original perceptions not only about art but especially about the place of politics in art, and then the possible role of art for politics, all the while remaining true to the sentiment of that time. In my sense of Cage, Zen and chance and everything else came afterwards; they are merely icing on this essentially anarchist cake.

(1993).

www.richardkostelanetz.com
Rkosti@aol.com

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Users and Usership of Art: Challenging Expert Culture, Stephen Wright

The task of the day is to “revive art’s transformative potential within the broadest possible frame,” to use Alexander Alberro’s expression. By all means; I certainly endorse the thrust of that remark. But what, exactly, is to be understood by “the broadest possible frame”? What lies beyond the frame, even in its broadest possible extension? Is there any art out there, any potentially transformative art, beyond the broadest possible frame? The frame, I assume, is the performative frame, which enables those symbolic activities and configurations known as art to appear as such. For without that frame, of course, those activities and configurations might well be visible – their coefficient of visibility might indeed by very high – but not as art per se, at least not according to current conventions. In the absence of a performative frame, objects and actions are ill inclined to change their ontological status and to become art; only the presence of that frame can coax them into being something other than the “mere real thing,” as analytical philosophers rather facetiously put it. It is tempting to see this sort of frame-legitimized sea-change as one of the last remaining acts of magic in an otherwise thoroughly rationalized society – so counter-intuitive it is that something, anything can change its ontological status at the snap of a performative finger, upheld by the presence of the frame, however broad. Yet that frame, like any frame, is also a limitation…a limitation, above all, to art’s transformative potential. When we say, unaware that the frame is in place, we didn’t “even” know something was art, the adverb is very telling: in order for something to be perceived as art, it must be framed as such, but more importantly, the more distinctly framed the more incisive it is. This is a highly dubious claim, however, for we can just as easily say, once we are aware of the frame’s invisible but powerful presence, that it is “just” art. There too, the adverb is revealing: just art, not the potentially more transformatory, corrosive, even censorship-deserving real thing. In short, then, while the frame is an almost magically powerful device, it is also a debilitating one. And this is the reason, I think, that an increasing number of art-related practitioners today are seeking not to broaden the frame still further – thereby pursuing art’s already extraordinary colonization of the life-world – but to get outside of the frame altogether. Every year, more and more artists are quitting the artworld frame – or looking for and experimenting with viable exit strategies – rather than broadening it further. And these are some of the most exciting developments in art today, for to leave the frame means sacrificing one’s coefficient of artistic visibility – but potentially in exchange for great corrosiveness toward the dominant semiotic order.

As I say, a growing number of artists and artists collectives are questioning the need for art to heed the frame, however broad: in the place of the sacrosanct artwork, some are favouring an art which remains open and process-based, showing scant concern for the usual criteria of showing and disseminating, refusing to subordinate process to any extrinsic finished product; others (often the same), challenging the artist’s expert-like authority, have come to advocate coauthorship, broadening responsibility for the creative process to all those taking part; still others (invariably the same), instead of contributing to an art whose legitimacy relies on recognition by the spectator, refuse this conventional division of visual labour (whereby subjet1 produces an object for delectation by subjet2), preferring interventions, which, though not exempt from the exigencies of the public sphere, have only a negligible coefficient of art-specific visibility. Such practices undermine positions of authority and diminish the remit historically attributed to experts of expression.

Envisaging an art without artwork, without authorship and without spectatorship has an immediate consequence: art ceases to be visible as such. For practices whose self-understanding stems from the visual arts tradition – not to mention for the normative institutions governing it – the problem cannot just be overlooked: if it is not visible, art eludes all control, prescription and regulation – in short, all “police”. In a Foucaldian perspective, one might argue that the key issue in policing art is the question of visibility. As Jacques Rancière put it in his now classic definition,



“the police is, in its essence, the law which, though generally implicit, defines the part or lack of part of the parties involved…. The police is thus above all a bodily order that defines the partition between means of doing, means of being and means of saying, which means that certain bodies are assigned, by their very name, to such and such a place, such and such a task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable, which determines that some activities are visible and that some are not, that some speech is heard as discourse while others are heard as noise.”[1]



The art police acts tacitly, its hidden injunctions only becoming perceptible with the benefit of hindsight, when the shape of an era or movement slowly comes into focus. Rancière’s analysis applies not only to art, but more generally to the partition of the real between places and non places of knowledge, visibility and legitimacy, and enables us to better see how actions and words are distributed in keeping with a line that has been defined a priori, an always shifting line of partition between practices that are admitted and those that are discredited, between what must be said and what cannot be said (socially mandatory and forbidden speech).

Rancière’s use of the word “police” to refer to the forces that maintain a semblance of self-evidence in the existent perceptual order is useful because it draws attention to the fact that this order is enforced. Not by truncheon-wielding wardens of the law, of course, but in a far more sophisticated way, by controlling what can and cannot be said, heard or seen. This becomes particularly evident with respect to frame-related discourse and the sophistication with which framing devices function.

I want to give just one example of this today – and that is the notion of the user and of usership in general. I would like to devote the rest of my talk to unpacking some of the embedded suppositions and values that can be found in the semantic field associated with the notion of the user and usership.

I have noticed, over the past few years, a steadily growing usage in public discourse of the category of the user. Despite, however, this ongoing extension and expanded usage of the term, there are clearly limits to its usage. We readily speak of art practices, for instance. But art usage? Art lovers, yes, but art users? However, I consider myself to be an art user – and almost by definition, anyone attending events such as this one, is also an art user.

There is a definite correlation between frame-related discourse and expert culture. By and large, discussions of relationality have taken for granted a highly differentiated artworld increasingly dominated – like all other fields of activity in contemporary society – by expert culture. Those experts of expression, display, interpretation and appreciation known respectively as artists, curators, critics and audiences all jealously preserve their specific spheres of expertise. In France, the Ministry of Culture has gone so far as to create a new socio-professional body mandated to regulate the allocation of public resources in the artworld: the Inspector of Visual Arts... However, as in other realms of social action, the division of labor behind this expert culture, and its afferent privileges, have been brought into question by the emergence of a new category of social actors, which contests expert culture not from the standpoint of some competing expertise but from the standpoint of experience: the political category of the user. We are not accustomed to speaking of “art users” – and indeed, the fact that the term smacks of philistinism says a great deal about the lingering aristocratic values which continue to permeate the artworld and make a mockery of art’s claim to having much transformational potential or will.

Art users are not passive consumers, nor merely even viewers. Rather, the term refers to a broad category comprising all those people who have a stake in art taking place; the broadest possible category of the framers of art, who ultimately generate its relationality. Usership breaks down obsolete binaries between authorship and spectatorship, production and reception, owners and producers, publishers and readers, for it refers to a category of people who make use of art and whose counter-expertise stems from that particular form of relationality known as use-value in their lifeworlds. Like consumer-protection groups, citizens’ initiatives, neighborhood associations and so on, art users experience the use-value of art directly.

The mounting challenge to expert culture due to the expanding sematic field of usership in contemporary public discourse is by no means homogeneous. It is only appropriate to approach the phenomenon through the use of the pragmatics of language (stemming philosophically from Dewey and Wittgenstein), where meaning is determined through usage. Let us take a look at some principal instances of usership today.

The growing current interest in participatory democracy (if not yet in anything but a defanged way) provides a first example. But it is merely part of a broader shift of user-driven initiatives focusing not on claiming individual freedoms but on defending uses and usage. The reference to users is increasingly generalized in a political context where legitimacy is measured by the ability of the governed to appropriate the political and economic instruments made available to them. This is of course a double-edged sword: on the one hand, public services – anxious to uphold their regime of exception with respect to the market-driven private sector – are quick to point out that they serve users, rather than customers or clients; and on the other hand, they are the first to again uphold their exceptional status by stigmatizing users (or consumer advocacy groups) as the Trojan Horse of this same market-driven logic…

There are other, still more interesting cases of usership. Drug users, for instance. To use drugs is to know something about drugs and their use that the medical experts, and the legislators whom they advise on a purely prohibition-authorization basis, do not and cannot know. It is a form of experience-based knowledge.

Similarly, the British Disabled People’s Movement, has developed a wonderful watchword, particularly eloquent in its experiential challenge to expert culture: “We are the experts of our own condition.”

Or parent-teacher associations… In a recent case in Britain, parents were being brushed off by the teaching staff, who dismissed the parents experience as being merely “anecdotal” rather than establishing evidence. The users’ response came in the form of a disarming question: “How many anecdotes does it take to become evidence?”

The most extreme example of usership that I know of occurred last year when the prisoners of France’s highest security prison at Clermont-Ferrand, contending unexpectedly though irrefutably that they were “users of the incarceration system”, demanded that the death penalty be meted out to them, rather than remaining their entire lives in prison without any prospect of release… In a country where the legitimacy of the current polity is founded upon the abolition of the death penalty, this challenge to broad-based expert culture from within the lifeworld of the prison system is terribly poignant.

Usership, however, also stands opposed to another form of authority: ownership. Ownership is the most complete – both inclusive and exclusive – right that one can hold or exert over an object. One can literally do with it as one will, regardless of what those who may also use it have to say. This, is of course something which has been fiercely contested by since the nineteenth century writing of Marx and particularly Proudhon, the former developing his philosophy on the idea of use-value and the second on the notion of the right of use (droit d’usage) as a way of contesting ownership (which Proudhon flatly described as “theft”). In a world where privatization is rampant, usership is a burning issue: how is ownership to be brought into check before it ends up shutting down the system altogether? How can the rights of usership be formulated in a way that is adequate to new modes of production and circulation of immaterial goods?

This implicitly raises an accessory question: that of alternative terms to users and usership as part of a diagnostic to the plight of contemporary relationality. One term that has been used a great deal is that of the “multitude.” The term is felicitous in one respect, because it does describe what is most constitutive of contemporary intercerebral collaboration and networked knowledge production, no longer based on a relationship to the means of production (as was the proletariat) but on a more open or at least loose-knit network of brainpower. But it has the disadvantage of being untethered to any unifying experience or common life-world. Which is why the category of intersubjectivity one finds in usership strikes me as more promising – or at least worth exploring.

With respect to contemporary art and art-related practices, usership as a challenge to expert culture can follow two different vectors: challenging expert culture within the artworld frame itself, in the lineage of institutional critique; or lending art-derived, art-specific and art-engendered competence to other user-initiated and user-driven challenges to expert culture in other walks of life outside of the broadest possible frame of the artworld, collaborating with citizen’s initiatives, amateur scientists’ projects, and so on. Ideally, of course, the deployment of usership by art practicianers would do both, unleashing the tautological imperative (that conceptual art always held tethered to the art sphere alone) on expert culture and its consequences inside and outside the frame. Using the tools and acquisitions of conceptual art to expose and undermine the privileges of expert culture found in other fields of human endeavor.

Usership I believe is a new and extremely relevant category of relationality and political subjectivity with respect to contemporary art-related practice and the conceptual and physical architecture of the places where its users converge. What do we use exhibitions for? And art journals? How, why and when do we use the word “art”? And who are “we”? The experts have their answer, and the users have theirs – necessarily conjugated in the first person plural. Users comprise a loose-knit community based upon common experience. The bedrock of human relationality.

The paper was initially delivered in the context of a conference entitled “Reconsidering Relationality” organised by Alexander Alberro and Nora Alter in Paris on April 18-19, 2007.


[1] La Mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995), p. 52. Our translation.

Above copied from: http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1180961069

Before the Art of New Media, Lidija Merenik

The restaging of Tendencies 4, the 1968 Zagreb based exhibition series and colloquium, in the recent show bit international – [New] Tendencies – Computers and Visual Research does more than deepen and internationalise our understanding of computer art’s early history. It also presents an opportunity to revisit the cultural landscape of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Here Lidija Merenik considers the show in Graz and [New] Tendencies’ unique engagement with international avant-gardist concerns, technology’s utopian potential and the socialist cultural landscape of ex-Yugoslavia

Even though they have been reviewed extensively in historiographic terms, primarily in the work of Professor Jerko Denegri, [New] Tendencies were the subject of their first serious retrospective: bit international – [New] Tendencies – Computers and Visual Research at the Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz this summer.[1] Curated by Darko Fritz, the show was comprehensively prepared in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb,[2] which possesses a major collection of [New] Tendencies works, and the Neue Galerie in Graz. Like all pioneering projects, this exhibition comprehensively follows the genesis of [New] Tendencies, offering a lot of art works rarely seen or not exhibited until now. The curatorial rationale lies, it seems, not only in the need to mount a ‘pioneering’ retrospective, but also in the actual logic of the progressive developmental phases of [New] Tendencies. Without the representation of its early stages, it would be impossible to understand the group’s ultimate achievement – its movement towards computer art and its final exhibitions in 1968/69 and 1973.

However, it must be said that the importance of this exhibition lies not only in its comprehensive approach – which sheds light on a little known phase of a strong international movement of post-war avant-garde – but also in its highlighting of a unique moment of artistic, ideological and ethical opposition to the ‘liberalised’ modern art of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Indeed it provides us with insight into [New] Tendencies as a sort of [un?]proclaimed ‘dissident’ art of the socialist era.

Knifer, untitled 1978
Julije Knifer: Untitled, 1978



The genesis of NT begins with the first exhibition, held in 1961, which coincided, in terms of time but not language, with the European post-art informel situation. The ultimate aim of the 1961 project, on the international not local level, was to transcend, through a pronounced emphasis on discontinuity, the crisis of art in the process of ‘overcoming informel’ and to establish a different artistic philosophy and ideology. The first exhibition was revolutionary in every respect, and is as important as the exhibitions Monochrome Malerei (1960), held in Leverkusen, and Bewagen-Bewegung (1961), held in Amsterdam, in the sense of a shift from painting towards object, or as a shift from art towards science and new technologies (in an essentially synchronous connection with Arte programmata e cinetica (Programme and Kinetic Art). Hence we perceive a succession of apparently heterogeneous concepts, from Piero Manzoni, through Piero Dorazio and François Morellet, to Julije Knifer and Ivan Picelj, which were unified, however, through the idea of the need to create, as stated by Morellet, ‘a revolution in art that will be equally great as the one in the sphere of science’. It is clear that this first segment of development contains the seed of the future kinetic, and subsequently, computer art, but it is not differentiated in this respect and is primarily founded on various notions of the spiritual and the experimental circulating in the early ’60s and underlined by this exhibition underlines. The ensuing [New] Tendencies exhibitions (1963, 1965) mark one progressive development path of not only the Croatian but also the European avant-garde as well, aspiring to create a great international movement.

In the course of this process, the actual artistic ideology of the artists gathered around [New] Tendencies was defined: team artistic work, the grand entry of science into art, a pronounced anti-commercial attitude, exploring new artistic values, visions, if not utopias, about art – as MeÅ¡trović states, needing to be ‘an entirely sober, aware and precise voice of the emerging world’. In the catalogue of the second (1963) exhibition, Getulio Alviani wrote: ‘convention has always been very important in history, and it (convention) should be abolished.’ In this respect, [New] Tendencies are indeed a form of concrete utopia, for they argue in favour of the realisation of the ‘constructivist project’ in the society of the 1960s, which was obviously moving fast towards uniting science, technology and art, to effect what MiÅ¡ko Å uvaković has called a ‘rationalisation of art through scientific methods and an aesthetisation of science through artistic visualisations.’[3] For, both the second and the third (1965) NT exhibition give priority to experiments with new technical and technological media (for example: Alberto Biasi’s Light Prisms; Grazia Varisco’s Schema Luminoso Variabile; Bridget Riley and Gruppo MID’s work... ). Their ensuing research elaborated on the chromo- and kine-visual which also clearly referenced inherited artistic tendencies such as constructivism, kinetic art, concrete art, fully acknowledging Malevich, Mondrian, Nicholson or Vasarely.



IvanPicelj, [Nove] tendencje 4, 1969
Ivan Picelj: [Nove] tendencije, 1969

A significant turnaround occurred with the symposium and the exhibition entitled NT 4 Computers and Visual Research, (1968/69), whereby [New] Tendencies defined the meaning, ideology and purpose of the experiment they had been running from the very beginning. The period until NT 5 (1973) was almost solely focused on the achievements of computer art. After Tendencies 4 and the first international colloquium [New] Tendencies, and until 1973, when the Tendencies 5 exhibition was held, the above mentioned vision entirely turned not only towards anticipating but also taking some of the first steps in computer art; a dialogue between art and ‘machines’ capable of creative activity.

That same year marked the establishment of bit international, a periodical arguing for a ‘symbiosis of art and machine (computer)’, an organ of ‘information theory, exact aesthetics, design, mass media, visual communications and related disciplines.’ It was certainly a very exclusive periodical, and the only one of its kind in Yugoslavia which, along with texts by Abraham Moles and Max Bense, published papers dealing solely with the relationship between computers and visual experimentation. Evidently, then, in that period the role of computers in the visual media was not the sole issue for [New] Tendencies; it is a radical, and we can now say, premature concept of Gesamtkunstwerk based on a vision of a high-tech world. The Graz exhibition is focused precisely on this, the most revolutionary phase of NT, and effort has been made to present a documentary film about NT 3 and digitally restored audio recordings of four NT symposia held in Zagreb (1968-1973).

At the Graz exhibition my attention was drawn by Vladimir Bonačić’s Computer-Controlled Light Installations (1971). In a photograph depicting Bonačić’s experiment in the centre of Zagreb on the NAMA department store, (NAMA standing for 'narodni magazin’ [people’s store] and representing Yugoslavia’s first well-stocked, Western style socialist department store), one can see a giant billboard placed on the city’s main street. It reads: ‘Citizens, extend a loan for the building of the Zagreb-Split highway.’ Such an almost bizarre combination of avant-garde artistic practice and the environment of socialist-populist self-management was characteristic of art in Tito’s Yugoslavia in general. More precisely, of the period from the political break-up with Stalin in June 1948 to Tito’s death in May 1980, designated as ‘socialist modernism’.




Vladimir Bonacic: DIN. PR 10 [NaMa II], 1971

Vladimir Bonacic: DIN. PR 10 [NaMa II], 1971, computer-controlled dynamic object / light installation at the storefront of NaMa in Zagreb, Ilica Street

On the other hand, two decades separate this work of Bonačić’s from the advent of the seminal Zagreb group EXAT 51, and five decades separate it from the advent of the first international Yugoslav avant-garde movement (then designated as the Zagreb-Belgrade avant-garde), Zenit (1921). Mentioning Zenit and EXAT ’51 now presupposes a necessary understanding of the continuity in the establishment and operation of the few, albeit strong, international avant-garde movements in the former Yugoslav artistic space whose shared point of origin was Zagreb.

We are thus faced with at least two possible levels of reviewing [New] Tendencies. One pertains to the political and culturological climate of Tito’s Yugoslavia and Tito’s ambivalent attitude towards what he called ‘Western tendencies’ in art. The other is the line of continuity of avant-garde movements, so few and far between and so little understood, in ‘the first’ Yugoslavia (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918-1945) and ‘the second’ (Tito’s Socialist Yugoslavia) alike. Naturally, the last but not least aspect of this is the specific character of the radical modernist expression and avant-garde tendencies occurring in Zagreb after 1951, which were immeasurably different from the modernisms of other Yugoslav cultural centres and divergent from the climate of ‘socialist modernism’, ‘traditional modernism’ and ‘socialist aestheticism’.

How come, then, that ‘socialist modernism’ was the dominant climate of creative work and a cultural policy supported by the regime, one from which [New] Tendencies so greatly differed? Primarily politically motivated, the break-up with socialist realism (which was in full swing from 1945 to 1949/50) in Yugoslav art and the shift towards international modernism would not have been possible (or the process would have unfolded much more slowly and with difficulties, as in the USSR and most Eastern European countries) had it not been for the official break with Stalin, the Comintern, USSR and the Eastern bloc countries in June 1948. An essential factor in this complex history, which cannot be dealt with in any great detail here, was purposeful action in the sphere of culture. Namely, the education of artists from the early ’50s primarily by means of efficiently organised grant schemes directed mainly towards the USA (Fulbright) or Paris. Tito’s policy aimed to shift art to the other side of the ‘Iron Curtain’, to the very heart of the mainstream – abstract expressionism and its affiliated artistic languages.

The early 1950s were also characterised by the beginning of Tito’s policy of ‘sitting on the fence’ between the USA and the USSR (the ‘Western’, capitalist bloc, and the ‘Eastern’, communist bloc), which would intensify after Stalin’s death in 1953. This also marked the beginning of the era of 'socialist modernism'. Even though the Cold War was at its peak then, Yugoslavia solidified its international position, and culture became an important and obvious link with 'capitalist countries', the most visible and symbolic representation of that policy. The regime paid particular attention to various forms of the modernisation of art, for such art, characterised by a changed ideological key, could represent a clear signal to the new ally, the West, not only of a changed semantic landscape but also of the seriousness with which Tito’s regime was undergoing change.

Still, this desirable pro-Western art was subject to certain forms of political control from the shadows. Speaking of the attitude of the state/Party authorities towards the liberalisation of culture, one should have no illusions about their tolerance, and in particular about the possible visual literacy of the Yugoslav politicians of that time. Judging by the views expressed in the course of the 7th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia we can conclude that, in the 1952-1958 period, the Party’s tolerance of modernist trends was most likely strategic in nature. The Yugoslav situation was unique, 'softer' than in the Soviet Union, especially when the socialist realist dogma was abandoned and new, not so easily discernible and more intelligent criteria were established. As opposed to the Soviet brand of dogmatism, where the bureaucracy ordered artists to do things in a particular manner, in Yugoslavia the political establishment made unofficial agreements with artists or gave recommendations against doing something.

In post-war Yugoslav art, 'socialist' modernism played two historically vital roles. The first one consisted in liberating the fine arts from the direct influence of the Party’s ideology of socialist realism in the period after 1949/50. In this respect, its effect was highly evolutive, visionary and progressive. The second role, under the given political circumstances, had to be shared with the political establishment willy-nilly. Here modernism played the politically useful role of providing an enlightened 'civilisation wrapper'. Socialist 'underdevelopment modernism' unfolded on the loose foundation of a society which, although unprepared and in the midst of its own contradictions, very quickly turned away from real communism and socialist realism towards the acceptance of Western models of living, working and creating. The high modernism of Yugoslav art was a symbol of Tito’s Yugoslavia and a half-real, half-virtual modernisation; it was eventually institutionalised in the sphere of the official Yugoslav culture of enlightened socialism as 'socialist modernism' – a symbol of the new state, just like other inventions including socialist democracy, the self-management system and the non-alignment movement.

It is clear that EXAT ’51 – a group that, today, can be considered the ideological and linguistic precursor of [New] Tendencies – was not built on similar foundations and did not please the Party ideologues who liked 'recommending' an acceptable 'modern' manner of expression. A polemical climate was created as early as 1951/52, mostly to do with EXAT’s activities. Abstract (that is, non-objective) art was sharply criticised, first of all as an art whose 'ideological basis was vague and uninvestigated', as being 'hermetic', and as a consequence of uncritical acceptance of 'foreign' influences (Tito was fond of using the term 'Westernisation'). EXAT was the earliest and the most consistent proponent of the supremacy of abstract art and of a new profile of art and the artist; a synthesis of 'pure' and 'applied' art. Also, it would be more correct to view EXAT as a project or concept of the modernist total work (as evidenced by the Manifesto of 1951) than as a group pursuing a conventional course of artistic action attempting to effect changes within a single area of practice. In this respect, EXAT was a multidisciplinary (‘total’) project. The abolition of the allusive and the associative, as well as the destruction of principles such as the harmony of painted elements in a 'composition' (more precisely, the rejection of the heritage of L’Ecole de Paris and the principle of 'push-and-pull' composition inside the 'frame' unique in ex-Yugoslavia’s modern art), certainly must have disturbed an establishment used to a 'feeling of harmony' and to that 'soft' modernism that provided a warm, conformist shelter through its elegant aesthetisations. In this sense, the advent of EXAT does not only represent a watershed for Croatian art, but a generator of tectonic disturbances on the Yugoslav art scene at large. It is also one of the rare movements that clearly broke with the convention of 'composition', that is, the deeply rooted heritage of French modernism, cultivated to the level of a cult.

Despite the historical classification of EXAT, as well as various subsequent 'new tendencies' in Croatian art, as 'abstract' and 'geometrical', neither the truth about them, nor their essential historical significance, lies in their morphological structure. Their prime significance, I believe, lies in their overall ideological weight and ideas of progress that lift them above the modernisms of their contemporary national culture and, essentially, single them out as strong international avant-garde movements within a primarily European cultural space. Geometry, then, is a tool. Progress, then, is the goal. The 'bit international' concept is actually the only Yugoslav project of yearning for an electronic age, a kind of reverie about the computer as the most perfect, impersonal artist; a wake up call to computer art.

It is therefore the art of its European time, but art outside its socialist Yugoslav time and particularly outside 'socialist modernism' and its status quo aesthetics. I imagine that Tito’s diatribes 'against abstraction' (1963, 1964, 1966) may have been provoked by works that irritated him, such as Knifer’s Meander (the Graz exhibition shows a historical specimen dating from 1960, when Knifer 'invented' the Meander), or works by Picelj, Aleksandar Srnec, Vjenceslav Rihter, Vojin Bakić and Vlado Kristl dating from the late 1950s or the first half of the 1960s. Judging by some of Tito’s speeches (which, however, had no political consequences for the artists concerned due to the image of tolerance the Party was cultivating), this is quite certain. Excerpts from various speeches he delivered in the course of 1963 clearly show a considerable degree of ambivalence, if not the outright schizophrenic nature of the above-mentioned 'sitting on the fence':

[...] In literature especially, and in art generally, there are a lot of foreign elements, irreconcilable with our socialist ethics, something that is attempting to divert the course of our development from the one determined by our revolution. These are various decadent phenomena, brought in from abroad. We must fight against them; however, we must do it not always by resorting to administrative measures but through political action. [...] I am not against creative searching for the new [...] but I am against spending our community’s funds on some so-called modernist works that have nothing whatsoever in common with artistic creation [...]. [4]



Also, it is clear today that, as Professor Denegri remarks, EXAT was better known outside Yugoslavia, so that no particular echo of these innovative initiatives was felt inside the country, not even in Zagreb itself. However, the situation changed with the first [New] Tendencies exhibition, the groundwork having been laid by people who were aware of EXAT’s contributions and their possible further consequences, such as Vjenceslav Rihter, Radoslav Putar, Božo Bek, Matko MeÅ¡trović and others. 'Exatians' also joined [New] Tendencies. Knifer and Kristl, for example, strongly influenced the shaping of the earliest phase of NT, which was founded on various non-gestural, 'pure' and primary, geometrical, visual structures. Picelj, on the other hand, worked on the level of optical, kinetic-visual constructions. Until 1968, that is, when NT entered its most original phase and began gathering around the ideas of bit international, one should not underestimate the impact of EXAT which was much deeper than it initially appears


Even though they were, without doubt, of paramount importance for radical modernism, and outside the context of 'socialist modernism', I dare say that NT achieved their true aim with artists like Vladimir Bonačić. He (otherwise a PhD and an electronics engineer) first hit upon the idea of visually generating the scientific results obtained while working with computers: 'This was’, he said, ’best evidenced when, researching polynomials, we got pictures that also expressed certain aesthetic values'. This paved the way for his creation of the first light-kinetic objects, whose screen displayed a sequence of over 65,000 differently structured visual situations (obtained researching Galois fields). But he did not wish his scientific, visual investigations to be a mere aesthetic object placed on a pedestal in some museum or other. He therefore produced ambient installations or temporary installations in situ (where the architecture of the building was used as a ‘host’ for the computer controlled experiment with light, visible from outside and together comprising a giant ‘sculpture’). in the centre of Zagreb (the NAMA department store and Kreditna banka). These Computer-Controlled Light Installations completely integrated the formal-aesthetic aspects established in the early phase of NT with his scientific, visual and early electronic investigations – a special form of 'electronic iconics' which produced the NT 4 emblem. Bonačić developed this concept further by means of very complex audio-visual and kinetic constructions (GF-4 32/71, 1971, today located in the UNESCO building). Proceeding from his visionary works, authors like Tomislav Mikulić, not being content with the possibilities of computer graphics or objects, arrived at the first Yugoslav computer generated cartoons (Mikulić’s Random, 1976).

Tendencies 5 (1973), even though it was the last exhibition of its kind, opened the door to the coming phenomenon of neoavant-garde, conceptual art (John Baldessari, Giuseppe Penone, Sol LeWitt, Endre Tot, On Kawara, Goran Trbuljak, Braco Dimitrijević, Iannis Kounellis, Giulio Paolini...). As a linguistic and aesthetico-technological art practice, but also as an ideological and ethical construct of sorts, in the period between 1961 and 1973, NT found themselves 'squeezed' in the European cultural space between two dominant artistic poles. They stood in antithesis, on the one hand, to Art Informel, the painting of matter and gesture, and, on the other, to that trend of conceptual art embodied by the Turin Arte Povera circle around 1968, which notionally refused any form of technical, technological craftsmanship or aesthetic determinants. NT were also 'squeezed' in the Yugoslav cultural space between the politically acceptable 'socialist modernism' with its mostly non-experimental models of a work of art, and the radical artistic action and behaviour that appeared in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, gathered around the Belgrade and the Zagreb Students’ Cultural Centres, whose prime exponents were Marina Abramović and Braco Dimitrijević. By the time of Tendencies 5, Belgrade’s Students’ Cultural Centre was already engaging in radical international projects; the Centre was headed by its spiritus movens Biljana Tomić, one of the greatest Yugoslav gallerists of avant-garde and neoavant-garde movements, educated, small wonder, though the exhibitions and colloquia of Zagreb’s [New] Tendencies. That was how, in symbolic terms, a series of uncompromising artistic concepts came full circle – from Zenit, through EXAT and [New] Tendencies, to Belgrade’s April Meetings: concepts, projects, action, creation and conduct that paid no heed to the dead end street of socialist modernist aestheticism and the unbridled era of happy consumption, characteristic of a cushioned, neither-socialist-nor-bourgeois state.

This invisible line of continuity, which we can understand today owing to post festum insights, including, among other things, the Graz exhibition, could not be as pronounced in the 1970s. Indeed it remained submerged until the mid-1990s, with NT’s efforts languishing in the bywaters of local art the way the avant-garde efforts of ZENIT and EXAT had done before them, and seemed irretrievably lost, first in the inarticulate climate of transavant-garde tendencies of the 1980s, and then in the brutal political and merciless wartime climate of ex-Yugoslavia. A visible inrush of 'new tendencies' into the ex-Yugoslav cultural space occurred in the latter half of the 1990s, owing to the influx of contemporary digital technologies and the possibilities of artistic expression they afforded, conducting the process of artistic creation outside the domain of matter and the material. However, the lines of development of recent art directly connected to digital technology are numerous and conceptually and ideologically diverse in each of the former Yugoslav cultural centres (Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Skoplje, Sarajevo, Podgorica), and truly constitute a separate subject for consideration. Let us just add that today, the contemporary artists of ex-Yugoslavia are collecting the shards of that world of concrete utopia, one of the main advocates of which was none other than the [New] Tendencies project.


Lidija Merenik, PhD, is a Professor at the Department of Modern Art History of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University


Footnotes

[1] J. Denegri, Apstraktna umjetnost u Hrvatskoj 2 [Abstract Art in Croatia 2], Split 1985

[2] Ex-Gallery of Contemporary Art

[3] M. Šuvaković, Pojmovnik moderne i postmoderne likovne umetnosti i teorije posle 1950 [The Terminology of Modern and Postmodern Fine Arts and Theory After 1950], Belgrade 1999

[4] J. B. Tito, Govori i članci [Speeches and Articles], XVIII, Zagreb 1966


Info

bit international – [Nove] tendencije, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, 28 April – 26 August, 2007, http://www.neuegalerie.at/07/bit/cover.html


The above copied from:http://www.metamute.org/en/Before-the-art-of-new-media

Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure, Brian Holmes

Great social movements leave the content of their critical politics behind, in the forms of a new dominion. This was the destiny of the revolt against bureaucratic rationalism in the sixties. The Situationists, with the practice of the dérive and the program of unitary urbanism, aimed to subvert the functionalist grids of modernist city planning. They tried to lose themselves in the urban labyrinth, while calling for the total fusion of artistic and scientific resources in »complete decors« –»another city for another life«, as the radical architect Constant proclaimed. With the worldwide implementation of a digital media architecture – and the early signs of a move toward cinematic buildings – we are now seeing the transformation of the urban framework into total decor (Lev Manovich: »In the longer term every object may become a screen connected to the Net, with the whole of built space becoming a set of display surfaces«. What kind of life can be lived in the media architecture? And how to explain the continuing prestige of Situationist aesthetics, in a period which has changed so dramatically since the early 1960s?
Today, the sensory qualities of the dérive are mimicked by hyperlinked voyages through the datascapes of the World Wide Web. The decades-old imaginaries of the Silver Surfer still permeate our computer-assisted fantasies. Within this commercialized flux, the proponents of »locative media« – like Ben Russel, the developer of headmap.org, or Marc Tuters, of gpster.net – propose to add a personalized sense of place, a computerized science of global ambiances, using satellite positioning technology. In this way, the »geograffiti« of GPS waypoint marking seeks to promote a new kind of locational humanism, tailored to the worldwide wanderer. »Know your place« is the ironic HeadMap motto. But what would it really take to lose yourself in the abstract spaces of global circulation?
Not long ago, utopian maps portrayed the Internet as an organic space of interconnected neurons, like the synapses of a planetary mind. Data-sharing and open-source software production have effectively pointed a path to a cooperative economy. But a contemporary mapping project like »Minitasking« depicts the Gnutella network as a seductive arcade, bubbling over with pirated pop tunes and porno clips. The revolutionary aspirations of the Situationist drift are hard to pinpoint on the new cartographies.
In the wake of September 11, the Internet's inventors – DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – conceived a new objective: »Total Information Awareness«, a program to exploit every possible control function that can be grafted onto the new communications technology. Here's where the innovation lies: in »Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery«, »Human ID at a Distance«, »Translingual Information Detection«, etc. Fortunately for American civil liberties, Congress still had the constitutional power to quash this distorted brainchild of a convicted political criminal, the retired admiral John Poindexter. But the Pentagon has clearly caught up to the commercial surveillance packages that took the initiative in the late nineties: workstation monitors, radio tracking badges, telephone service recording, remote vehicle monitoring (advertising blurb: »From the privacy of your own computer, you can now watch a vehicle's path LIVE using the new ProTrak GPS vehicle tracking device«). Military strategist Thomas Barnett has learned the lesson of the freewheeling 1990s, when individual autonomy developed at the speed of high technology: »In my mind, we fight fire with fire«, he says. »If we live in a world increasingly populated by Super-Empowered Individuals, then we field an army of Super-Empowered Individuals.«
In »The Flexible Personality« I tried to show how networked culture emerged as a synthesis of two contradictory elements: a communicative opportunism, bringing labor and leisure together in a dream of disalienation that stretches back to the 1960s; and an underlying architecture of surveillance and control, made possible by the spread of cutting-edge technologies. The contemporary manager expresses the creativity and liberation of a nomadic lifestyle, while at the same time controlling flexible work teams for just-in-time production. The Yes Men have made this figure unforgettable: impersonating the WTO at a textile industry conference in Finland, they unveiled a tailor-made solution for monitoring a remote labor force, what they called the Management Leisure Suit. The glittering lycra garment might have recalled what NY Times pundit Thomas Friedman once called the »golden straitjacket«, forcing national governments into the adoption of a neoliberal policy mix; but the yard-long, hip-mounted phallus with its inset viewing screen is just a little too enthusiastic for private-sector discipline! Transmitting pleasurable sensations when everything is going well on the production floor, it allows the modern manager to survey distant employees while relaxing on a tropical beach. The conclusion of the whole charade is that with today's technology, democracy is guaranteed by Darwinian principles: there's no reason for a reasonable businessman to own a slave in an expensive country like Finland, when you can have a free employee for much less, in whatever country you chose.
What happens when the freedmen revolt? Today all eyes are on the soldier. Thomas Barnett has drawn up a new world map for the Pentagon: it divides the »functioning core« of globalization, »thick with network connectivity,« from the »non-integrating gap« of the equatorial regions, »plagued by politically repressive regimes«. The gap is where the majority of American military interventions have taken place since the end of the Cold War. It's also where a great deal of the world's oil reserves are located. And it's mainly inhabited by indigenous peoples (in Latin America) or by Muslims (in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Indonesia). Barnett's solution: »Shrink the gap«. Integrate those people, by force if necessary.
Jordan Crandall seems to grapple with this question of integration in one of his installations, »Heat Seeking«. The piece is full of menacing violence; but one scene shows a passive, unconscious woman being fed, apparently under the influence of a radio transmission. This disturbing image gets under the skin of the new media architecture, exploring its relations to psychic intimacy. What kind of subjectivity emerges from exposure to the contemporary networks?
I think we should conceive the worldwide communications technologies as Imperial infrastructure. These are systems with strictly military origins, but which have been rapidly liberalized, so that broad sectors of civil society are integrated into the basic architecture. Everything depends on the liberalization. The strong argument of Empire was to show that democratic legitimacy is necessary for the spread of a reticular governance, whose inseparably military and economic power cannot simply be equated with its point of origin in the United States. Imperial dimension is gained when infrastructures become accessible to a new category of world citizens. The effect of legitimacy goes along with integration to the »thick connectivity« of which Barnett speaks.
What happens, for example, when a private individual buys a GPS device, made by any of dozens of manufacturers? You're connecting to the results of a rocket-launch campaign which has put a constellation of 24 satellites into orbit, at least four of which are constantly in your line-of-sight, broadcasting the radio signals that will allow your device to calculate its position. The satellites themselves are fine-tuned by US Air Force monitor stations installed on islands across the earth, on either side of the equator. Since Clinton lifted the encryption of GPS signals in the year 2000, the infrastructure has functioned as a global public service: its extraordinary precision (down to the centimeter with various correction systems) is now open to any user, except in those cases where unencrypted access is selectively denied (as in Iraq during the last war). With fixed data from the World Geodetic System – a planetary mapping program initiated by the US Department of Defense in 1984 – you can locate your own nomadic trajectory on a three-dimensional Cartesian grid, anytime and anywhere on Earth (Defense department dogma: »Modern maps, navigation systems and geodetic applications require a single accessible, global, 3-dimensional reference frame. It is important for global operations and interoperability that DoD systems implement and operate as much as possible on WGS 84«).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this satellite infrastructure is that in order for one's location to be pinpointed, the clock in each personal receiver has to be exactly synchronized with the atomic clocks in orbit. So you have an integration to Imperial time. The computer-coded radio waves interpellate you in the sense of Althusser, they hail you with an electromagnetic »hey you!« When you use the locating device you respond to the call: you are interpellated into Imperial ideology. The message is that integration equals security, as exemplified in the advertising for the Digital Angel, a personal locative device pitched to medical surveillance and senior care. It's a logical development for anyone who takes seriously the concept of the »surgical strike«: give yourself over to the care of the machines, target yourself for safety.
In light of all this, one can wonder about the limits of the concept of conversion, developed extensively by Marko Peljhan in quite brilliant projects for the civilian reappropriation of military technology. Can we still make any distinction between a planetary civil society articulated by global infrastructure, and the military perspective that Crandall calls »armed vision«? The urgency is social subversion, psychic deconditioning, an aesthetics of dissident experience. Most of the alternative projects or artworks using the GPS system are premised on the idea that it permits an inscription of the individual, a geodetic tracery of individual difference. The most beautiful example to date is Esther Polak's »RealTime« project, where GPS-equipped pedestrians gradually sketch out the city plan of Amsterdam, as a record of their everyday itineraries. But the work is a fragile gesture, fraught with ambiguity: the individual's wavering life-line appears at once as testimony of human singularity in time, and proof of infallible performance by the satellite mapping system.
All too often in contemporary society, aesthetics is politics as decor. Which is why the Situationists themselves soon abandoned Constant's elaborate representations of unitary urbanism. »Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence«, wrote Althusser. It's what makes you walk the line, to use his image. Has the ideology of our time not become an erratic, wavering pattern of crisscrossing footsteps, traced in secure metric points on an abstract field? The aesthetic form of the dérive is everywhere. But so is the hyper-rationalist grid of Imperial infrastructure. And the questions of social subversion and psychic deconditioning are wide open, unanswered, seemingly lost to our minds, in an era when civil society has been integrated to the military architecture of digital media.


An initial version of this text was presented at the RIXC »Media Architecture« conference in Riga, May 16-17, 2003.










References:
-Constant, »Another City for Another Life«: www.notbored.org/another-city.html
-Lev Manovich: www.manovich.net/DOCS/augmented_space.doc
-»Utopian maps...«: http://research.lumeta.com/ches/map/gallery/index.html
-Minitasking: www.sw.ofcd.com
-Total Information Awareness: www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0926-02.htm
-The Yes Men, »Management Leisure Suit«: http://theyesmen.org/finland/ppt/index.html (click first link at the top)
-Thomas Barnett: www.nwc.navy.mil/newrulesets/ThePentagonsNewMap.htm; also see the book, The Pentagon's New Map (Putnam, 2004)
-»The Flexible Personality«: www.geocities.com/CognitiveCapitalism/holmes1.html
-»Heat Seeking«: http://jordancrandall.com/heatseeking/index.html (Stills: colonia.01)
-World Geodetic System: www.pha.jhu.edu/~hanish/wgs84fin.pdf
-Marko Peljhan: http://world-information.org/wio/program/objects/1037132588/1037132631
-Esther Polak and Den Waag, »Amsterdam RealTime«: http://realtime.waag.org
-Louis Althusser: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 119; pirate version of the paper on »Ideological State Apparatuses«: www.culstudies.com/rendanews/displaynews.asp?id=2534

Above copied from: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1523&lang=en