Augmented Vision and the Decade of Ubiquity, Robert Rice

There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything…” - Alan Kay


The Past

The concept of Augmented Reality has been around for a very long time, and not just in fiction. I’m not going to spend much time talking about what augmented reality (“AR)” is or should be, you can do that on your own. There are plenty of resources like Ori Inbar’s Games Alfresco out there that will get you up to speed quickly. Start there if you want to know who is who, and who is doing what. I’m not aware of any other resource on the net that is as definitive as this site is.

The Present

Augmented Reality is quickly becoming one of the buzzwords of 2009 mostly due to social networking, blogs, twitter, and early exposure in mass media. Unless you have been living under a rock recently, you should have seen some marketing by GE, Toyota, Lego, and many others. While I think that it is too early for AR to have so much attention in the mass market, and it is already beginning to suffer overexposure in some circles, it is undeniably building momentum and the early experimenters/adopters are diving right in with accessible tools.

For now, AR is mostly about superimposing graphics on a video stream (from a webcam). This requires some type of marker such as a glyph or fidicial with a symbol, or some other type of image such as a picture (like the front of a baseball card). In either case, the software uses the marker for two things…first, to determine registration and tracking (where should the content and media be displayed) and second, what content to display. Some companies advertise the second method as markerless, but what they really mean is that they aren’t using the first method of a symbol or pattern. Let’s call all of this Level 1 AR.

In most of these cases, this type of AR is pretty novelty and fairly useless. Aside from some games like Sony’s Eye of Judgment, Int13’s Kweekies, and even Frank Lasorne’s AR Toys concept, which are all pretty damn cool, you won’t see very many applications worth more than a glance unless you break away from the desktop, take it mobile, and get rid of all types of printed markers. Now, we are talking about Level 2 AR.

Probably the most well known example of level 2 is Mobilizy’s Wikitude-AR for the Android platform. As we move away from the desktop AR toys and start paying attention to where you are and what is around you, things get much more interesting. The mobile device becomes a lens that gives us the sensation of looking through and seeing the world around us layered with information, data, and visualizations. As an industry, we are only beginning to explore the possibilities here. The transformation of mobile phones into mobile internet devices (MIDs) with powerful processors, 3D graphics, and GPS functionality has already changed the way we think, communicate, and interact with media. Some, like MIT’s improperly named “Sixth Sense” have this backwards by trying to project images on to objects instead of augmenting what you see. Others, like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera has the right idea, but their approach feels incomplete. It is one thing to associate or link media to a general location, but it is much better to link to specific objects and things. SprxMobile’s ATM finder for ING is another example of how early location-based augmented reality can be very useful.

The Future

Level 3 becomes Augmented Vision. This is an important distinction. We must break away from the monitor and display to lightweight transparent wearable displays (in an eyeglasses formfactor). Once AR becomes AV, it is immersive. The whole experience immediately changes into something more relevant, contextual, and personal. This is radical and changes everything. As I have said before, this will be the next evolution in media. Print, Radio, Television, Internet, Augmented Reality (well, Vision).

L3 must also be mobile massively multi-user, persistent, shared, dynamic, and ubiquitous. This requires a full on convergence of a variety of technologies and disciplines, particularly powerful multi-core MIDs, pervasive wireless broadband, semantic search, intelligent pattern and image recognition, intelligent agents, hybrid service oriented and client-server architectures, gesture interfaces, standardized communications protocols and data formats, easy-to-use and intuitive tools for application development and content creation, and many others. Depending on a number of factors and variables, we are two to three years from this being realized commercially, and maybe five to seven from dominating the mass market. Maybe longer.

2010 to 2020 will become The Decade of Ubiquity. Not only will Level 3 become a reality, but the advent of this will spawn entirely new industries, professions, and hundreds of thousands of jobs. The impact of L3 will be equal to or greater than the effect of the Internet and the Web combined. Nearly every industry will change in some way, and L3 technologies will have a dramatic effect on our day to day lives, jobs, education, entertainment, culture, politics, society, and so on. Even newspapers will evolve and reinvent themselves. Today’s web designers and artists will become holoscape designers…developers will create intelligent agents and bots that are capable of seamlessly interacting with the real and digital worlds (think about Star Trek Voyager’s Holographic Doctor). Marketing and advertising will be completely reinvented and will be more interactive and dynamic than the targeted holographic advertising in The Minority Report. The world around you becomes your display and your interface. Any and everything will be tagged, labeled, interpreted, remembered, and filtered, in real-time. Cyberspace, combined with L3 devices, will become something like a hive-mind collective conscience and memory that we can all tap into at will. We don’t quite know how this is going to happen yet, but a lot of thought and effort is going on right now. Ideas are beginning to become reality.

Early on, entertainment, advertising, and social communication will feel the effects the strongest. Massive amounts of revenue will be generated and the technology will begin to explode, disrupting the way we do everything. Next, education will get a huge shock, as will training, medicine, and business. Industry domination will first be focused on the hardware and software that users need. Then it will be controlled by whoever masters what goes on behind the scenes in the cloud of cyberspace.

Imagine…

You only have to see the Yellowbook Ads, HP’s Roku’s Reward, Soryn’s The Future of Education, Bruce Branit’s World Builder, Nokia’s Morph concept phone, and Microsoft’s Future Vision Series to get a glimpse of what is COMING and in some cases is almost already here.

The best examples of L3 AR, at least where we are headed to and what everyone is talking about for the near-future, include Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End and Mitsuo Iso’s Denno Coil. If you don’t bother with anything else, at least pay attention to those two.

The Decade of Ubiquity is defined as the next ten years where every aspect of our lives will be permeated by digital, mobile, media, data, information, augmented, virtual, and so forth. It will be everywhere and accessible almost instantly. Everything will be connected, labled, monitored, tracked, tagged, and interactive to some degree or another. We will break away from the desk, we will throw away our monitors, and our children will laugh at how large our IPhones are. They will struggle with how we ever managed to get work done with “windows” “webpages” and keyboards. They will be unable to fathom the concept of vinyl disks, typewriters, and landlines. But it all starts, and accelerates, during this next decade. Imagine everything that happened in the last decade, and multiply it. You haven’t seen anything yet. The next decade will make the last one pale in comparison.

The Distant Future

Level 4 is a long way off and is where we upgrade to contact lens displays and/or direct interfaces to the optic nerve and the brain. At this point, multiple realities collide, merge, and we end up with the Matrix. Without some amazing breakthroughs in a dozen fields, don’t expect this for another two or three decades. That is, assuming there is aggressive funding and R&D in the right areas. It won’t just happen on its own. There needs to be dedicated effort here. This is where Virtual Reality will finally come into its own and our dreams of pure and total immersion where we forget our bodies will finally be realized. Ok, maybe just Playstation 9.

Back to the Future

VAST Media is Virtual, Augmented and Simulations Technology Media. Virtual Worlds, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, MMORPGs, Simulations, and so on. In other words any media that is usually based on technology and is generally three dimensional. Print, Radio, and Television don’t count (this includes video). VAST Media today is still heavily segregated into individual industries with very little cross-pollination and sharing of theory, methodology, application, and leaders. This is slowly changing, but the fact remains that the technologies used for each are very similar. Until industry-wide convergence begins to occur, there will be little growth or advancement in any of the individual sectors. Virtual Reality went into a coma in the earl-mid 90s. Innovation in Virtual Worlds is barely measurable, with much of today’s state-of-the-art barely different from where it was a decade ago. MMORPGs have actually devolved in nearly every aspect. Some of the leading titles focus more on single-player gameplay, repetitive and static content, or aren’t even real 3D anymore. Augmented Reality, even as it is gaining momentum and excitement, is at risk of over-exposure and hype.

New leaders and thinkers are emerging and the hunger for creative innovation is beginning to gnaw at the bellies of Gen X’ers that miss the good old days of the Internet boom. Rapid advancements in mobile internet devices and tools for open development are fanning the fires. L2 will burst into the mainstream very soon, and the main thing holding L3 back are the wearable display companies that keep making promises but don’t seem to actively and aggressively be pushing the limits of technology. Too much emphasis is on miniature projectors or wearable displays so people can watch IPod/IPhone videos on the plane in privacy.

The world is nearing another dramatic paradigm shift and explosive growth in technology and economics, but we need to wake up. Demand more, better, stronger, faster, smaller. The future is ours to invent. Don’t be satisfied with mediocrity or lazy development.

We still have a long way to go, and there are plenty of obstacles and problems to be sorted out. Hardware has got to keep up this time (remember what happened to VR). This means that mobile devices have to crank it up real soon and compete with the desktop. Wearable display companies have got to quit screwing around, or they will single-handedly snuff out most efforts to push the envelop by years.

The architects of our augmented future need to think outside of the box as well. Forget everything you know about the internet, the web, web 2.0, virtual worlds, interface design, client/server, internet domains, etc. They MUST look at massively multiuser ubiquitious augmented reality with fresh eyes and vision. The paradigm is completly different. You can’t think about website design and development and ubiquitous AR at the same time. It isn’t about pages, servers, websites, or everything we have created over the last two decades. AR is about WHO you are, WHERE you are, WHAT is around you, WHAT you are doing, and WHO is nearby. Even things we take for granted like anonymity on the internet needs to be thrown out and rethought. The user’s identity is absolutely key to building the future. So are other things like privacy, interoperability, context, semantics, interface, and so on. We have to be thinking about these things NOW if we are going to build the future in the next decade.

Even the way we think about media and content is going to be important. Types of media can be categorized as Passive, Active, Interactive, Dynamic, and Meta. Passive media is text, an image, a 3D object, or something else that just is, and is static. Active media does something. It might be animated, it could turn on and off, and it can have multiple states. Interactive media requires input and interaction with a user. Games are a good example of interactive media. Dynamic media has the ability to change or evolve. It can be influenced. Meta media is beyond all other media types and is usually created and driven by other media or data sources. An example of this would be dynamic media, such as a constantly shifting and transforming 3D shape with attributes such as size, color, texture, volume, and morphability determined by live input from some other source such as the stock market or an orchestra.

Think about all of that, but with other attributes and influences that are based on the who, what, where, when, how, and why that become important with mobile multiuser ubiquitous augmented reality and vision. Now, make it intelligent. The rabbit hole is getting very deep, isn’t it? You absolutely cannot create, architect, and develop this stuff while in the mindset of 1.0 or 2.0. You have to think ahead to 9.0, or better yet, throw out the whole “point oh” system to start with. Never mind Shrödinger’s Cat, think about his Dog.

You must change your perspective, if you want to change how we see the world.

One good place to find out what some out of the box thinkers are thinking, is over at Tish Shute’s blog. Check it out, definitely worth your time. Her recent interviews with Mike Kuniavsky, Adam Greenfield, Usman Haque, and Andy Stanford-Clark are very interesting and in-depth.

What is your vision of the future?

Above copied from: http://curiousraven.squarespace.com/future-vision/

A Withholding Criticism: Susan Hiller’s Critical Practice of writing and Talking, David Berridge

Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977-2007, ed. Alexandra M.Kokoli (JRP Ringier, Zurich, & Les Presses du réel, Dijon, 2008). ISBN 978-3-905829-56-3.


There is a delicate balance throughout the thirty years of talks, catalogue essays, introductions and interviews that comprise The Provisional Texture of Reality. If Hiller demonstrates a verbal facility in regard both to her own work and broader structures and histories of art and thought, she is also acutely aware that if she could just talk or write about the issues involved then there wouldn't be any point making the art itself.

So the writings here give rein to that analytical verve, but always hold back, maintaining a space for the art work itself to function. Re-phrase that as the balance between logic, reason and coherence alongside something more mysterious and unfathomable, and an argument could be made for this being the key subject of Hiller's artistic output as a whole since the 1970's.

This critical-reserve concerns both her own art work and that of the artists about whom Hiller talks and writes. The first section of this book, then, is comprised of explorations-cum-tributes concerning Tarkovsky, O'Keefe, Helio Oiticica, Yves Klein, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock and Kurt Schwitters. Hiller's tone varies. Her Pollock piece is the closest she comes to art history, seeking to unfold a web of underappreciated artists and influences she saw as leading up to Pollock. The piece on Tarkovsky moves quickest from its ostensible subject to a broader web of ideas and her own practice. But perhaps that is itself a tribute to the astonishing relevance Hiller finds in Solaris: its existence, like the other work she reflects upon, as a kind of viral cultural contagion.

Often - as was no doubt expected by those inviting her to speak at numerous themed conferences and symposia - Hiller is weaving out from each artist's work into a broader web of cultural connections as a way of connecting to her own work. There is a sense throughout Provisional Texture of attaining some clear ground where the self, the work, and the broader culture are all held in balance, and prioritising one is more choice-in-the-moment than imperative. The opening of "O'Keefe As I See Her" states a method applicable to many of the essays in this collection:


In a way, this is a collection of detours around the subject, circling in on it. It's like a drawing, where the negative space is as important as the marks, and where individual marks don't mean much on their own. In the process, I've found my lines of thought converging or overlapping to define a tentative shape that may represent a sighting or wish for something that will emerge more clearly in the future. (33)


Hiller's balance and reserve doesn't stop her making astute critical points. In the O'Keefe essay she raises many issues that have preoccupied academic art historians, but always founded on that initial statement of ambulatory method. Her critical response comes from her ongoing attempt to think (inter-) contextually. So here is O'Keefe in relation to her paintings, in relation to lots of other painters, to her depiction in Stieglitz photos, in relation to Hiller's own biography of engagement with O'Keefe, to Linda Nochlin's gender focussed criticism, and so on and so on.

Essays on Oiticica and Klein focus on the difficulties of preserving anything like an accurate and authentic picture of their work. What we can access of Oiticica's work is "only a collapsed sign of the larger work he made available...relics of a dead past." Klein, by contrast, "took death into account when he made it explicit in his practice of deliberately creating works that were already 'only traces" (55). Hence " his relics do not seem to convey more to those who knew the artist personally than to those who didn't." (55)

Such concerns with the object and related processes of collecting, categorising, curatorship and the museological, relate to Hiller's background as an anthropologist. This emerges here as a biographical detail, an obvious influence on her intellectual approach, and a source of irritation to an artist often finding herself victim of, as she would see it, a lazy critical willingness to identify her works as exhibiting anthropological tendencies. If Hiller wanted to work within anthropological frameworks, her own impatient, somewhat irritated position seems to be, then she wouldn't have abandoned her original career plans.

This is to a degree somewhat disingenuous because Hiller, at least early on in her career, cultivates and depends upon the connection to anthropology as both a source of income and that through which the distinctiveness of her work can be articulated. Here Hiller reviews two exhibitions that, via content and context, weave a fraught amalgam of art and anthropology. In these essays - from 1979 and 1986 - Hiller is not accumulating a "collection of detours" that slowly circle in associatively on their subject. The ideas that lead to these exhibitions are colonial hangovers, and Hiller's aim is to highlight and skewer them with as much clarity as possible.

Thus her review of Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Art (Hayward Gallery, 7 Oct 1977- 16 Jan 1978) builds to where the show becomes - at least reading about it thirty years later - a kind of anti-credo for her work as a whole:


This exhibition, then, is really about using 'art' to cover up some historical truths; about using aesthetic judgements as a way of avoiding moral judgements; about expressing admiration for spiritual values while manifesting only materialistic ones; about admiring the 'work' while ignoring its meanings; about voiding symbols of their complexity by eliminating their context; and about valuing art objects more than societies.
To say that the purpose of the exhibition is 'that this art should at least be properly regarded for the sake of a better understanding among peoples', is, at the very least, an inadequate way to render justice to the peoples whose works are represented. (101)


Hiller's argument is all the more convincing for how - on the occasion of a review-essay for Studio International - she moves from condemnation towards demonstrating some practical alternatives. Several pages are given over to models of the kind of catalogue entry a non-colonial ethnography and curating would practice. Where an existing catalogue essay refers to "a wampum belt [that] served as a gift, also as a binding symbol of an agreement," Hiller appends to the beginning of the entry the note: "THE MAKING OF TREATIES WITH THE NATIVE AMERICANS WAS CONSIDERED PURELY GESTURAL BY THE WHITES." (96)

This efficacy throughout Hiller's counter-practice prevents many of the pieces in The Provisional Texture of Reality from being circumstance-bound musings. It also explains how Hiller negotiates the divide between artistic and academic, the creative and the theoretical - happily critiquing the later whilst holding to herself its authority.

Hiller herself explores all these issues in her still clear and powerful talk "Women, Language, and Truth", presented at a panel on 'Women's Practice in Art', organised by the Women's Free Art Alliance" in 1977. Hiller's central conviction is the impossibility of anybody or any-thing being fully represented by any available position. Noting how we are each "simultaneously the beneficiary of our cultural heritage and the victim of it" (115), Hiller goes on to observe that "It is always a question of following a thought, first incoherent, later more expressible, through its process of emergence out of and during the inconsistencies of experience, into language."

All this in the first two paragraphs. By the end of the talks two pages Hiller has offered, not a conclusion - "To sum up would be premature, obviously" - but three working proposals that clarify her non-positional and largely upper case free strategies:


1.all my ideas begin as part of the necessity for truth-telling in art practice;

2.not being entirely at home in the ordinary, dominant languages make this less than simple. At the same time, it gives me a wide range of options; and

3.the greatest self-betrayal for an artist is not indulging in anarchic or careless opposition to rational politics, but in fashioning acceptable SEMBLANCES of truth. (117)


Of course, over the time span and career of this book, there is the position of the Self to consider. Or, rather, such a career as Hiller's has to find its own way of not becoming a fixed position, whilst exploring a focussed range of themes, and meeting the professional and commercial pressures to make new work. Hiller herself articulates her anxieties over this in "An Incomplete Text on Commissions", a - perhaps tellingly - previously unpublished text from 2003. It also explains something of why From the Freud Museum has become so emblematic of Hiller's oeuvre.

Comprehensive as this collection is, it remains necessary to view it alongside Barabara Einzig's Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, which gives a sense of the different forms - and image-text relationships - Hiller's lectures have employed. Provisional Textures is poised between a Collected Writings and a snapshot of a writing and talking practice as a place for theorising, engagement and public address. Even though some texts - like Incomplete - gives a presence to Hiller's private writing, this is not a place for notes and other linguistic doodling - as collections of artists' writings often fetishise.

By the third section of this collection, however, I had begun to have a mental picture of Hiller, sifting through a wad of invitations to conferences on art and dreams, art and surrealism, art and anthropology, art and any paranormal phenomena you care to mention, trying to select those with enough of a space of difference to warrant the inevitable repetition. One that seems to warrant the effort is a conference on Body & Soul in Edinburgh in 2000. Hiller concludes her talk by noting, as the book began, her interest in "perspectives where figure-ground relationships can be allowed to shift" (249) and how "not editing-out and not forcing strange juxtapositions and unanswered questions to conform to theory is an aspect of my style, almost a signature."

But the talk also offers a chance to develop ideas around the body that are unarticulated elsewhere in this book. It suggests a motivation for these writings: let the flow of one's professional life as an artist, the opportunities that arise to talk and write, be a way of revitalising thinking and artistic practice itself. In her writing-talking about the body Hiller attempts a methodology that avoids becoming 'a position' - using one's knowledge and abilities, but always willing to start again, refusing certainties and obsessive originality, looking for clarity, the genuine engagement with the highly familiar:



The word 'body' seems very now, very contemporary. The word 'soul' sounds romantic and deeply unfashionable.

The word 'body' makes me very cross when used in connection with contemporary exhibitions, art of the body, the body in art, body art, etc., etc. In my opinion, body can be evoked but not represented. Pictures of bodies I don't think have much to do with 'body.'

Body is felt from the inside ... body is empathy. Body is communicated through touch and smell as much as sight. Body in art would be traces, stains, smears, sounds, not images. Body is blurry ... Handwriting is body. Voice is body.


Above copied from: http://moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/2009/05/withholding-criticism-susan-hillers.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/

Excerpt from Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality (1924), André Breton

Poetry evidences in our days such peculiar requirements. See what importance it attaches to the possible, and its love of the improbable. What is, or what might be—how insufficient that appears to be. Nature, it denies your rule. Objects, what does it care about your properties? . . .
Now consider words . . . Words are likely to group themselves according to individual affinities, which generally have the effect of making them re-create the world each instant upon its old model. Everything goes on, then, as though a concrete reality existed outside the individual; I might say, as if such reality were immutable. In the establishment of pure fact, pure and simple, if that is what we are after, we must have absolute certainty in order to advance something new, something the nature of which would shock common sense . . .
But, as I have already said, words, by virtue of the characteristics we find in them, deserve to have another decisive function. Nothing serves to modify them, since they respond in their own way with such promptness to our appeal. It is enough that our criticism should bear on the laws governing their assemblage. Does not the mediocrity of our universe depend essentially on our power of enunciation? In its most sterile seasons, poetry has often furnished proof of this; what debauches of starry skies, precious stones, dead leaves. Thank God a slow but sure reaction against this has finally developed in men's minds. Things said over and over again today meet a solid barrier. They have riveted us to this vulgar universe. It is from them we have acquired this taste for money, these constraining fears, this feeling for the native land, this horror of our destiny. I believe it is not too late to recoil from this deception, inherent in the words we have thus far used so badly. What is to prevent me from throwing disorder into this order of words, to attack murderously this obvious aspect of things? Language can and should be torn from this servitude. No more descriptions from nature, no more sociological studies. Silence, so that I may pass where no one has ever passed. Silence! After you, my beautiful language!
The object of language, they say, is to be understood. But understood how? Understood no doubt by me, when I listen like a child asking for the continuation of a fairy tale. Let them beware! I know the meaning of all my words and follow naturally a syntax (syntax which is not, as certain fools believe, a discipline). This being the case, I cannot see why there should be an outcry when they hear me declare that the most satisfactory image of the earth I can offer at this moment is that of the cardboard hoop. If such an ineptitude has never been advanced before me, then certainly it is not an ineptitude. Furthermore, I cannot be taken to account for a statement of this kind without my demanding the context. A rather dishonest person one day, in a note contained in an anthology, made a list of some of the images presented to us in the work of one of our greatest living poets. It read:
'The next day the caterpillar dressed for the ball' . . . meaning 'butterfly'.
'Breast of crystal . . . meaning carafe'.
Etc,
No, indeed, sir. It means nothing of the kind. Put your butterfly back in your carafe. You may be sure Saint-Pol-Roux said exactly what he meant.
Do not forget if for no other reason the belief in a certain practical necessity prevents us from ascribing to poetic testimony an equal value to that given, for instance, to the testimony of an explorer . . . To satisfy this desire for perpetual verification, I recently proposed to fabricate, in so far as possible, certain objects which are approached only in dreams and which seem no more useful than enjoyable. Thus recently, while I was asleep, I came across a rather curious book in an open-air market near Saint-Malo. The back of the book was formed by a wooden gnome whose white beard, clipped in the Assyrian manner, reached to his feet. The statue was of ordinary thickness, but did not prevent me from turning the pages, which were of heavy black cloth. I was anxious to buy it and, upon waking, was sorry not to find it near me. It is comparatively easy to recall it. I would like to put into circulation certain objects of this kind, which appear eminently problematical and intriguing. I would accompany each of my books with a copy, in order to make a present to certain persons. Perhaps in that way I should help to demolish those concrete trophies which are so odious, to throw further discredit on those creatures and things of 'reason'.
Who knows? There might be idle machines of a very scientific construction: Plans for immense cities might be minutely outlined which, although we never could carry them out, at least might classify the present and future capitals. Absurd automatons, perfected to the last degree, which would function like nothing else on earth, might give us an accurate idea of action.
Must poetic creations assume that tangible character of extending, strangely, the limits of so-called reality? May the hallucinatory power of certain images and the true gift of evocation which certain people possess, independently of the faculty of memory, no longer be misunderstood? The God within us does not, indeed, rest on the seventh day. We still have the first pages of Genesis to read. It perhaps remains for us only to hurl on the ruins of the ancient world the foundations of our new terrestrial paradise. Nothing yet is lost, for we know by certain signs that the great illumination follows its course. The perils into which reason leads us, in the most general and debatable sense of the word, in subjecting the works of the spirit to its irrevocable dogmas, in depriving us of the mode of expression which harms us the least—this peril, doubtless, is far from being dispelled. The deplorable inspectors who pursue us even after we leave school make their rounds of our homes and our lives. They make sure that we always call a cat a cat and, since after all we accept this to a great extent, they refrain from sending us to the galleys or the poorhouse or the penitentiary. Nevertheless, let us get rid of these officials as soon as possible . . .

above copied from: http://home.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/surrext.html

Interview with Siân Ede, William Shaw

Use and beauty | Siân Ede unravels preconceptions about the purposes of art

Siân Ede is Director of Arts at the Gulbenkian Foundation in the UK. There she initiated a ground-breaking Arts and Science programme, encouraging artists from all art forms to engage with science and technology. With broad experience in fine arts, drama and literature, she frequently chairs and speaks on panels about science and art. She's also the author of Art and Science, and the co-author of Strange and Charmed: Science and the contemporary visual arts.
What, we wondered, did she think of the objectives of the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre? How "useful" is art when it comes to creating social change?
Siân Ede talks to RSA Arts & Ecology's William Shaw.


In Art & Science you write about how scientists talk about the elegance and beauty of a project, but also from the 20th century onwards, you say that artists never do. How has that come about?
I think it's because scientists have a vision of the world as something that is implicitly perfect, and it is their job to find out how it works. This would be particularly true of physicists and mathematicians because they're Platonists, and you can't underestimate the effect of classical thinking - Plato and Aristotle being, in a way, the two sides. This is my philosophical take on it, but I can talk it through as well.
Plato does have this idea of the perfect world that came with the ideal forms. And in mathematics you get people like Marcus du Sautoy, all the time saying he's looking for pattern, and the pattern is an indication that there is a mega-pattern to be found. And I think they go off with a spring in their step every morning because they find things that somehow confirm this and then sometimes don't. But even when they don't they're still finding it. I think that biologists are more Aristotlean and they are more about, "What do my senses tell me?" and "How do I find things out every step of the way?" But I still think there's an implicate way of thinking about things, even though evolution, as we know it, is what biology is based on, it is about the accidental. Physicists would say that it's only responding to the implicate universe.
In the arts we are rooted in the experience of being human. It's a subjective experience. And ultimately we know we die. That is at the heart of it. And so even a concept of beauty has a kind of sense of time passing in it. I did an event at the ICA the other week, Can Art Make Us Happy?, and I said, "Look, there are four latin phrases: tempus fugit, mememto mori, carpe diem and vanitas. And they are all about the poignancy of time passing."
Even though the Romantics were interested in science and enthusiastic about it, Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn is a central poem for me. It's absolutely central! The people frozen round, "For ever panting, and for ever young", on the point between one thing or another - yet in life we're full of grief. There's this terrible contrast between the ideal and a fantastic sadness.
Then you get the 20th century and there's an awareness that the world is full of grief and wars – I suppose there's always been an awareness of that – and then since Duchamp, a world full of irony. So if there is humour, if there is a lightness of heart, it's tinged with irony and misery.

People think there must be a use for art in issues around the environment – and we believe there is – but quite often they misconstrue what that use is.
Yes. Artists never use the word “use”. What Kant says about art is it's purposiveness without a purpose. And it is a response to the world in any number of interesting different ways because all the artists are looking at it slightly differently. So there is a fundamental problem for me, and I think for the RSA too, and for the Arts Council, about asking artists to make things that have a utility, that are issue-based, in the jargon. You'll get people like Cornelia Parker saying "as an individual I am very moved by the politics and the ethics of environmental issues, but I can't do that in my art." It's not how it works. Because the arts are much more complex and do not have a particular purpose.
Obviously there will be some artworks that have a particular purpose, and interestingly the attitude to nature that we hold enshrined because of Romanticism, means that we are now aware that nature is no longer the nature that it was. Romanticism came about in response to the industrialisation of the countryside. Now we know nature is no longer the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the God-given. It is tainted. It is sad. It is ending.
You can't say, "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!" any more like Shelley did, without being aware that the lark is in decline. If you read the Shelley again you read it with this new awareness and you bring this awareness to it.

Is there a problem then with a project like Arts & Ecology - or is there only a problem if you think about it in terms of "use"?
Oh, subtle question. I mean, you could say, arts and sport, or arts and economics, couldn't you? And arts and anything? In fact my book Art and Science is part of a series of books that are art and anything... Art and Medicine, Art and Sex, and in a way you're just making an interpretive selection. "Ok, let's look towards all the art that looks at the environment, and look at environmental issues." Which is different from being an agenda given to artists. Of course, how can you not make art about the environment? Nobody's isolated.

So Arts & Ecology, or Art and Science, gives you a pair of critical glasses through which to look?
Yes. Yes it does.

I'm going to eat away at this some more because it's obviously of huge concern for us as a project. Matthew Taylor asks the question, "Given that artists are publicly funded and educated why should they not then be obliged to look directly at a social agenda?"
That is an enormously utilitarian question to ask. And it's not one that I could possibly ask because I think art just is. I don't think anybody said to Shakespeare, "What are you doing this for?" I don't think anyone said to Samuel Beckett, "Give us a list of your aims and objectives." Or, "What are the outcomes?" I would never expect artists to answer that even though I think every brush stroke or word is going to be influenced by the politics of their time.

Another argument in relation to social change is that artists are individualists. It's an individualist practice. And it's justified by art. You've got to let them do what they do because they're artists. But we're in a crisis of individualism right now; you could say it's individualism that has got us into this mess.
That's very interesting...yes.

So artists have to change at this point? Do they have to think more collectively? Is there a possibility of a different culture? If art is what it is at any time, can it change?
I think what you say is a profoundly interesting observation, because art came out of human development about 60,000 years ago at the same time as religion and it had a function - if you want to call metaphysics a function. It had a function in giving you a vision of the other world, side-by-side with religion and probably was shamanistic. And it was cohesive; it was there to keep the society together.
I think that one of the great turning points in English literature – we're talking about the beginning of modernism – is Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech, because I think that's as much to do with the individual as it is to do with the social responsibility, and the rise of the individual is something that happened in modernism.
Until then art was about the collective experience, even if Chaucer and others wrote about the individual. The rise of the individual went through to Freud, which is of course about the "me", and in the 20th and 21st centuries we have been in the centuries of the single person - the outsider. "What is my role?" was enshrined by Sartre and Camus and existentialism. "I have nothing to do with anyone else. I am not part of anyone else."
I am enormously interested in trying to see how far we really are collective and no longer individual and I think it's very interesting to look at neuroscience. That's why I love this question. I'm a bit sceptical about evolutionary psychology. I think we are far more about collective biology than we are willing to acknowledge.
Just before Christmas I did a symposium called Embodied Mind on the neuroscience of performance at RADA, and Antonio Damasio, who is one of the experts on neuroscience of emotion and feeling, was there, as was Raymond Tallis, who is again very interested in the phenomenology of the body, and the playwright Caryl Churchill. We were talking about what's going on in the mind and the fact that the body and the mind are as one. The body expresses the mind and the mind expresses the body. Somebody asked Antonio Damasio about collective behaviour and swarming in animals and he said, well actually that is what's going on in the brain. There is no ghost in the machine, it is all a mass of signalling. I think it's the most interesting idea - that there is not a me. There is an illusion of a me, but it is all swarming and it is better seen as the sum of its parts.

What a great metaphor, at least.
Isn't it? Now it's quite difficult to analyse a society that is complex. We're not living in a village any more. I think there's a lot of interest in the way in which we communicate and act as a body.
Now, your question had political undertones. You're saying it's the responsibility of artists as social creatures, in the global village if you like, to be the voice of conscience. I think that's a fair comment. They probably are. They wouldn't.... express themselves as such. (I'm worried about the word express because people think artists are "expressing themselves". They're not. They're making art.) But I think their interest is very often in collective issues. Very interestingly at the last Venice Biennale - two years ago - there was a huge amount of documentary work, photography, art about the Middle East's problems, the world in environmental crisis. This was shown as art. It's already becoming the collective responsibility as opposed to the old-fashioned idea of the artists communing with his muse.

When it comes to discussing the environment, a lot of art becomes naturally apocalyptic and dark. Is that problematic?
I think what artists like doing is setting up a scenario and then trying to work out what will happen. It's no accident that a lot of writers at the moment are writing books set in the near future, Doris Lessing, Paul Theroux, Margaret Atwood. Lots of writers are projecting into the future and it's almost like they are saying, "Ok, let's imagine what's going to happen?" Faye Weldon's wonderful at this.

Finally, with the economic crisis, do you see a change coming in art?
Well according to the Art Newspaper, which is my Bible in these things, of course there will be because a lot of people who buy art are very rich people. You could argue it's not all bad because some investors - caricatured as the Russian oligarchs - overinflated the price of art, and bought thoughtlessly. I tend to hope some idea of the idea of value and price would be separated off. Apparently the historical art marketplace is holding very strong and it's the more frivolous art pieces - fashion really - which are losing value.


Siân Ede is the Arts Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation and is author Art and Science, and editor and author of Strange and Charmed, Science and the Contemporary Visual Arts.
Above copied from: http://www.artsandecology.org.uk/magazine/features/interview--sin-ede

A Conversation with Anouk De Clercq, David Berridge

This conversation with Anouk De Clercq took place in Foyles cafe on Charing Cross Road, London on October 2nd 2008. The previous night she had shown her film Building, along with work by the three other members of the Brussels based collective Auguste Orts, at Tate Modern. With each artist showing individual works, the Q&A had prompted much discussion about the precise workings and purpose of the collective, and this was also the starting point of our conversation...



ANOUK: ...Every time we have to talk about this collective - we always look at each other, we are a bit like rabbits in headlights because, I don't know, we are starting to find out what it is because it's only been a year and a half and it's only now through writing these letters to each other that we really go to this level of really talking to each other and really trying to see what the other is all about. Before that it was much more inside our heads and not really said. We felt that there were affinities but we had never had the time to sit down and talk about it so it is really amazing that we have. Then there is the pragmatic level of joining effort.

DAVID: Some of the questions last night seemed like rebukes for the way you were up front about being a collective for administrative reasons to do with arts funding, rather than having utopian, collective goals.

ANOUK: We don't pretend to be anything. Maybe it's the time for something - within visual arts it's not so common that people would start together and join effort. It's much more of an individual approach. It may be related to living in Brussels. In Brussels you have a community of artists coming from all over. So in the Manon [de Boer] film [Two Times 4'33" (2008), which involves a slow pan around the audience for a performance in Brussels of the John Cage piece] the audience includes dancers and musicians - there is this mix. Last night was the first time I saw that film.

DAVID: Seeing Building last night, I wanted to start by exploring this distinct visual language in all your films. What for you does that language consist of?

ANOUK: Well it's changing. Most of the work on the website - like Building - dates from a couple of years ago. Now I'm moving away from screen based work only. But back then I was coming from a classic, experimental film background, New American Cinema, Anthology film Archive, all that. Then with Whoosh I got into 3D animation and that was because I wanted to make text visual - visually interesting - but also keep it readable. I wanted to animate the text.

But when I got into the 3D animation area I was so intrigued by this empty box. You have to build something so it is very close to architecture. So this idea of empty space that you have to fill in, that became a core element of the work. Also, I am intrigued by this idea of other places and wanting to build other places - be it a building or a landscape.

DAVID: And that empty space on the computer - does it have a particular feel or potential or emotion for you?

ANOUK: The strange thing during the process of making a new piece is that you start from this empty landscape or space and slowly you fill it up and build something. But I want the space to be empty enough so that people can still wander around and have their gaze dwell in that space. Not completely fill it. So it is empty space, filling it up, and taking it away again, remaining with a concentrated presence of very little. Something like that. You start from emptiness and you end up with not so much more (laughs). Emptiness again but a different kind of emptiness.

But now I try to relate this landscape or this space that is in the image, to the space that is around the image. So in more recent work the projected image is just one of the elements of the whole piece. I think I would say I build environments now. I wouldn't consider myself a video artist anymore. There's been this evolution from a really experimental film base, 16mm and super 8, to video and 3-D animation, virtual spaces, and then to building environments, with video, music, text, and with architectural elements.

One of the recent pieces I made was called Echo. What I did was make an echo of the actual space in the museum. So there was a screen for which I made an image - a mirror image in 3D of this space, that also transformed the actual space, obviously. It was a very large, white cube space twice this size [of the Foyles bookstore cafe] and I made a revolving door for the opening, as if the wall continued but you could push it around. In the door was a speaker - the door was a medium for sound.

The screen was really big and there were four vertical windows. I made a video image of four windows with a landscape behind the windows - a mirror of the actual windows in the space - so there was a dialogue there. All around the space - thirty five metres of wall - there was a sitting bench I made according to a rhythm, a pattern. The bench continued even behind the screen. All around the space were speakers...

That's what I mean by building an environment: spatial sound, video, architectural, all one big thing. That's what I mean by moving away from the projected image.

DAVID: Do you have a conscious sense of choreographing the experience people have in that space?

ANOUK: It started from this drawing in an old French magazine of the 1930's of people in a boat listening to a concert on the radio. I was very intrigued by the looks on their faces, by seeing people listening. That's what I wanted to see. So I built this environment because I wanted people to listen, and I wanted to look at how people would give this attention to listening in a museum.

The whole spatial sensation of the sound was very important - there were thirteen hidden speakers. Writing the sound for the space was very important. The stories that I heard after and during the show: people would go to the space to be really away, like people would go to a chapel. They were completely inside themselves and very quiet and very.. it's like these in-between spaces, going to a sauna, a cinema, a museum, or an elevator. Those are the spaces that interest me, the spaces that I like building too. So you could say other spaces but I would rather have in-between spaces.

DAVID: You talked last night about films to listen to. How does that inform what kind of visual image you create?

ANOUK: Well I think in my earlier work you could see sound as a way to help look at images. Like how they use soundtracks in classical cinema. The sound is used to make the flow from one shot to another easier or something. But in Echo the image is like a resting point, a focus point to be able to listen. So that makes me, at least in that last piece I did, less and less is happening in the image. Its much more like a space where you could just be. It's not something - there's nothing that I impose. It's like a focus point to be able to listen and wander around in your own head. That's it.

Before there would be more like a narrative flow. In Building - I consider that as being one of my most narrative pieces. It's called Building which is a building and also a verb, so I really wanted to tell this story of architecture which is that you have this line and then you have this surface, then you have a volume and then you see space and then you see that it is an actual space. That is very narrative. Now I am not so interested in that anymore. I am more interested in images that have no beginning and no end, that have a continuous flow, being part of a bigger ensemble of an environment. So it means that the image imposes less. I don't know if that is the right word.

DAVID: My experience of Building is this balance between abstract shapes and patterns, then points where it becomes representational. That tension between establishing one condition and then immediately wanting to get away from it, and so on.

ANOUK: That's the whole play. I draw from reality. You could say in a 3D program you have almost a dictionary of forms. A library of forms, that's what I want to say. So if you want to have a tree in your 3D landscape you can look up and there's a whole bunch of trees. But sometimes I take the form of that library but I completely dismantle it.

For instance in Kernwasser Wunderland you have these flower like shapes. Well that is from the library of the 3D program. It is a palm tree that we put upside down so the leaves are in the ground. What you see is the root of the palm tree. We made the trunk very thin and elegant but what you see and think is maybe like a flower shape is actually the root of the palm tree...

It's like fooling around, playing around with reality, I don't know. It's not only the play between the remains of reality and abstraction, but it is also the whole play between 2D and 3D. In building there's constantly a tension between is this a surface or is there a depth of field - as there is also a friction between the sound and the image. Sometimes it would be synch and sometimes it wouldn't.

DAVID: Are you drawn to using the program because of its restriction?

ANOUK: I feel there's no restriction. I used to film and shoot footage but I like this idea of having a palette of possibilities, almost like you would have a palette of different kind of colors to paint, and then by pushing the right buttons and sometimes pushing the wrong buttons... the machine surprises me a lot.

It's a constant dialogue between me and the machine. I push a lot of wrong buttons (laughs) and then something comes up that wasn't my intention. An image comes up, or a form comes up, and I think I wouldn't be able to think of that. An example would be the bird in Portal. Actually I had this other shape in my head, but pushed some wrong buttons, and something like that came up, and that made me think of another possibility. It's a constant dialogue, keeping it open enough. I do work with drawn storyboards but it's a dialogue. It changes all the time.

DAVID: And images like the birds or the mountains offer a very particular blend of the artificial and the natural, human and machine -

ANOUK: Of course I am very, er, influenced or something by Japanese drawings of Hokusai and Hiroshige, these very minimal drawings of landscape, a couple of lines and shww! you have a landscape, you can just dwell in it. Also not so much the aesthetic quality but more like the feel of romantic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and this whole idea of wanting to surrender to an environment. I'm very grateful that those guys were there.

DAVID: But lots about those examples, of course, is very different to your own work. Aren't those artists in lots of ways offering examples of things you want to avoid?

ANOUK: I guess it started off... (looks through files on lap top)... I'm looking for a good example. Take Portal. That was made as answer to a question of a curator. He wanted people in different disciplines to make a secret garden and make it public. So I wanted to map my secret garden - an inner world. I wanted to portray my inner world in sound and image. Why I would use the digital: I feel that through abstracting these emotions, also this whole digital approach is more distant - it's not me and a pen, it's not human - there's a machine in-between - I hope that my inner world becomes more open. It becomes like a public park. From a secret garden to a public park.

Because there is this machine, this software in-between, it becomes just a little bit more distant, it becomes less mine, it becomes universal, or like a group experience. I feel most comfortable working with 3D animation to have this openness because otherwise if I would draw or write it the space would be too closed.

DAVID: And part of that open space is a real co-presence of extremes. A sense of apocalypse, flare out, and entropy, yet also something more pastoral and contemplative, generative -

ANOUK: It's very conscious. I'm not so much interested in apocalypse per se, but in these in-between spaces. In Portal there's an edge of that world - you glide off the end of this world we created in 3D into nothingness. In Building at the end - that's my favorite moment. There's this whole trip through the building and at the end you go into a blackness which is not a fade out, it's absolutely not a fade out, it's about going into another space, because coming from where you have been in the building this darkness is a space - it's not just a black surface. That's my favorite moment.

Again, I think you could relate it to my fascination for in-between spaces: Alice in Wonderland falling into another world; going to a sauna, an elevator, where time and space stops for a bit. A chapel. Weightlessness. I think those spaces are very healing. In Echo looking at the faces of the people listening and being in that environment they were very relaxed I have to say. They were inside themselves. It was beautiful to look at. I was very happy to be able to see that happening. That was my film. I wanted to be able to look at the people. I think it's healing. I like to be in these spaces.

DAVID: Healing in what sense? Calm? Peacefulness?

ANOUK: Something like that. Being very safe, comfortable, confident. Yes, comfortable spaces.

DAVID: Which could relate back to your interest in constructivism. I was thinking how your work used the language of constructivism, but where is the utopian revolutionary politics? It's about calm and healing.

ANOUK: It's also about.... If you're thinking about constructivism then I think about my - I don't know what you'd call it - heroes - which is Malevich. Or Rothko. I just try to reduce and go to some sort of essence and remove everything that is anecdotal but just try to go to the core of things. That's also maybe why using the 3D animation: I have an empty box. I am building something. I take away a lot because I want to have this concentrated presence of very little.

Nothing too clutterly. If you have a blank space and you have this one black line as a viewer you have a lot of room left for your own mental projections. In Bachelard's The Poetics of Space - which is my book! - he says that for a writer it's not your talent to construct beautiful sentences that is important but much more your ability to withdraw enough to give space to the reader. That's what you do when you read. You have this whole mental world that you construct from reading someone's words. Your talent is revealed by withdrawing - a talent for withdrawal - and not by filling up worlds.

I like that whole play. I think that's your job as an artist: to balance between that - portray your inner world and at the same time it's a gesture towards other people so you have to be able to take away to let other people in. So this whole - it's a balance act. That's work. It's very conscious.

DAVID: I was interested in End, the theatre piece you've been working on, partly because I'm curious what happens when you re-introduce a body into this virtual space. What happens?

ANOUK: This piece was a collaboration between me and Kris Verdonck, a Belgian performance artist. He asked me to do a video piece for a performance. I'm always a bit skeptical. There's a lot of shows that have video in them and I never really know why. It's a kind of fashion, I guess, but it's seldom that I say "okay, that's why they had video in that show." But I really appreciate his work so I wanted to do this effort of thinking how it might work.

We linked my image to one of the performers. One of the ten figures was pulling a rope. As he was pulling he also pulled the image which was a mixture of 3D and films of clouds. Clouds, smoke, blackness, that kind of feel.

So he pulled clouds basically. The clouds moved really slowly from one side to another. The projected image was twelve metres wide and three metres high. It was very panoramic - really like old days of cinema, old days of theatre, with this idea of having a panoramic background and all the characters in front. He made the clouds move as he moved. You could make this connection with Atlas carrying the weight of the world, with the worker, almost the Russian mine worker, that kind of thing. But at the same time he was pulling clouds. I think it worked. The presence of the image was very organic linking in to this one character and the theme of the play. It became more and more black.

DAVID: I imagine the flux and variability of live performance is a contrast to the control, order and solitude of working the animation program on your laptop?

ANOUK: In 2002 I did a live video performance. I come from a music background. I thought, jesus, this work I'm doing is all so controlled! I want to see what it does to me if I do it live. It was a disaster. (Laughs) I worked with two musicians and they were making music and I had to play with the images. It didn't work for me at all.

DAVID: What was wrong?

ANOUK: I had this.. I still had this narrative flow I wanted to follow. I felt that every form had to have its time to evolve and grow, then grow into something else. Sometimes I felt I had to move too quickly. I had to impose an evolution on the movement of the form. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to give it the right amount of time. The musicians had to laugh. We had fun - God! they said to me, this is really not your thing. I was so miserable after each show. I like to give things its proper time.

A CONVERSATION WITH ANOUK DE CLERCQ: PART TWO



ANOUK: But with this performance [End] in 2008... maybe it's an age thing. Since 2002 I've let go of the whole linear approach, that there's a beginning and an end, so now I make images that don't necessarily have to have clicks and stages, plot points and turning points and all this almost classical narrative language that's inside my head. I let go of all that. It's much more an experience. So with the clouds it's a flow that can have the presence of another human being. Allowing this guy to pull the images, to choose the rhythm of the cooling. It doesn't work if you have a linear approach to images.

DAVID: So if it's not narrative what provides the structure for pieces now? The space? Duration?

ANOUK: I constantly go back to Echo - it's one of the last things - I was very happy with it - it's a flow, like a bubble, an environment. You can step into it and step out of it. It's so much about architecture, you step into a building and you step out of the building, that's the idea. It's not like you sit down in a cinema, the light goes out, the projection starts and you watch it from beginning to end, that's not what I feel is very rewarding for me now as an artist. As a viewer and spectator, yes, but not as an artist.

It starts in my work with the revolving door in Echo: you flow into another space and then the light is different The sound, too, is so choreographed. We made sacks of sound, a mix of focal speakers and broader speakers, a work of months, choreographing space. So you just flow in and you flow out...

DAVID: Flow sounds very... experiential. Your images also evoke measurement, surveying, and a more mathematical sense of space...

ANOUK: Isn't that what architecture is about? I work and talk with architects. You create a space for people to move in but of course it's measured spaces. That's architecture. I don't think you can have anything more controlled than putting up a building and almost forcing people to go up and down the stairs. A choreography for people to move into - that's what I do - I'm more architect now than a video artist.

DAVID: But Bernard Tschumi, whose work has a lot of resemblances to your own, also has as a key assumption that there can be no simple predictive relationship between the space and the activities that take place in it.

ANOUK: Of course it depends. I worked with architects Robbrecht & Daem on the renovation of the Filmmuseum in Brussels, finding a new way to present their collection of classical film in the digital age. We discussed and drew the plans together. A new experience. (Laughs) Quite controlling I have to say.

In Echo, except for bench, revolving door, and screen, it's not that I impose so much in that space. It's much more putting up walls with the sound, one sound space into another. Sound is never - even if you have the most focal speaker - you can never close it in, one sound fades into another one. A good lesson for me!

DAVID: In the films how are - were - you working with sound? At what point did you combine sound and image?

ANOUK: Here too there has been a big evolution. In the beginning I was much more interested in synchronicity, particular in Sonar or Petit Palais. Both are tracks by Ryoji Ikeda, a Japanese electronic minimalist artist. Both were pieces where I had the sound first and then made the image. I don't think I will do that anymore. There's a tendency that you have the soundtrack and you hang the images on it like you would hang clothes on a clothes rack. It's kind of like translating sound into the image, possibly.

I don't feel that that is very interesting any more for me. In the beginning I was very interested in that because I come from music. I wanted to connect both worlds, image and sound, and also dancing, making it connect through synchronicity.

As I got more confident, maybe, within image and within music, I was able to let go of synchronicity and much more play with frictions, with how if you have a sound-layer and an image-layer then with these two layers you can... Something you can't tell in the image-layer you can tell in the sound-layer. I see layers as much more independent, and I have no sense that because the image does this the sound has to do this too.

DAVID: So now you develop sound and image separately...

ANOUK: Now it's going like bricks. Now it's .. I work a lot with one sound artist, Anton Aeki. Of course if you work so long together you can experiment much more. You don't need to explain so much anymore what you want to do.

DAVID: So you discuss, work separately, come together...

ANOUK: Exactly. Its really a dialogue. A strong dialogue. I start with this whole description of the environment I want to make. He starts to propose sounds, I start to propose sounds, and so it just clicks, clicks, clicks. Then I give him the image...

DAVID: In the discussion last night people talked about anti-cinema. Is the development of your work based on the refusal of certain conventions and practices of cinema?

ANOUK: I don't see it as refusal. Have you read Breaking the Narrative, the book of interviews by Doug Aitken? [ Noel Daniel, ed. Broken Screen: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken: Expanding the Image/ Breaking the Narrative, 2006] I think the cinematic experience is much more than only sitting in a film house and having a classic film approach. I don't think cinema is dead. I feel much more comfortable with a cinematic experience that is very broad and that implies architecture.

In the filmmuseum work, for instance, I proposed a series of flat screens. Then there is a Muybridge like scene going on so to see it, you have to walk from one end of the screen to another. Plus, on the image - there are touch screens with abstract black forms you can move to see the image behind them.

That's a cinematic experience, and it combines screen cinema with an interactive experience so it's just so much broader. But it's nothing to do with refusal. It's not a negative thing. The possibilities are there to create a cinematic experience that is may be much more illusive when it is not kept only on the screen. Why would you? You have surround sound, so why wouldn't you have a surround cinematic experience in general. It's just grown.

DAVID: I guess the idea of anti cinema is also engaging ideas about spectacle, celebrity, a visual experience that is oppressive so there's a critical move to create new notions of image, new situations for the spectator-

ANOUK: That's also what became clear yesterday [at the Tate Modern screening] - the four of us: we ask another question to the audience, much more asking them to engage.

In classical cinema you have this film of Queen Christina with Greta Garbo. At the end of the film you have this long - such a long! - zoom in on the face of Greta Garbo, maybe three minutes, which is so long in the classical cinema at that time. She stands on the bow of the ship and looks straight ahead, nothing, a blankness- and so the camera just moves into the face and as an audience you can project so many things.

It's the end shot of the film so what you've seen, what you've lived with this character - she doesn't reveal anything. Her face is so blank but you just go in on her face and you just project emotions that you think - it's so amazing. To be given that time to do that and to be given that trust. This gesture of a director not explaining every emotion that goes on in this woman's emotions or mind but leaving it like this - that's wonderful. Kind of like... a blank.

That's why I like the end image of Building so much... the blackness is not an end... it's just another space.. you just go into another space...

DAVID: On your website you describe 20x20 as a work that involved finding "A strong poetic image as a metaphor." Does that explain your process more broadly? Metaphor for what?

ANOUK: An inner world. It's a lot about emotions, knots and frictions. Portal is a translation of that inner world. Or in Conductor: I made that during a time when I was extremely angry, so I had really strong emotions and somehow couldn't ventilate it in the real world. I'm an artist so there is a reason why you choose to communicate with images and sounds. That reason might be a little less there now but, anyway...

I tried to translate that anger into that piece. The clouds become darker and darker and there's this lightning and this release at the end. At the same time there is this little light - it's a presence that's there. It's a breathing a calming presence so even though the whole world around that breathing element is going crazy, the tiny element is really there.

A lot of the pieces you could really make a psychological analysis of it if you wanted. You could make a description of it as a painting of an emotion absolutely. That's how I work. Its not so much how the result is formal sometimes but the starting point is very personal, very emotional, very psychological.

Before drawing I make descriptions - a lot of words before making images. I write a lot before I start - random thoughts all around this one feeling I can't put my finger on. It's very vague, a sensation, and then I try to grasp it by writing around it, basically the whole editing starts with writing. I start deleting things: that's not it, that's not it. I keep this cloud of words, short sentences, it's never really a linear text. It's always more poetic.

Then I start drawing from those words also trying to grasp the sensation in images and in sounds. Slowly and slowly I get to the core of what that sensation is and then give a title to the work. There is that scene in Alice in Wonderland where she goes into the forest and then she loses her words for things and her own name and it's by living different kinds of stories and meeting all these creatures in the forest that she slowly finds again that, okay, this is the word for this and this is my name.

DAVID: I was thinking about writing about your films and how they were resistant to description. I didn't feel I could describe them because they didn't lend themselves to a simple fit of word and object. So either my attempt would become incredibly, ridiculously complicated or I would have to have some other, indirect approach to language. So it's curious that writing should be such a part of your own process.

ANOUK: It's something that comes out in the letter writing that we [the member of Auguste Orts] have done. I was writing to Sven [Augustijnen, whose film Johan (2001), a study of a man with aphasia, was also screened at Tate Modern] about language and how I felt. I told him that for me language is really a poor means of communicating. I am much more interested in reading between the lines. I was hoping I gave him enough space between my lines so he would know what I mean but in a different way, not through words only.

I felt so strongly about Johan, just because he focussed so much on hesitation, on the blank spaces between words. Usually on TV, documentary, a radio show, silence is a taboo - never let that blank space speak. It can reveal so much. There's a friend of mine who has a radio show. Each day she has a one hour conversation with an artist. She was saying one of her favorite shows was with a poet. She asked him a question and he was hesitating so there was five minutes of radio silence. It reveals so much that is not language, not words, that's, well... it's an attention. You just cut it out in cinema or radio shows. You cut it, move on. It's all words.

DAVID: The film about Johan was remarkable because he was so present, there was so much going on, and yet his spoken vocabulary was so small. It's an image for what we have been talking about.

ANOUK: I feel his struggle in my head. It's kind of recognizable in some weird sense. In a letter to Sven I wrote that music is much more direct ways of communicating.

DAVID: Why? Because it's less specific or vaguer or indirect in some way?

ANOUK: It's less direct. It's a sensation. It touches the soul much more directly. I didn't know you could feel the soul until I went to a really good classical music concert. That touches an area that isn't touched in any other way. Music, much more than anything else, has such a subtle way of entering. A composer has an idea in his head, but the way he makes it enter inside you, it's such... that's a work space for me.

DAVID: So you are resistant to using language in films? But you whisper in Me+ and there is the subtitled head in Whoosh?

ANOUK: I did it. I stopped. In Portal there were like subtitles. There was the idea of a secret garden and I wanted to have this vastness - but connected to this one person so it would be their inner world. The language was necessary to have this vastness. I put it at the right of the image so you don't have to watch it. Someone pointed out that it was really a pity I put that presence in the image because this person wanted to be completely free and go into the landscape and not be - not have this landscape be attached to one person. That's why I tried to let language go.

DAVID: So what relationship did you want?

ANOUK: I didn't want to make the landscape... it was like a guide. It is really a trip in Portal - constantly moving, very slowly. A guided tour through a mental landscape, an inner landscape. This presence of language is the guide - if you look left you will see blah blah blah. These words came from a blinking cursor. It was always there. The cursor was always blinking, like the light in Conductor. Almost like a breathing. On off on off. There is a presence and sometimes words comes out of it.

I like the macro-micro idea that you have a cosmos and you have this one little person. This dialogue. (Laughs) That's not a dialogue it's friction! It's friction and dialogue at the same time. It relates to your job as an artist - to go away from your own hermetic little world and open it up so it becomes interesting to other people as well and maybe also universal.... attempts. Trying.

DAVID: Universal? You mean...

ANOUK: (Laughs) Dangerous territory! Very dangerous territory! I have read Jung. This idea of collective memory, archetypes. I'm aware of that. I don't know if that's - I'm just saying these terms that are really very charged and very loaded. (Looks at watch) I need to go.

DAVID: We should finish. So where are you right now? No single screen projections. It's all space, environment, architecture and movement?

ANOUK: It's also public space. I get asked a lot to do pieces for public space, which is a weird question for someone so into virtual reality. But I get asked a lot and I really like to work in terms of public space...

DAVID: Using these ideas of calm and retreat and healing?

ANOUK: Absolutely. One piece will be an installation in psychiatric hospital that is also a museum, in Ghent. It's an amazing space already, a mixture of museum goers and mental patients, a former abbey. You go through this big wooden door into another world. I've been asked to make an installation, to turn it into a more open space, for both gallery visitors and patients. Also something else for a really big square - bigger than St. Marco in Venice. They know I'm not going to impose. I leave it empty. I don't know what I'll do. But it's an interesting question.

DAVID: And a project you haven't been able to realize but would like to?

ANOUK: So many. There's one I'm trying to realize: they asked me to have an idea for a water tower. I wanted to change the facade of the watertower so it becomes a mirror. If light falls on it it's a beacon and it's a reflection of its surroundings. That's an idea I'd love to see it. It would be very expensive though. But that's something I'd really like to do.


Above copied from: http://moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/2008/10/conversation-with-anouk-de-clercq-part.html

George Brecht's "Event Score" (1996), Elyse Nelson

George Brecht’s “Event Score” (1966)
Elyse Nelson
Art, Music & Theory Since World War II
Seth Kim-Cohen
October 16, 2007


George Brecht stands out among the Fluxus group as an innovator, pushing the ideas of his predecessors, Cage and Duchamp, into an open-ended, ever-elusive world of objects, sound, performance, and theory. In his 1957 essay, Chance-Imagery, Brecht seems to find art as a logical nexus among his interests in science, probability theories, and objects. He further stumbles into a career as an artist/musician while taking John Cage’s highly influential class at the New School for Social Research (New York) in 1958. The origins of his practice are significant in understanding his work as that of an untrained musician who embraces art in the light of expanding media of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and thus using it as an open arena for experimentation. Brecht’s chosen platform for such experimentation manifests itself in the shape of his “event scores” (a term coined by Fluxus artists). Among the dozens of situations that are sketched out in his “event scores”, perhaps the most beautifully understated yet loaded and paradoxical may be found in his 1966 “Event Score:”

Arrange or discover an event. Score and then realize it. (fluxworkbook 27)

In a short ten words, Brecht cuts through the material employed in his other scores, instructing that a non-descript ‘event’ be manipulated in every sense that he sees fit. The score stands above the rest as a paradigm of contemporary artistic thought in the 1960’s, critiquing – and simultaneously advocating – the nature of art as an ‘event’ (one brushing the fringe of reality) if only set aside as such by any one who chooses to do so.
To speak of his “event scores” in broader strokes, they may be seen as instructions for performances or guidelines for a particular situation, which he calls an ‘event.’ The use of sound and objects is typical, and he often instructs action between the two, such as in his “Drip Music” (1959) in which water is dripped from a source into an empty vessel (fluxworkbook 22). In other scores, he calls for the performance of specific actions by the audience and/or performers. Brecht blurs the distinction between the mediums by creating scores that call for ‘events’ that lie between object and sound, performance and reality, and physically exist as replicable paper objects written in miniature stylized stanzas. Higgins uses the word intermedia to define the in-between state in which these scores exist (4). They neither mix nor juxtapose media, but rest between them in a state of flux (thus the group name Fluxus). Higgins’ use of the term intermedia is the closest one comes to pinning down the proper nomenclature for the many ambivalent instances such as the appearance of the sound-object that Brecht calls for in “Drip Music.”

But among the many uncanny situations that unfold in Brecht’s ‘event scores,’ his piece “Event Score” (1966) remains evermore elusive. In cleverly giving the title of the piece a name that is synonymous with the entire body of work in which it lies, he speaks of the common principles underlying his work as a whole. To start, he uses the word ‘Event’ to suggest that the score draws out a situation. In reading it, however, one becomes aware of the fact that while Brecht asks for many different manipulations of the ‘event’ within the score, the event itself is left undefined. This ambiguity is intentional, and perhaps Brecht does this in order to encourage the reader to think more seriously about what constitutes an ‘event.’ Secondly, Brecht recognizes his work as a ‘score’, suggesting its likeness to a musical score and thus his role as that of a composer. His claimed authorship, however, remains paradoxical, as he otherwise seems to deny himself the designation as the genius behind his work. Dezeuze calls Brecht “one of the most self-effacing artists around,” referring to the way in which he leaves his scores exceedingly open and enigmatic so that those who come across them may interpret and perform them in such subjective manners that they become, in part, their own work (9). So in using the word ‘score’ in the title of the piece, while he in some ways calls attention to himself as the composer/author/artist, Brecht perhaps more importantly calls attention to the other necessities of any musical score – the performers and the audience.

In Brecht’s scores, and in this one in particular, the performer/audience relationship is left undetermined. Brecht himself being an untrained artist does not require any skill of his performers and never even designates who is to perform his scores at all, be it artists or musicians. His scores are left as open haikus printed as public statements and (preferably) distributed at large. The way in which he states the content of “Event Score” in imperative form implies that he speaks directly to the reader. So in reading the score, the audience and/or performer is confronted by Brecht in many forms, being asked to participate as the composer, performer, and audience of the score. To appreciate this notion, it is necessary to understand this score piecemeal, for each word is loaded with meaning and possibility.

First, he tells the reader to “arrange or discover an event.” The word ‘arrange’ has been carefully selected because the verb ‘to arrange’ can be interpreted in many ways. Brecht may be asking the reader to organize or plan an ‘event,’ to position objects and/or sounds and/or performers into a situation, or even to ‘arrange’ in the musical sense, to compose sounds, objects, or gestures into a situation. As Dezeuze notes, he chooses the word ‘arrange’ over ‘assemblage’ to differentiate his ‘events’ from the combines of other artists such as Rauschenberg (7). As stated before, Brecht is not interested in juxtaposing or mixing objects and/or mediums. He wants to ‘arrange’ them into new situations fitting between media. Brecht also gives the option to ‘discover’ an ‘event’. This may be interpreted as to simply call a found object/sound/situation of reality an ‘event.’ This idea was influenced by Duchamp’s readymades, such as his 1913 Bicycle Wheel or 1917 Fountain. Duchamp advocates through his readymades art as objects of reality that are placed into the art world by choice of an artist. Brecht takes Duchamp’s idea a step further, allowing the art to be not only an object, but also any sort of undefined ‘event,’ whether it be a set of actions, a sound, an object, or a situation between any of the former. In using the disjunction ‘or’ in juxtaposing ‘arrange’ and ‘discover,’ Brecht gives the reader the option between the two. The instructions are mutually exclusive, as he asks the reader to do one or the other. He is specific in using a disjunctive rather than conjunctive as to avoid the urge to both ‘arrange’ and ‘discover,’ which may lead one to invent, or fabricate, an ‘event.’ To invent a situation would be too much in line with the tradition of artists who feel the need to be creative. Brecht desires a more subtle art, one that exists as an intermediate between reality and artifice, what Dezeuze calls “almost nothing” (10).

In the second sentence of “Event Score,” Brecht directs the reader to “score and then realize [the event].” Here, he passes the baton to the reader, instructing for him/her to take his role as composer or artist. Brecht recognizes that ‘arranged’ or ‘discovered’ situations/objects/sounds are not actually ‘events’ until they have been legitimized by the author as such by means of recognizing their ‘event’ status in some concrete form. To ‘score’ the ‘event’, then, means to dictate or transcribe the situation into an ‘event,’ thus giving it status as a situation outside (or at least on the fringes) of reality. Next, Brecht directs the reader to “and then realize it.” Once the ‘event’ has been legitimized, it must be acted out, seen, or understood as an ‘event’ by the performer and/or audience. The verb ‘to realize’ is once again a broad term that Brecht uses to muddle the distinction between audience and performer. It is unclear whether Brecht is directing the reader to ‘realize,’ as in understand the ‘event,’ or to ‘realize,’ as in physically make the ‘event’ happen.

After treading through Brecht’s carefully constructed language, one seems to understand the options that Brecht outlines, yet may still be dumbfounded as to how to define the ‘event’ within “Event Score” and thus understand how it may be ‘realized.’ But with more thorough consideration, it becomes obvious that this ‘event’ is entirely capable of being ‘realized,’ and it is only the overwhelming degree of freedom that Brecht gives to his reader that confuses him/her. He truly values the risk involved in leaving such works undefined. Dezeuze sees this as an extension of his earlier experimentation with chance in art:

Brecht discovered that simply leaving performers to make the decisions usually controlled by the artist was an equally, if not more, effective way of introducing chance into an artwork.
(Brecht for Beginners 2)

Therefore, to ‘realize’ “Event Score” would be as simple as to ‘discover’ (or happen upon) an exploded pen, ‘score’ it in some fashion, and then ‘realize’ or understand it as art. Brecht would argue that this specific interpretation of “Event Score” would be just as legitimate as any other interpretation.
So, “Event Score” can be readily realized, but still the question remains whether it needs to be. In a sense, the score has already realized itself as paradigm for all scores by Brecht and thus does not need to be further realized. It is as if Brecht writes this score as a way to divulge his own valuable process in writing scores. On the other hand, “Event Score” seems to need to be realized by its reader because Brecht never justifies language as an artistic objective. In fact, in his text Chance-Imagery, he writes, “words about art are so indefinitely inferior to art itself” (4). He does not write scores as products but rather as a means to a more material end. He is specific in “Event Score” that it is to be “[scored] and then [realized].” He does not give the disjunctive connector or as he does in the former part of the score. He uses and then to imply that a score is nothing without being drawn to completion, being both scored and then realized. Nothing in the score is to be overshadowed, for it is his brilliant and humorous economy of meaning within the ten-word score that marks its effective power and signature as a paradigm for all other scores.



Works Cited

Brecht, George. “Chance-Imagery.” A Great Bear Pamphlet, Something Else Press, 1966: 1-29. 14 October 2007

Daneuze, Anna. “Brecht for Beginners.” Papers of Surrealism. Issue 4 (Winter 2005): 1-11. 14 October 2007

Friedman, Ken, Owen Smith, Lauren Sawchyn, Excerpts From: the Fluxus Performance Workbook. Performance Research e-publication, 2002. 15 October 2007

Higgins, Dick. “Synesthesia and Intersenses: Intermedia.” Something Else Newsletter 1 No. 1 (1966): 1-12. 14 October 2007


above copied from: http://artparlor.forumotion.com/critique-discuss-f2/george-brecht-s-event-score-1996-essay-by-elyse-nelson-t2.htm