Beuys’ Concept of Social Sculpture and Relational Art Practices Today, Laurie Rojas

German artist Joseph Beuys’s work appears unfathomable: his entire oeuvre engaged drawing, sculpture, performance, pedagogy, and political activism. Art critics and art historians have admitted the difficulty of placing this enigmatic artist within the modern or postmodern lineages of significant postwar artists. In the foreword to Joseph Beuys: The Reader, Arthur Danto argues that Beuys (1921–86), like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, is one of the artists who one must turn to in order to understand contemporary art. Danto believes, however, that unlike Duchamp and Warhol, who are frequently discussed and shown, Beuys has faded from contemporary awareness. This is both true and not true.

Beuys is famously remembered for two things: the theoretical hypothesis of “social sculpture,” and the statement “everybody is an artist.” A close consideration of the relationship between these two concepts reveals Beuys’s program for art and his historically motivated vision for society. Both concepts have influenced participatory, socially engaged, and relational art today and provide a vehicle for unraveling their historical significance, even if they claim to detach themselves from Beuys’s historical moment. Perhaps of even more significance, then, is what aspects of Beuys work seem to have–somewhat suspiciously–faded.

Danto suggests that perhaps the fading interest in Beuys lies in the fact that both the subject of Beuys’s art and his own personal myth are bound up in World War II and the period of German reconstruction. It is possible that the fading of Beuys is due to the inability to digest and resolve the problems his work raised in the aftermath of World War II. Our historical moment, almost five decades later, inherits that history and those desires, even if a certain metaphysical strain of postmodernist thinkers have incessantly argued that such a moment has irretrievably passed. The analysis of the influence of Beuys on contemporary artists, specifically those engaged in relational aesthetics, in this essay is to argue and demonstrate that the moment has not passed, but changed. The difference in our historical moment is that we are less conscious of—and less interested in–the social conditions that produced and re-produces the political disillusionment and aesthetic desires and needs that emerged after WWII.

According to Danto, the ideological context–the German mentality of the 1960s–is inseparable from the work, and a necessary component for its emergence and understanding. In that case, the question for critically engaging Beuys’ work rests on whether he was was part of an effective, critical neo-avant-garde or something else—as art historian Benjamin Buchloh attempts to do (to be addressed in part II).

In the present, a decade dominated by the discourse on relational aesthetics and socially engaged art practices, Beuys theory of social sculpture, and his relationship to Fluxus in Düsseldorf, places him within the early experiments in this camp. This approach to Beuys is illustrated by the inclusion of Beuys in Claire Bishop’s Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, but also, in Francesco Bonami’s “The Legacy of a Myth Maker.”

Written for Tate Etc magazine, in the event of Tate Modern’s 2005 exhibition, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments, Bonami’s “The Legacy of a Myth Maker,” expounds on how contemporary artists have both borrowed and developed from Beuys’ approach. Bonami’s principal claim: “Today, a wide number of artists, working in a variety of ways, have inherited – if that is possible – aspects of the Beuys sensibility, though in each case for very different ends.” One of the contemporary artists that take Beuys as a major source of influence is Thomas Hirschorn. Bonami explains:

“Thomas Hirschhorn’s work often has a social agenda with a political undertone. His 2002 Bataille Monument at Documenta 11, the international exhibition in Kassel, saw residents of a German suburb build, install and invigilate a series of eight makeshift shacks, including a library with a topography of Bataille’s work, a television studio and a snack bar. Like many of his team-based projects, the emphasis was on social investigation, leading an audience beyond that of the gallery-attending public to find out about art for themselves, using Hirschhorn’s ideas as a framework. [Hirschorn] has said that his approach to the political within his work is ‘a tool by which to experience the time in which I am living.’ There are echoes of his predecessor’s practice, but Beuys favoured the tactics of loud, visible campaigning and protestation, hoping to attract a type of following normally enjoyed by influential political leaders. Hirschhorn’s preferred modus operandi is explicitly as an artist: rather than promote himself, he promotes the work. As he said recently: ‘I am an artist, not a social worker.’”

Hirschorn wants to be an artist, not a social worker, because, it can be argued, art ought to be doing something else: what exactly? It is not clear in Hirschorn’s statement. Art ought, however, to be different than social work: social work aims at ameliorating the degraded and worsening social conditions. Art, if it is to distinguish itself from social work—from political practice–ought to raise the tension between society and art, and it can only do that by creating a critical distance to society, instead of attempting to ameliorate a problem it cannot resolve. Hirschorn argues that art ought to raise the awareness that things are not as they ought to be. But, what is to be said of art that comes all-too-close to social work?

Turner prize-winning artist, Jeremy Deller’s traveling project, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq, is a pivotal example of art that comes all-too-close to social work. Deller’s work, like Hirschorn’s falls under the expansive rubric of socially engaging, participatory art; it has been contextualized by Bourriaud as relational aesthetics: “an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.”

As this author’s previous post argues, It Is What It Is boasts Deller’s name, but his participation is absent, or as present as any curator (although curators increasingly take on the celebrity status enjoyed by most blue chip artists). The artist has created a forum for conversation in an art space that might otherwise not be possible. The work’s success or failure lies not only in the eyes of the beholder, but in the physical actions, interaction, and engagement of those occupying the space. But, when any kind of participation is the goal, does even passive observance make the work successful? There is no way of critiquing Deller’s piece within the discourse of relational aesthetics, because it supposedly achieves what it set out to do.

A critique, however, is necessary. Deller’s emphasis on conversation for its own sake places his work in the same aesthetic realm as the tv show The View. It appears as if both are setting the stage for a conversation that is not happening elsewhere, but what they do is rehearse and reconfirm already established ideas. What is art for if nothing changes after the experience? The difference between art-as-object and art-as-conversation lies in the kind of recognition it demands of the viewer, the beholder, even if it is the artist as the first viewer. Beuys’s Bureau of Direct Democracy (BDD) produces a similar situation as Deller’s It Is What It Is, but with a few key distinctions.

Bishop’s Participation, includes two texts on Beuys. The first, “A Report on a Day’s Proceeding at the Bureau for Direct Democracy,” which describes a single day in Beuys’s 100 days live installation at Documenta 5 (1972). The report is “a detailed account of the type of relational encounters generated by Beuys activist approach.” As the introduction to “the report” states, Beuys concept of social sculpture remains an important reference for contemporary artists such as Hirschorn. In an interview with Buchloh, Hirschorn admitted that what he liked tremedously about Beuys’s work was more than his social engagement, but “the fact that he revolutionized the concept of sculpture by introducing materials…that had never been used before.” Bishop’s inclusion places him within a narrative of socially collaborative, participatory, dialogical, and relational art—that originated in the 60s with Fluxus and Happenings, and saw a revival in the 90s with Hirschorn and Deller.

During the “Proceedings at the Bureau” Beuys presence—along with his unapologetic and confrontational attitude—makes the piece more powerful than Deller’s open-ended installation left in the hands of invited guests. Deller’s piece raises the question, Why does art take such a form today, or why do the artists feel increasingly compelled to distance themselves from the work? And, Beuys’s piece raises a rather different question: How is it that antagonism makes the piece more powerful?

Beuys proposes—and defends—a multitude of political initiatives in BDD; he challenges the status quo of social reality. Beuys, in proposing that the conversation at the BDD was only a means—not the ends—of art, is rather different than Deller’s art-as-conversation. Deller’s piece at the MCA seems to offer a solution to a political problem through conversation. But, the problem is not the lack of conversation, it is the lack of a body politic that has the ability to mobilize for progressive social transformation that makes the war in Iraq possible, for example. For Deller—and Hirschorn—creating a situation that provokes the conversation is sufficient. Deller’s overall detachment and ambivalence indicates the worsened—and regressed—conditions necessary for political transformation. Beuys’s work does not escape the abyss of weakened political possibilities either, however, Beuys at least believed social change was possible, whereas Deller is ambivalent on whether it is even desirable.

The second inclusion in Bishop’s collection, “I Am Searching For Field Character” (1973) is to be considered Beuys most concise statement on social sculpture. Beuys’s manifesto begins as follows:

“Only on condition of a radical widening of definition will it be possible for art and activities related to art to provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system to build a SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.”

This statement demonstrates that Beuys’s intentions go beyond the realm of art, and amplifies the task historically given to art: that of society as a work of art, and that of a desire for total social transformation.

His concept of social sculpture fashions everything into art and proposes that everything should be approached creatively: a sort of Gesampkunstwerk, an art that not only discredits the totality but becomes it, and supposedly overcomes it in the process of transforming it. This is only possible when all humans consider themselves as artists, as creators of this total artwork, as architects of society:

“This most modern art discipline – Social Sculpture/ Social Architecture,” continues Beuys, “will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor, or architect of the social organism. Only then would the insistence on participation of the action art of FLUXUS and Happening be fulfilled; only then would democracy be fully realized.

EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who – from his state of freedom – the position of freedom that he experience at firsthand – learns to determine the other positions in the TOTAL ARTWORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER.”

What was only implicit in the “the report” is made explicit in this statement: Beuys aspires to make art and artists the means by which social change–the end goal—is possible. Beuys’s so-called “activist” approach demonstrates he is more concerned with social change (politics) than with the transformation of art (aesthetics), as illustrated with his two last sentences:

“FREE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM.

THE FIFTH INTERNATIONAL IS BORN.”

Beuys’s utopic mission, “to build a social organism as a work of art,” and to transform art into the “only evolutionary-revolutionary power” has a historical context, that of post-WII Germany. His political impulse is grounded both in the failed evolutionary-revolutionary power of the previous Internationals—and Leftist politics–to dismantle the “repressive effects of a senile social system,” but also in the possibilities for social transformation they represent. The solution–the only option–for Beuys is thus to call for democratic socialism and a fifth International.

The First International, aka the International Workingmen’s Association, founded in 1864 by Marx and Engels (among others) was envisioned as “a central medium of communication and co-operation between workingmen’s societies existing in different countries and aiming at the same end: namely, the protection, advancement, and complete emancipation of the working classes.” The Second International was founded in 1889, after the death of Marx–with the majority of steering power coming from the French and German Social Democratic Parties–lasted until 1914 at the outbreak of World War I. The Third International, also knows as the Commitern, founded in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, was an attempt to reunify the international worker’s and socialist parties who had reverted to nationalist positions during World War I: the most urgent task being the realization of worldwide socialist revolution.

The possibilities for social transformation were dually shattered by World War II and the dismantling of the Third International by Joseph Stalin in 1943. The Third International was to be housed in Tatlin’s never completed Monument to the Third International. Tatlin’s Monument is perceived as the culmination of his first Counter-Reliefs, and spatial experiments, which began in 1913. The 400 metre-high glass and steel structure was understood as a towering symbol of modernity and also as the prototype for many of the architectural projects commissioned by the Bolsheviks, the leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Was the Monument to be a 20th century Tennis Court Oath, or a Death of Marat?

The founding of the Fourth International, an initiative undertaken by Leon Trostky and his followers (who had been expelled from the Soviet Union) occurred in France in 1938. The Fourth–and final–International was largely an anti-Stalinist international organization of workers dedicated to socialist revolution. Trotsky and the majority of his followers were assassinated before the end of WWII. The idea of the founding of the Fifth International in which Beuys closes his statement is undoubtedly motivated by the loss of a political force that would be able to wield social transformation.

Beuys maintained a utopic–but not impossible–vision that believed society as a whole could be reorganized. It is this radical utopian vision of potentiality–transferred from the realm of political practice onto the realm of artistic practices–that has become a point of departure for many contemporary artists. The aspect of Beuys’s practice that still resonates for contemporary artists is not this international, totalizing art-politic. Rather, it is the rhetoric of participation and democracy, so often linked to relational aesthetics. In other words, one can find relational aspects in Beuy’s work, especially when approached through the dominant discourse on contemporary art; but the motivations for what has come to be understood as the socially engaging quality of his work are grounded in utopian desires from a historical moment filled with trauma. The rise of fascism to power and the spread of barbarism all over Europe by WWII was accompanied—if not directly a by-product of—by the inability of the Left to organize an international socialist revolution, the collapse of revolutionary marxism, and the project of emancipation.

As Thiery DeDuve proposes in Kant After Duchamp, now that the project of emancipation has been taken off the table, and art can no longer critically function to accompany or anticipate it, “is artistic activity able to maintain a critical function if it is cut off from the emancipation?”

In his foreword to Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Borriaud indirectly responds to this question: “overwhelming majority of critics and philosophers are reluctant to come to grips with contemporary practices… remain essentially unreadable, their originality and their relevance cannot be perceived by the resolved and unresolved problems of previous generations.” Furthermore, “The oh-so-painful fact that certain issues are no longer being raised, and it is, by extension, important to identify those that are being raised these days by artists.” Bourriaud’s statement intends to deflect any historically grounded aesthetic critique, and instead justifies relational art practices as completely detached from certain, perhaps namely avant-garde concerns, as trying to do something entirely new with art. There is undeniably a turn, a paradigm shift that occurs, but they are inarguably responding to the art post-1945 era, if only to counter-identify with it.

The overwhelming amount of dialogical and relational art being made today is being justified, first and foremost by its own theorists, like Bourriaud,, but also its practitioners, too many to name here, as totally breaking away from art practices prior to the 1960s. Bourriaud, although not explicitly, seems to agree with Danto’s claim about the “End of Art,” albeit being a claim about the end of a particular art practice, because it seems, as Hal Foster argues, the aesthetic has eclipsed. But, the idea of the end of art, of the eclipse of the aesthetic, of object-image oriented art, is attached to a historical moment, a historical eclipse, that of the project of emancipation.

The response to “politicize” art through socially engaged, participatory art, is a response to political helplessness masked as social hopefulness. Without the context of a revolutionary political movement, “utopic” artistic endeavors have lost all critical distance and leverage against society. Relational aesthetics demonstrate the precarious position (often self-imposed) of contemporary art when it considers itself a platform for social engagement in a time when even the idea of utopia no longer represents a different totality. Instead, utopia is merely a temporary way station to declare our hope that things could be better. The significance of Beuys work for contemporary artists, his place in the interstice of modern and postmodern artistic practices, exposes the deep-rooted and well-hidden conditions for these practices, and why there are certain issues no longer being raised.

above copied from: http://chicagoartcriticism.com/2010/02/28/beuys%E2%80%99s-concept-of-social-sculpture-and-relational-art-practices-today/

The Fluxhouse Cooperatives, Charles R. Simpson

In 1966 George Maciunas, an artist working in the dadaist tradition of anarchistic and irreverent art, became entranced with the idea of artist cooperatives as a vehicle for the emancipation of artists. Beyond residences and studios, Maciunas hoped to establish collective workshops, food-buying cooperatives, and theaters to link the strengths of various media together and bridges the gap between the artist community and the surrounding society. Maciunas concretized his utopian planning impulses with endless and minutely detailed projections of renovation costs and the advantages of wholesale purchases. He had the conviction, essential in a social catalyst, that legal prohibitions and entanglements could be overcomes, and that the first priority was to get on with the living experiment. Maciunas established himself as the president of Fluxhouse Cooperatives, Inc., in order to “perform all the organizational work” involved in “forming cooperatives, purchasing buildings, obtaining mortgages, obtaining legal and architectural services, conducting work as a general contractor for all renovation and [handling the] future management if so desired by the members.”

With preliminary buying agreements with several SoHo building owners and with speculatively based bust convincingly detailed renovation estimates, Maciunas approached Kaplan for backing. Kaplan had formed a joint venture financed by the J. M. Kaplan Fund and the National Foundation for the Arts. Not only did this provide a source of capital, but it enlisted new and important interest groups to back Kaplan’s experiments in artists’ housing. According to a foundation consultant, Henry Geldzahler, the joing venture with Kaplan was designed to break through the city’s M-1 zoning designation, which excluded residential occupancy in areas of light manufacturing. “The M-1 zone, now forbidden to artists-in-residence, embraces areas of downtown Manhattan where light manufacturing has declined and many buildings now stand empty,” said Geldzahler. The Foundation and the Kaplan Fund, with a contribution of $100,000 each, were looking for a test case where artists could challenge the M-1 restriction. Maciunas appeared at the opportune moment, and Kaplan agreed to fund his Fluxhouse program.

By the end of 1966 Maciunas had picked out the first of the SoHo buildings that he was to promote as artist cooperatives, 80-82 Wooster Street, and was taking deposits from buyers of floors and half-floors. In the summer of 1967, with $20,00 from the Kaplan Fund and the Foundation, Maciunas was able to make the cash down payment on this $105,000 building. As was to be the pattern with other SoHo cooperatives, the former owner assumed the mortgage for the balance owed. With $20,000 in grants, Maciunas was able to offer spaces for only $2,000 cash down per shareholder, using the money for renovations and charging initially only $205 per month maintenance for 3,300 square feet. By August 1967, 80 Wooster Street was fully subscribed and undergoing basic renovations, and Maciunas was lining up buyers for a second building, 16-18 Greene Street. This time he had $5,000 from Kaplan and the National Foundation to hold the building. But serious setbacks had occurred in the Fluxhouse program. The Federal Housing Administration, which Maciunas had counted on to take over the mortgages as buildings were established, in order to free the Kaplan seed money for new purchases, had refused to become involved, citing fire hazards in the area, referred to by a series of city fire commissioners as “Hell’s Hundred Acres.” In addition, the National Foundation for the Arts and the Kaplan Fund has embarked on a project of their own, the sponsorship of a conversion of the old Bell Telephone Laboratories in Greenwich Village into a huge artist housing complex, and had therefore lost interest in the Fluxhouse venture. With the withdrawal of the legitimating momentum of philanthropic and governmental sponsorship, Fluxhouse residents were acutely conscious that they were occupying buildings that had been illegally purchased and illegally renovated. Without philanthropic sponsorship, they had no leverage to get required zoning variances from the Board of Standards and Appeals or the occupancy permits form the Department of Buildings.

Maciunas, however, relied upon a different basis of legitimacy for the occupants, a pattern of building purchases and conversions that involved enough people to make the city hesitant to enforce its own residency codes. In September 1967 he advertised shares in three buildings at Grand and Wooster streets at prices ranging from $2,200 to $5,000, or roughly $1 a square foot. Within three days the buildings were 60 percent subscribed, and by December Maciunas had the $50,000 necessary for the down payment.

Maciunas moved from block to block throughout SoHo, tracking down owners who were closing their businesses and anxious to sell their buildings. His method was to hold buildings with deposits, then to line up shareholders to provide the down payments. Maciunas balanced his increasingly complex financial arrangements with a continuous flow of new cash deposits. By June of 9168 he had sponsored cooperatives on Prince Street, Broome Street, and along West Broadway, a total of eleven cooperative units involving seventeen buildings.

The city’s planning policies indirectly aided Maciunas. By casting the depressing shadow of the Lower Manhattan Expressway over the area for so long, the city planners had driven down the building values and undermined the real-estate market. As early as 1963, local real-estate interests whose properties had been rendered unacceptable as loan collateral had filed suit in fruitless effort to force the city to either buy their buildings or abandon the expressway. Maciunas was operating in a buyer’s market, purchasing in an area many feared would become an industrial slum. Shael Shapiro, an architect-resident in one of the first Maciunas buildings, and later a consultant for many cooperatives and an active civic leader, agreed that the city had inadvertently aided Maciunas. “The Lower Manhattan Expressway made this [Fluxhouse project] possible. It depressed values throughout this area. The day after Lindsay announced the end of the expressway, real estate along Broome Street went up 50 percent.”

The Emergence of Vested Housing Interests

The cooperatives, which Maciunas envisioned as a numbered series of affiliated “Fluxhouses,” quickly became autonomous and resident controlled. The shareholders had become restive under Maciunas’s single-handed directorship, and they felt fully competent to take over building management themselves. All residents were artists under the broad definition (which included writers and composers along with visual artists, “events” artists, architects, and in one case, a flower arranger), but many, especially the writers, college art teachers, and architects, were experienced with legal and financial matters and were comfortable dealing with the city bureaucracies. These co-opers were not bohemians desirous of protection from the harsher realities of their situation.

The cooperative food-buying schemes were the first to collapse “I can remember sitting in my loft surrounded by dozens of loaves of Russian black bread,” said an early resident. “George thought this kind of buying would save us all money, and he just went out and bought what he liked. We ate it for weeks.” Another time it was oranges, and then toilet paper. Cooperative buying soon ended.

Residents faced the chronic problem of undercapitalization stemming from the fact that Maciunas’s coast estimates were always too low, and because the shares had been sold at prices that attracted artists with very little money. Residents repeatedly found themselves having to pay special assessments for unforeseen plumbing costs or to make up a low fuel bill estimate. For a time, this condition was not attributed to deception on Maciunas’s part, but rather to his alleged warmhearted incompetence. “We were all smart enough to know that George was totally unrealistic in his expense estimates,” said one resident, “and we allowed for it.” But as the levies continued, many found they were financially overcommitted. Their access to capital, largely through modest loans form their middle-class families, had been exhausted, and more assessments were due. Individual buildings had to resort to independent action to save themselves from default. In some cases only the exceptional connections of one or two residents saved their buildings from bankruptcy. One resident, a painter and his building’s first president explained,

I have a Harvard education, and so I have connections that way. We brought this building with a mortgage almost due [one of three], and it was immediately called. We were really about to lose the building. I had been to every bank in the city and had been laughed at. You couldn’t get a mortgage on anything. At nine in the morning of the day the mortgage was due, I had the idea of calling the father of a girl I used to date at Radcliffe. By one P.M. I had the money.

I knew he was in real estate, but it also turned out he was a chairman of the board of the [N] Bank. Uncle Jim, we used to call him. He simply directed the head of the branch bank to make the new mortgage. He said that had it not been for him, we would not have been able to get an appointment with the secretary to the branch manager, with the kind of building we had…. [B] was another dear friend. I just happened to be mentioning the building’s situation one day, and she offered five thousand dollars. She said it was probably made by exploiting someone anyway, and she had no doubt clipped a coupon to get it. But she offered it interest free to us for five years.

Residents solved their financial problems as a unit, giving some members grace periods on debts, taking loans from others, and using the borrowing ability of a select few. But they could not assume responsibility for the financial problems of cooperatives other than their own.

At first, however, George Maciunas handled the deposits and bank transactions of the cooperatives on a different basis. One cooperative in the formational stage found that he had lent $26,000 in members’ deposits to four other cooperatives also being established, all without the depositors’ knowledge. Maciunas was unable to calm the irate shareholders with this explanation of his accounting methods, published in his Fluxhouse Newsletter.

The reason for such disposition of monies is my principle of collectivism- running the cooperatives not necessarily in a legalistically correct way, but in a way to benefit the collective good. When a particular cooperative is in danger of losing a building to foreclosure of lien, every effort-0all the funds, go to the rescue. This has worked well without detriment to anybody. Not one of the 4 closings we had so far was delayed by this principle of a “collective chest.” It would not have delayed the closing of 465 West Broadway either had it not been for the interference of the “shadow kitchen.”

The “shadow kitchen” consisted of shareholders who did not trust Maciunas and who were eager to take over their building affairs. They believed that his financial control and manipulation of deposit accounts enabled him to speculate at their expense. The president of one early Maciunas cooperative pointed out,

George sold the garage on the ground floor of our building for a ridiculously low price to a friend of his. It’s now a theater, and a very valuable space. We saw collusion, with his friend working behind the scenes in partnership with George. When we protested, this guy rented the space to a company that parked garbage trucks there, just to spite us. Maciunas was dishonest from the very beginning.

Cooperatives found, contrary to Maciunas’s reassurances, that they could not get their deposit money back from other co-ops when their own closing date for purchase arrived. One cooperative reported having to pay an interest rate of 25 percent a month to borrow two thousand dollars from another Fluxhouse in order to forestall the foreclosure of their mortgage. In another instance, a cooperative found itself sued by the bank which handled its deposits because of Maciunas’s policy of shifting money from account to account. Individual cooperatives quickly discovered that if they were to survive, they had to fend for themselves in financial matter. Maciunas was hurt by this turn toward economic self-interest on the part of the cooperatives and by the criticism of his leadership which he felt had inspired it. In a letter in which he relinquished all managerial connections with two Fluxhouse units, Maciunas explained the dispute from his side.

I did not mind doing all this [managerial work] free of charge if it was going to advance the selfless spirit of collectivism. Unfortunately, it did nothing of the sort. As soon as opportunity presented itself, the collective spirit fell apart- members selfishly promoting their own interests at the expense of the cooperative and separate cooperatives promoting their interests at the expense of the entire collective. More specifically,… the Grand St. directors saw no reason why their temporarily excessive funds should have been used to save Wooster St. from disaster and Wooster Street’s treasurer saw no reason to reciprocate this good will by returning this borrowed money or part to save Grand Street from disaster. Members showed their distrust in me, or envying better spaces of other members, actually entered those spaces to remeasure and recalculate the spaces as to increase other’s and decrease their own monthly rents. Etc., etc., ad nauseam… Furthermore, since several members expressed dissatisfaction with my methods of management and accounting, a few even suspecting me of making a fortune (!), I decided to stop wasting my selfless interest which is unappreciated anyway and become just as selfish as everybody else.

THUS: … I will stop giving free time and advice on all matters relating to architecture, electrical engineering, management, accounting, carpentry, building code, contractors, supplies, etc…. I will charge… for my past work in management, general contracting and accounting at the low rate of $40 per week…. Any further time spent by me on any of the above matters will be charged to you at the rate of $10 per hours (which is the rate I received at the time I quit my job).

Maciunas continued to sponsor cooperatives, but only as individual ventures and for a fixed fee The Fluxhouse phase in SoHo was over by late 1968. In the absence of any overall financial resources, the problem of survival had individuated each cooperative. Financial anxiety and the recourse to purely personal resources available to the individual; shareholders made self-management for each cooperative a necessity. A secularizing monetary fear had washed away any illusions about the bonds of a gemeinschaft between cooperative. Nevertheless, it soon was to become apparent that the larger problem of resolving the artists’ illegal residential status would require an area-wide organizational approach. The territorial district itself evolved as the basis for a functionally important form of community in the next phase of development.

Charles R. Simpson, “The Achievement of Territorial Community” in SoHo: The Artist in the City (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981) pp. 153-188.

Above copied from: http://www.liino.com/?page_id=857

Mobile Technosoma: some phenomenological reflections on itinerant media devices, Ingrid Richardson

Murdoch University, Western Australia

Portable media devices and 'wearable' communications technologies are becoming both increasingly ubiquitous and personalised, penetrating and transforming everyday cultural practices and spaces, and further disrupting distinctions between private and public, ready-to-hand and telepresent interaction, actual and virtual environments. Such devices range from the standard mobile phone – which itself is exceeding its role as a communication device – to highly sophisticated multimedia hybrids, personal digital assistants (PDAs), MP3 players, personal media centres and handheld networkable game consoles. This article presents some initial thoughts pre-empting a bigger research project on mobile connectivity and media, and their emergence as portable microworlds or pocket technospaces. The project en large aims to investigate the emerging socio-cultural and techno-corporeal effects of mobile interactive media, and how they are changing the ways people interact with both their digital interfaces and each other, altering the shape and meaning of community and spatial location, and our embodied and agentic placement within metropolitan, pedestrian (i.e. literally 'walkable') and urban environments.

Much of the research and analysis in this project will focus on the mobile phone itself and its ostensible mutability into digital video camera, email and web interface, MP3 player, personal organiser, wireless broadband laptop-link, data storage and game device. In her study on mobile phone use in the global context, Sadie Plant observes that the mobile phone is often used as the primary means of Internet access (Plant, 2003).[1] The multi-functionality of the mobile phone, together with high-speed wireless third generation (3G) and Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) networks, and the adoption of Internet protocol technology, means that both mobile phone carriers and makers of handheld phones are poised to move beyond the voice market and into that of mobile media and data communication (strategy+business magazine, May 10, 2004). Moreover, today's advanced handsets 'are disrupting many industries simultaneously, including photography, music and games' (The Australian, September 7, 2004).

Yet while the mobile phone is perhaps the most significant technology in the context of this project, and will be the focus of much of this article, it is part of a more general telematic trend towards wearable, handheld and pocket communications and entertainment media. Aside from the multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player and PDA, there exist a number of handheld interactive media devices including Nintendo's GameBoy and DS (dual screen), Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP), phone-game hybrids such as Nokia's N-Gage QD and Samsung's recent rival (the SCH-V450), and the Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) handset which can receive TV broadcasts over the cellular network. The PSP, for example, has been launched as an all-in-one multimedia entertainment platform targeted for the adult market, with a USB 2.0 port for further expandability and connectivity to other devices, and the capability for wireless multiplayer interaction, network applications and data transfer. Thus, such handheld games and portable multimedia devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and should be examined both in terms of their potential merger with mobile phone functionality, and in their own right as nascent new media forms. Significantly, over the past two decades many of the distinctions between mass media and communications technologies have converged to become – as suggested at a recent symposium – "network media" ('Network Media: Code Culture, Convention' Symposium, University of Western Australia, September 9-11, 2004). As services based upon telecommunications – mobile telephony, the internet, video-on-demand, personal video recorders (PVRs), interactive television (iTV) – become progressively experienced as everyday media content, the environments of information and communication merge. Such a shift means that 'audiences' become 'users' (or agents), effecting changing relationships between individuals and society, private and public domains, temporal and spatial perception, location and presence, embodiment and interface.

The traditional logic underlying media theory considered every media object to be assembled in some kind of media factory (like a Hollywood studio), such that multiple identical copies produced from a master could be distributed to those with access to the medium; broadcasting, film distribution, and print technologies all follow this logic (Manovich, 2001). In a new media environment – via programmable, personalisable, interactive, hybridised, convergent and networkable technologies – rather than media objects being made available to mass audiences, individuals are increasingly micro-targeted: film and TV productions now engender multiple media manifestations (value-added websites, interactive DVDs with extras and games, customised mobile content); every visitor to a website can view their own custom version created on-the-fly from a database; personal digital video recorders enable television consumers to pre-programme their own 'niche-TV'. The mobile handset and portable console are also devices residing in this nexus between communication and information: one's child can be kept busy during a long drive watching the Garfield movie or playing games on Mum's Nokia; video and image content can be captured by the mobile's inbuilt digital camera and transmitted to friends via email, downloaded onto a computer or viewed on a domestic TV set or home theatre.

Clearly the cultural impact of digital telecommunications, 'narrowcast' and network media are impossible to apprehend with models that assume mass audiences and mass distributed messages. Over the past decade, the conceptual development of what has been termed 'new media theory' has sought to effectively grasp this imbrication of media and communications, and the changes wrought by the interactive and manipulable potential of digital technologies (Lunenfeld, 1999; Bolter and Grusin, 2000; Manovich, 2001; Munt, 2001; Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, 2003; Lister et al, 2003; Everett and Caldwell, 2003; Hansen, 2004). To date key new media texts such as these have not engaged explicitly with the mobile phone, pocket computer or game console as 'new media' with their own specificity. In texts which do include chapters on mobile phone use (Munt, 2001), the mobile is considered primarily as a voice or text transmission device, with no account of its emergence as an interactive digital medium. Yet clearly the current mobile media environment is evolving beyond the basic provision of information and voice/text transmission services. Today's handhelds are becoming increasingly multifunctional sociotechnical devices, portable and interactive technospaces which enfold (and unfold) an assortment of media forms. This transformation requires a critical approach that considers mobile media as more than telecommunications tools, but also as hybrid interfaces within a multi-platform or trans-mediascape, as 'containers' of discrete and connected virtual worlds (Sofia, 2000), as occasional or dedicated consoles of ludic and narrative connectivity, and as emergent nodes of creativity and digital art. Although mobile media forms have not yet undergone sustained analysis in the new media texts mentioned above, it is important that they be considered both as communication tools and info-mediatic assemblages within which the technologies and practices of communication, information and media come together.[2] Thus while communication-based analyses of mobile phones and devices will provide a useful context and framework for understanding some of the complex effects, perceptions and patterns-of-use, I aim to approach the mobile phone and portable interface as a new and interactive media form.

Existing research on the mobile phone itself resides mainly in the areas of sociology, cultural studies, communications theory, urban design, social psychology, anthropology and usability (Townsend, 2000; Sussex Technology Group, 2001; Bautsch et al, 2001; Katz and Aakhus, 2002; Mitchell, 2003; Plant, 2003; Lindholm and Keinonen, 2003; Kasesniemi, 2003; Rheingold, 2003; Geser, 2004, Goggin and Newell, 2004; Ling, 2004). Such studies have considered the mobile primarily in its capacity as voice-carrier and text-messager, and (for example) how it has changed the way we work and communicate (Katz and Aakhus), the various mobile-user types with which we identify (Plant), the increased decentralisation and 'nomadic intimacy' of mobile interaction (Geser), public perception and safety issues (Bautsch et al), disability and the digital mobility of text (Goggin and Newell), effects on teenage social behaviour (Kasesniemi), the emergence of 'flashmobs' or 'smartmobs' facilitated by mobile telephony (Rheingold), and its impact on urban society (Townsend, Mitchell, Ling). Not surprisingly, theorists have recently coined the term 'm-communication' to refer to the increasing dispersal of community and person-to-person relations by way of such devices, and the 'culture of interruptions' wrought by mobile telephony (Mitchell, 2003).

While these studies treat the mobile phone largely as a device for interpersonal and business communication, rather than as a medium for screen and sound media content, information or gameplay, there are some notable exceptions. These include Goggin's (2004) discussion of 'the aural irruptions of customised polyphonic ringtones' within contemporary soundscapes, Plant's (2003) various references to mobile-based artwork and the staging of an orchestrated collective ringtone symphony in London, and the trajectory Levinson (2004) traces between the mobile camera and mobile phone.[3] In her paper 'Mobile Art' presented at the Biennale of Electronic Art Perth in Australia (http://beap.org), Lisa Gye (2004) describes the supercession of wireless application protocol (WAP) with I-Mode technology (an always-on wireless internet platform recently launched by DoCoMo in Japan), which enables individual users to participate in a 'distributed aesthetics' by xml-coding their own mobile phone content, rather than simply downloading existing content/services; she reports on the creative media agency the-phone-book limited (http://the-phone-book.ltd.uk/) which provides workshops, downloadable freeware/shareware and code generators for mobile phone content. In contributing to these analyses of mobile telephony as both mediatic and communicative, in my own project I aim to elaborate on the corporeal and spatial effects of such mobile media forms.

Contemporary theorists of media and technology are currently grappling with the (non)corporeality and constitution of techno- and telespaces, and the way they are disturbing our commonplace notions of presence and location. In this context, the effects of miniaturised mobility on our experience of existing new and old media raises some interesting questions: How is the network literacy and ecology of the internet 'remediated' by mobile handset microbrowsers? Do our perceptions of media space, cyberspace and 'technospace' become transformed by the physical and vehicular mobility enabled by portable media? How does this portability impact upon the body-technology relation? What is the gender and cultural specificity of mobile media use and perception? How is mobility and networkability transforming our relation to screen and sound media? Does our experience of television and video change once viewed on mini-screens and out of familiar domestic contexts? When we carry mobile devices not just to maintain perpetual contact, but to watch TV, surf the web, or enter the virtual realtime space of SMS or MMS interactive narrative, what effect does this have on our relation to both the pedestrian and telepresent environment? Although many of these questions can't be answered in the scope of this article, they nevertheless highlight a field of enquiry that is focused on the medium specificity of mobile media and what could be termed their techno-corporeal or technosomatic attributes.

Medium Specificity Revisited

My approach is largely phenomenological, and framed within the broad premise that every human-technology relation produces certain kinds of being-in-the-world, and particular ways of knowing and making that world. The location of mobile phones and handheld media within this premise, and in terms of their own determining effects, implicitly realises the much-used media theory concept of medium specificity, and it is worth commenting briefly on the continuing salience of this term. Although some might question whether medium specificity is still a central concept at a time of digital convergence, I would argue that it remains critical to our understanding of contemporary media. At a seminar on interactive TV (iTV), Jane Roscoe and Fat Cow Motel developers Tracey Robertson and Nathan Mayfield claimed that media will not converge; rather, they will become increasingly multi-platform, such that each platform delivers appropriate and unique content, and with the mobile phone as an integral component of delivery.[4] This would suggest that medium specificity remains an important and viable conceptual tool, one that can continue to discern between proliferating digital media. Thus, for example, by organising data in particular ways, various interfaces may appear simultaneously or separately within the mobile screen or as audio content, but each mode of engagement (talk, text, email, micro-browsing, gaming, photography, word processing, etc.) will nevertheless still privilege particular corporeal attitudes, social agencies, and modes of (dis)engaging from both telepresent and immediate environments.

The application of medium specificity to new and supposedly convergent mobile media is also sustained by Bolter's and Grusin's (2000) new media concept of remediation, which in some respects is an effective reworking of McLuhan's 'laws of media' (McLuhan, 1964). McLuhan argued that each communication medium works to orchestrate the structure of perception, by preferencing certain sensory ratios over others in medium-specific ways; televisual media, for example, prioritise the visual and aural senses, and at least partially bracket out tactile, motile and olfactory modes of perception. In their collaborative work Remediation: Understanding New Media Bolter and Grusin (2000) suggest that this process is complicated by the way that contemporary digital media 'remediate' already mature cultural forms and vice versa, either by appropriating and integrating aspects of older media, or incorporating new media developments. For example, the mobile phone 'remediates' both photography and home video by rendering their transmission between geographically distant places all but immediate. The idea of technological trajectories is also central to remediation, questioning the notion that the latest technologies are 'new' by showing how their technical and cultural trajectories are partially set in place by previous technologies. Thus the telegraph, in severing communication from physical transportation, opened the way for our experience of — and foregrounded our familiarity with — today's more sophisticated telepresencing media. More recently, icon-based navigation on the mobile or PDA screen remediates the user-friendly desktop interface.

Following this trajectory of screen-to-screen remediation between mobile media and other larger screen media for a moment, it would seem that the complexity of the recursive relation between computer or TV screen and mobile screen confounds a number of assumptions made about our embodied and largely non-mobile engagement with televisual media. Manovich, for example, insists that despite numerous innovations in televisual media, the window remains as the archetypal interface:

Dynamic, real-time, interactive, a screen is still a screen. Interactivity, simulation, and telepresence: as was the case centuries ago, we are still looking at a flat, rectangular surface, existing in the space of our body and acting as a window into another space. We still have not left the era of the screen (Manovich, 2001: 115).

Within this metaphor the eyes alone must remain mobile, to traverse and visually 'handle' the surface space of the screen, while the body is held captive by the eyes' attachment. This front-to-front relationship, it is often argued, is one that we have with screens in general. In most cases the screen is a frame of limited dimensions within our own physical space, while the body's frontal relationship with the apparatus varies between media depending on what Manovich, pace Jonathan Crary, calls "viewing regimes" (2001: 96; Crary 1992, 1999). With cinema, for example, the viewer is at the outset fully frontal to the exclusion of all diversions, focusing entirely on the screen. In the optimum situation the boundary or interface between body and cinematic apparatus dissolves, a merger which manifests a change in orientation from being 'in front of' to being 'within,' an effect which is achieved by several factors: the size of the screen, the darkness of the theatre, and surround sound. In the case of television — with perhaps the home theatre an exception — the face-to-face relationship between the body and the set is somewhat more informal and less disciplined; viewers can look away to the familiarity of their domestic surroundings, move about or leave the room, or they can be visually and aurally attentive or inattentive to varying degrees, by muting the sound, zapping through channels, talking on the phone or conversing with co-watchers, and reading or engaging in other activities. This vacillating degree of attention and distraction clearly contravenes the perceived conventions of eye-body behaviour considered proper to screen-viewing. The 'eyes' of the mobile media device are even further distracted, by the surrounding clamour and moving objects on the street or sidewalk, by the latent lateral but ever-ready possibilities of incoming messages, and by the mobility of one's own body. Laura Singer suggests that screens function as areas of focus only when they are 'surrounded by a zone of inattention' (Singer, 1990: 55). This is almost always not the case with mobile communication; in fact rarely is mobile connectivity a 'dedicated' practice — it is always-already surrounded by other objects and activities within the spatial topography of the built environment. Thus even with this brief example of the mobile phone's particular modes of embodied use, it is apparent that mobile devices demand their own body-technology relations, and thus a medium specific phenomenological approach.

Phenomenology of Mobile Media

The work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1968), Don Ihde (1993), and later feminist accounts of 'intercorporeality' by Gail Weiss (1999) and Moira Gatens (1996) provide effective tools for interpreting the somatic intimacy of wearable and handheld media, their disruption to the spatial boundaries of everyday communicative practices, the communal effects of mobile connectivity, and the collective mobile-user habits of the wider cultural milieu. Through these theorists embodiment is considered to be under continuous modification by artifacts, somewhat reminiscent of Leibniz's monadology: all bodies are in perpetual flux, with 'parts… entering into them and passing out of them continually' (Leibniz, 1698). As Merleau-Ponty (1962) points out, the world is an agentic environment that also changes in common relation to our own flexible corporeality. Ihde's 'postphenomenology' adds to this interpretation by accounting for both the ontic and epistemic inclinations or biases of tools themselves (Ihde, 1993). Finally, in attending to both the equipmental and cultural specificity of our morphology, Weiss and Gatens argue that 'as-bodies' we are embedded within cultural and technical contexts where some kinds of endo- and exosomatic body forms and habits are privileged over others (Weiss, 1999: 66-67; Gatens, 1996). With these insights, and in the context of mobile media, I suggest that both tool and body are covalent participants – and coalesce as various technosoma – in the making of meaning and environment. It is our openness to the spatially non-coincident flesh of the world — not only bodily flesh but the 'stuff' of our environment — that allows us to incorporate technologies and equipment into our own corporeal organisation. In this understanding, then, the specificity of media forms can be documented and acknowledged as deeply integral to our culturally specific and collectively realised corporeal schemas. The insights of media theory and phenomenology have partly inspired my critical application the term soma, which when prefixed by such descriptors as techno, info, tele, endo and exo, among many others, can be used as a way of discerning medium and techno-specific effects on the lived body (Richardson, 2003). Each –soma blending can work to describe a way of being rather than a what of being; any soma is not an entity – as 'the body' might sometimes be understood – but a process/network or ontological schematic. This terminology aims to effectively combine the concepts of intercorporeality and medium specificity, and also to grasp the way in which individual bodies digest the collective embodiments or shared habits of the wider cultural milieu.

Today, our increasing remote interaction with the world — the possibility of extended intervals of telepresence or telematic perception — indicates a need to rearticulate our collective embodiments, our experience and understanding of materiality, corporeality and actuality, and to think through other ontologies, other ways of being-in-the-world, and in a Heideggerian sense, of being-with-equipment. In a number of discussions on new, online and cyberspatial media, it is assumed that such interaction facilitates a mode of disembodiment, such that we can leave the body behind. Against the notion that one can be even intermittently 'without a body' when using the internet, the telephone, or watching TV, telepresent media work on and modify the body, affording an altered sensorial engagement with the world. The specificity of this engagement can also be seen in our use of mobile media forms. The idea that disembodiment is possible relies largely on the supposition that our engagement with screen media requires a stationary body, such that one's awareness of the corporeal recedes. Yet as I have suggested mobile media complicate this relation, and facilitate a physical mobility of the body, whether pedestrian or vehicular, partially returning one's attention to physical location and the navigation within and around material environments.

In what follows I offer some preliminary observations of mobile media qua the body-technology relation. Just as we are familiar with the notion that sociocultural specificity is inherent to our embodiments and body-images, technological specificity itself is also — equally and collaboratively — an aspect of embodiment and agency. In other work Carly Harper and I have suggested that the notion of variable ontology can describe how being emerges through a network of extended relations between the body-subject and the equipmental environment (Richardson and Harper, 2002; 2003). Don Ihde's inventory of human-technology relations is particularly useful here; the body-technology relation peculiar to mobile phones and devices involves taking the technology into one's way of perceiving, 'through the reflexive transformation' of perceptual and body sense (Ihde, 1990: 72). In the case of wearable technologies and their transformative effects upon our sensorium and felt corporeal limits, the body and instrument form a temporary collusive entity — symbolically designated by Ihde as an [I-artifact]<--> world relation— which then apprehends or handles the world in specific ways. Thus, in a general sense the body-telemedia gathering modifies spatial and sensory perception, by changing what is 'proximal', or the relation between 'here' and 'there'. Concepts such as telepresence, non-space, virtuality, and telepistemology (Goldberg, 2000) are all attempts to describe and explain the spatial and ontic effects of such telemedia on our being-in-the-world.

The term telepresence, for example — which refers to the kind of 'distant presence' enabled by telecommunication devices — is a seemingly oxymoronic concept which demands we comprehend alternative modalities of embodiment not necessarily based on our 'normalised' tropes of the physical entity, body, substance or containment. Yet the ability to experience telepresence as part of our mundane and everyday practices is but one instance of our ready incorporation of tools and media into our corporeal schematics, and as extensions of our bodies and our perception. That we can oscillate between, conflate and adapt to ostensibly disparate modes of being and perceiving – i.e. to being simultaneously 'here' and 'there' – is precisely why telepresence and virtual space are ontologically tolerable. That is, the very condition of telepresence – as 'presence at a distance' speaks of our capacity for ontic dispersion beyond the neat physical limits of the body, and our open-ness to the embodied distraction of televisual and telephonic spaces. Thus although on one level it might be said that telepresence is troubling to our common experience of spatial perception and corporeality, we might wonder at how rapidly our reaction to radio, telephony, TV, online and mobile technologies becomes rather ho-hum and habitual. Telemedia may elicit an ambiguous nonspace, but we clearly integrate this ontological blurring quite unproblematically into our adaptive technosomas.

Nevertheless, from a phenomenological perspective it is intriguing to examine the characteristics of telepresence more closely, and the way in which a sense of presence can be felt beyond the location of the physical body. Both telephonic and televisual technologies have problematised the viability of distinctions between interiority and exteriority; in tactile face-to-face contact, or mechanised travel, distance is felt, timely, knowable, but in our use of televisual and telephonic technologies the distance traversed is simultaneously both so far and so close (phone to ear, remote in hand), that the space has been described as virtual – or in Heidegger's sense, part of the 'as if' structure of our awareness. The term distraction – originating from distrahere, or to pull in different directions – aptly describes how our attention becomes divided when we speak or text on the phone. It suggests that the locus of our perception is divided between the 'here' and 'there,' such that we can know different times and spaces simultaneously, an effect which shifts the boundaries of what 'immediacy' is, and how it is defined and experienced.

As Sadie Plant suggests, in mobile phone use this often results in a sense of incompatibility or inappropriateness between the conversation-context and the very public spaces (buses, trains, sidewalks, etc.) wherein we frequently find ourselves answering the mobile:

Certain conversations can induce emotional and bodily responses which may be quite incompatible with [mobile users'] perceptions of their physical location. Their participants often look as though they don't quite know what to do with themselves, how to reconfigure the tones of voice and postures which would normally accompany such conversations. The mobile requires its users to manage the intersection of the real present and the conversational present in a manner that is mindful of both (Plant, 2004: 50).

This interpretation of distraction, to describe a fragmenting or pulling apart of one's attention and spatial focus, also resonates with Sam Weber's (1996) insightful critique of Benjamin's and Heidegger's use of the comparable German terminology Zerstreuung or Zerstreutheit. Zerstreuung literally translates as 'distraction' but 'the root of the German words — the verb streuen — is cognate to the English “strew, strewn” and carries with it a strong spatial overtone' (Weber, 1996: 92). Benjamin employs Zerstreuung to refer to medium-specific features of mobile camera production and reception which involve the physical cutting and editing of film and the apprehension of these reconstituted fragments by the viewing public. Weber notes that the term Zerstreuung in Heidegger's usage describes the way Dasein constitutes itself by/as being scattered, establishing 'a link between Dasein's physicality — or more exactly, its 'fleshiness', its Leiblichkeit — and its fragmented, dispersed ways of being' (Weber, 1996: 92). In the experience of mobile connectivity, when this dispersion involves pedestrian, commuting, cycling or 'public' modes of embodiment – that is, of bodies-in-motion – the link between one's physical and distracted being becomes quite explicitly an issue for the caller. Thus when 'on the mobile', we have both the easy capacity for ontic dispersion beyond the physical limits of the body that enables telephonic and televisual interactivity on-the-move, yet also the penchant to locate ourselves and each other both temporally and spatially – by identifying our physical situation ('I'm on the bus') and our temporal context (I'll be there in 5 minutes').

Any discussion of pedestrian embodiment and mobile media use cannot go without at least a brief reference to de Certeau's (1984) interpretation of the way in which a pedestrian makes possible the space of the city in collusion with the built environment. The steps one takes – the act of walking through the city – is surely altered by mobile phones and other portable devices. De Certeau argues that 'a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities', places where one can go and objects blocking or redirecting one's path; at the same time the pedestrian trajectory actualises and creates some of these possibilities simply through the 'improvisation of walking' (1984: 98). Yet potentially, this trajectory can be quite radically revised and re-possibilised by the interruption of a mobile phone call or text message, by listening to and downloading music, by the beep of one's PDA warning of an impending meeting or deadline, by changes in the immediate soundscape, or by those telepresent on the other end of the phone becoming 'virtually' integrated into one's route. Moreover, mobile media elicit variable levels attention and inattention that shift between actual and telepresent space, partially depending on the demands of the immediate environment and the extent to which the interface becomes ready-to-hand in a Heideggerian sense (i.e. its function and usability recede from explicit awareness). Thus one's own technosoma may 'behave' in ways that accord with (or deviate from) consensual and recognised modes of being-on-the-phone, such as stopping, bowing the head, shielding one's mouth or face with the hand to define a provisional private space, or deliberately not altering one's trajectory or visual orientation, as is the case with the more blatant Bluetooth® pedestrian. In such responses the various postures and embodied actions, and the dynamics of attention-inattention, are quite specific to the body-mobile relation which has emerged throughout the last decade. The body becomes quite literally a mobile-specific mediatrope – inclined metaphorically, corporeally, communicatively and gesturally towards the mobile media device.

Indeed, the notion of a relational and variable ontology understands the body – pace Haraway (1991) – as a material-semiotic assemblage with mediatropic tendencies, disposed both figuratively and materially towards media. As theorists such as Henri Lefebvre (1974) and Norman O. Brown (1966) have argued, tropes and metaphors have an essential role in our understanding and experience of both the world and our own bodies/selves. Telemedia offer a range of corporealist tropes, such as the synechdochal 'all-hands-and-eyes' experience of interactive screens and games, or the way in which the mobile phone-body becomes — metonymically — a pedestrian or vehicular node of networked communication (Martin, 2002). If we remember that the combining form –trope indicates an affinitive turn towards something, then telemedia have had significant tropological effects on our corporeal schematics; our modes of embodiment 'turn towards' specific technologies and media interfaces. For example, as is most often the case with our use of contemporary media, the hand-eye-screen interface or the hand-eye-remote control arrangement works as the preferred default, and various body-postures and communicative attitudes become prioritised. Thus, we perceptually 'attend' to the world in ways that are 'allowed' by the medium's inclination or trajectory in Ihde's sense, a phenomenological understanding of technosoma that is also consonant with the concept of medium specificity.

As I have suggested, the phenomenological approach offers a way to begin a theorisation of telesomatic involvements by apprehending mobile device usage as quite literally a mode of embodiment, a way of 'having a body'. Such a perspective considers mobile media as aspects of the body-subject's corporeal schema, both transforming and transformative: specific media are conducive to specific body-media comportments. As Drew Leder comments:

[I]ncorporation is the result of a rich dialectic wherein the world transforms my body, even as my body transforms its world… The demands and solicitations of the world gradually lead me to reshape the ability structure of my body… [The] dialectical body-world relation is concretized even in the simplest of instruments. Ordinarily, any tool will have one end specifically adapted to our human anatomy; the handle of the saw is designed to fit the hand. However, the other end is adapted to the world upon which we act… To incorporate a tool is to redesign one's extended body until its extremities expressly mesh with the world (Leder, 1990: 34).

Phenomenologically, the handset or portable console becomes an incorporative aspect of the hand, a body-part in itself of some consequence as a mutable and world-shaping device. The techno-corporeality of handset use is of particular interest in the relational ontology of mobile media and body, as the relationship between corporeal schematics and networkable devices quite literally embodies telepresence. In this context the technical and ergonomic configuration of the mobile media device is significant. Handsets and portable game consoles are designed with the specificities of particular interfaces, hybrid devices, and user-bodies in mind. In the optimal embodiment relation, the device should become transparent; the 'best' usability is one which recedes from the user's awareness, such that the liminal gap between hand and instrument goes all but unnoticed. An almost universal experience of handset use is of the numbered buttons arranged in a pattern familiar to many other devices (e.g. calculators and automatic teller machines), that is, the 1 to 9 matrix. We use both our sense of touch and, at least initially, visual recognition to coordinate the position of the numbers in relation to each other, and since human hands are in general anatomically similar, we might expect a common technosomatic relation between hand and mobile phone device. Yet even a preliminary investigation of the phenomenology of mobile phone use suggests that a diversity of problematics and relations have surfaced according to the specificities of culture and sociotechnical context (Richardson, 2005; Plant, 2003). For example, SMS use is widespread only in some (sub)cultures and age groups in Australia, South-East Asia and Japan, and has been deemed particularly vital to networking groups that depend on near-instant distributed information such as smart mobs (Rheingold, 2003). Such emergent habits and practices indicate the need for a detailed phenomenological study into the peculiarities of text messaging.

Our corporeal intimacy with the handset or portable console renders it an object of tactile and kinaesthetic familiarity, although it is salient to mention here that the growing complexity of mobile devices can also bewilder the non-expert user. In such cases there is a conflicting 'disincorporation' between the device and the hand-body. While a reciprocity between tool and body drives the technical specifications and ergonomic development of every apparatus, there is often resistance, in the interstices of our many technosomatic assemblages. The materialities of human bodies and nonhuman bodies are often in ontic conflict, and ensuing material-semiotic compromises are deeply embedded in the trajectories of body-tool relations. Keyboards and keypads must remain of certain proportion in order to fit the somatic specificity of human hands, despite the technology surpassing the need for such bulk. When keypads are repurposed for text messaging, however, the containment of the phonetic alphabet (and punctuation/symbols) to nine buttons renders the interface overly compact and awkward, which would seem to discourage prolific use. But SMS communication demands less, or differently, than traditional voice conversation – a sensory and somatic commitment that is suitable for some situations (such a public lecture), but not for others (such as driving). It is also flexibly either more immediate or deferred that a letter or email, and it is these enablements that encourage frequent use and thus practised dexterity, and vitiate against mobile-body 'disincorporation' and issues of poor usability. Nevertheless, the teleology of technological design is always towards the reconciliation and eradication of perceptual and ergonomic incompatibilities. The contrivances of the body are quite literally built into the blueprints and specifications of any technical device or assemblage (the arrangement of keys, hands-free usability), just as the body is manoeuvred and disciplined by the procedures of the apparatus ('typing' with the thumb, the 'space-making' or 'blue-toothing' on-the-mobile pedestrian). Of medium specific and phenomenological interest here is the extent to which ergonomic and stylistic differences in the design of handsets and mobile devices – the material 'contours' of the mobile medium itself – impact upon the body-tool relation, and thus upon our apprehension and experience of (tele)presence, (techno)space, intercorporeality and sociotechnical agency.

There seems little doubt that the mobile device's delivery of peripatetic yet present-at-hand communication and interactive media content has evoked a number of altered medium-specific ways of being-in-the-world. The dual consequences of ubiquitous wireless connectivity and media rendered miniaturised and portable impacts directly on our experience of the everyday, and transforms urban and city environments as media- or technospaces, reworking our agency, (inter)activity and bodily movement within and through them. The 'sensing' of mobile communication and interactive media elicits an intimately audio, visual, sometimes haptic, 'handy' and visceral awareness, a mode of embodiment which demands the ontological coincidence of distance and closeness, presence and telepresence, actual and virtual. In this article I have offered some initial ideas prefiguring a more complex somatics of mobile media, primarily in the context of the mobile phone, but there is much more to be done in the larger project on the techno-corporeal effects of various pocket media and portable devices in their specificity. In addition to mobile phones, this research will conduct an ethno-phenomenology of mobile media use in urban Western Australia, including sophisticated multimedia hybrids, personal digital assistants and entertainment devices, and handheld networkable game consoles. Yet as I have suggested, the emergent agencies and relations will not be considered the remarkable consequences of a brand new merger with high technology ex nihilo; rather, they will be interpreted as remediational 'gatherings' amidst numerous other technosoma, and as further instances of our inherently mutable ontologies.

Author's Biography

Ingrid Richardson is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media Communication and Culture at Murdoch University. Her research interests include philosophy of technology and science, phenomenology of new media, and corporeal feminism.
Notes

[1] Sadie Plant was commissioned by Motorola in 2003 to carry out a study on the global use of mobile phone and the user-habits to emerge from increased mobile phone uptake.

[2] An important area of inquiry which will not be discussed here is the field of game studies, which to date has largely focused on the generation of avatars, the player-character relation, multi-player platforms, narrative content and interactive environments within the virtual microworlds of computer and TV-console games (Aarseth, 2003; Wolf and Perron, 2003). That is, there has been little attention paid to the phenomenology of mobile handheld games, the impact of physical mobility on gaming in offline and online modes, and the particular sense of transmediatic space, place and community that they generate. This is an important area of study given the proliferation of handheld games and hybrid game-phone handsets for the adult market. As such, the larger project aims to critically examine the ludic, embodied and technospatial specificity of portable and handheld game decks which has thus far escaped sustained analysis.

[3] Plant notes that 'artists have explored the creative possibilities of mobile speech. In the UK, Robin Rimbaud, known as Scanner and sometimes referred to as the "telephone terrorist," has produced soundscapes featuring snippets of mobile conversations. In the US, Chicago-based poet William Gillespie has composed poetry based on eavesdropped mobile transmissions, and another artist, Spacewurm, has made music from scanned mobiles and used them as the basis of a book' (Plant, 2003: 48).

[4] 'Producing Interactive TV', Australian Film Television and Radio School Seminar, Sydney, Australia, August 2002. Robertson and Mayfield produced Fat Cow Motel as an Australia-based 'multimedium platform space'. Comprised as a whodunit in thirteen half-hour episodes, FCM allowed its viewers or 'players' to interact with the narrative by participating in games and following clues in order to solve a series of mysteries. These clues were distributed through multiple platforms such as interactive TV via Austar, dedicated websites, SMS, voicemail and email, and viewers could follow the narrative either on broadcast TV or online. In the particular context of the mobile phone, viewers could enter coded passwords in order to 'eavesdrop' on the phone conversations of key characters in the series.
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Makers: DIY Agents of Social Change, Alyce Santoro

Everyone Is an Artist

As our society collectively awakens to the realization that it must devise ways to stem the hemorrhaging caused by years of denial and excess and as the DIY (do-it-yourself) movement grows in popularity, Joseph Beuys' words, "everyone is an artist" ring all the more true. Beuys, who referred to himself as a "social sculptor," believed strongly not that everyone should make (so-called) fine art, but that everyone can live a richer and more meaningful life by infusing any vocation or action with his or her own personal creativity.

From the 1950s through the mid-1980s, Beuys expressed the notion that personal creativity could be cultivated and honed by connecting with nature and by developing a more intimate relationship with it. He believed that individuals as well as our entire society could be healed by returning to a simpler way of life and by becoming more attuned to the subtle, ineffable forces of the ecosystems we inhabit.

Everyone Is a Shaman

Some call one who consciously connects to, communicates with and elaborates on the intangible a shaman. Some called Beuys that. Most just called him an artist. Shamans, artists, cooks, gardeners, scientists, inventors, and all others who bring imaginary things out of the realm of the intangible to help give them form routinely benefit from enhanced access to the mysterious force of inspiration. In this sense, everyone is a shaman as well.

And as people begin to seek opportunities to "do it themselves," they are exercising a form of personal creativity that has been largely neglected in our culture for far too long. A basic fact of existence that has been all but forgotten is that human happiness and the sense of freedom depends largely on the ability to express personal creativity. Beuys also famously said, "To make people free is the aim of art. Therefore art for me is the science of freedom".

The Joy of Fluxus

It is possible that the reshuffling of our collective deck, while discomfiting at times, will ultimately result in an overall increase in happiness as people come to realize that we were misguided in relating the ravenous, mindless accumulation of stuff to personal joy, and as we begin to experience instead the sense of simple, profound satisfaction that comes from planting a seed, sewing on a button or cooking a meal from scratch.

Autonomy as Radical Act

Consciously creative types ("makers" as they have come to be known) are returning to the sort of DIY approach to the creating and sharing of their work that the fluxus artists of the 1960s and '70s pioneered - only now we have the Internet. Web sites, blogs and social networks have made the notion of the white box/velvet-rope-style gallery virtually obsolete - now everyone has the same access to the same art and artists, from the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Sculptors can create installations in a basement, musicians can give concerts in their living rooms, writers can publish in an instant - and everything can be shared with millions of people across the globe.

Digital Pioneering

The Internet is a fascinating artifact of the fundamental human longing to connect. The telegraph, telephone and television are all apparatus devised to facilitate communication. The Internet takes it all a step further - now we are able to pool resources, share information and generate tangible links. In 1998, Howard Rheingold, an early Internet researcher and pioneer, published a brilliant article called "Thinking About Thinking About Technology" in the Institute of Noetic Sciences newsletter. In the piece, Rheingold posits that for new technology to develop into tools for enhancement of creativity and "mind amplification" as opposed to becoming merely a source of "disinfotainment," we must develop a philosophical framework within which it can evolve. That was 12 years ago. Now, we can say for certain that technology, devoid of philosophical framework, will become everything that we are - enriching and distracting, elegant and dangerous, brilliant and ridiculous.

Technology has arrived at a point in its evolution when it is exceptionally easy for the maker to direct all aspects of his or her own creation, from inception to publication, marketing and dissemination. From Facebook, Twitter and Blogger to Ebay, Etsy and YouTube, it is an exciting time for the DIY innovator.

Internet as Cave Wall

Technologies for the amplification and enhancement of imagination and conscious intent have existed in every aspect of human culture at least since the first cave painting was created. Modern western civilization's fanatic rejection of the unquantifiable has, in many ways, done us a great disservice. To trust only that which can be measured negates inspiration, intuition and imagination - some of humanity's most precious attributes.

Perhaps Beuys was right - re-enchantment with the intangible, reverence for nature and an open-minded acceptance of alternative modes of perception may make it possible for humanity to emerge from this period of economic, environmental and social upheaval and re-evaluation into a more peaceful and contented era. By perceiving ourselves as artists of our own particular medium (be it plumbing, politics, cooking, medicine, teaching, healing, engineering or painting), we have an opportunity to sculpt our very culture into a masterpiece that's beyond our wildest collective imagination. We just need to keep in mind that technology is only an electronic, externalized version of some far more sophisticated software that exists inside all of us, preinstalled. There's no Google search that can tell us how to use it, however. For that we'll need to move away from the machines and step outside.

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This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

above copied from: http://www.truth-out.org/makers-diy-agents-social-change59919

Interview: Sina Najafi: On Cabinet magazine, critical writing & ethics, Claire Ruud

Sina Najafi is a co-founder and the Editor-in-Chief of Cabinet magazine. …might be good caught up with him last month while he was in town as one of Arthouse’s Visiting Lecturers.

…might be good [mbg]: I’ve heard that one of the reasons you founded Cabinet was to fill a gap you saw somewhere between journalism and academic writing. You saw that in Europe public intellectuals could publish in popular newspapers in a way that they couldn’t here in the States. Since then, have you perceived a shift in the presence of the public intellectual in the U.S.

Sina Najafi [SN]: Here? No. It is shifting in Europe though, unfortunately for the worse. I think today there is less space for the public intellectual even in Europe, at least in newspapers. In Sweden, which is where I was before I moved to this country in 1995, there were four newspapers. Two of them were tabloids, and a friend of mine was editing the cultural pages of one of these tabloids, Aftonbladet. They were publishing interviews with intellectuals like Paul Virilio and Baudrillard. That blows away the content of the cultural pages of the New York Times, for example. In Europe at that time, it wasn’t unusual for academics and other public intellectuals to write for newspapers in a way that was both smart and jargon-free. These types of intellectuals cared about trying to engage in a larger cultural conversation and I felt like the New York Times—well, I have not read the New York Times for a long time, actually—

mbg: Really?

SN: I can’t read the Times anymore—I get most of my news online from European newspapers like the Guardian or Dagens Nyheter in Sweden—but when I still used to read it, people like Stanley Fish and Edward Said used to write for it sometimes. Then after a while Said’s views were considered too radical for the Times and they dropped him. On the whole, the cultural pages of the Times are—or at least were when I used to read it—highly disappointing.

There are not enough non-academic venues in which intellectuals can publish. For that reason, I think, they end up being sequestered in academic journals, where they write in a particular mode, and their language atrophies. It’s very sad because what those specialists know can and should be of interest to a much larger audience. However, writing for a larger audience requires a different type of language that you have to practice to become good at. So, we thought of Cabinet as being—and this was one of the impetuses for starting the magazine—a place where we could encourage that mode of writing. About a third of our articles are written by academics. Many academics in the United States are dissatisfied with what academic writing offers them, so we’ve not been turned down by many—unless they’re about to get tenure and they know that, in that last stretch, writing for Cabinet won’t be considered relevant by their tenure committee. Other than that, most people are very happy to have the opportunity to write for our audience. Our audience is fairly small; we sell about 13,000 copies of the magazine and it’s usually estimated 3 people read each sold copy, so we’re looking at around 30,000 people. But that’s a lot more readers than the journal of 18th-Century French Studies, or wherever academics might usually publish.

mbg: Do you find that academics are well-prepared to write for Cabinet’s audience, or do you have to work fairly closely with them as an editor?

SN: Well, we interview a lot of academics, in part because I find that the interview format allows them to speak very naturally in much more accessible language. They do write for us as well, and sometimes we have to edit vigorously to push them towards a language that’s jargon-free. However, the academics we approach to write for us may be from a self-selecting pool. We can already see that their mode of writing is going outside of the traditional bounds of academic writing. There’s exuberance there, there’s speculation there, and you can see them busting out.

mbg: As an editor and writer myself, I think a lot about what “critical writing” is or could be today. What part of critical writing do you think Cabinet is doing, or is it doing critical writing at all?

SN: I’ll tell you components of critical writing that we are not interested in. The idea of critical distance is something we are definitely not interested in; this idea that I somehow survey the object of contemplation from a particular distance, which is the right distance, and from this right distance that is only available to certain people, I can then make judgments that are true or valid in some way. That we don’t like. We prefer the person who is too close in some way, who is passionate and makes no claim to being at just the right distance, the person who in some way acknowledges that her insights and blindnesses are deeply related. But we also prefer the person who is too far, who is too distant to have any engagement at all, including the act of judgment, and is providing almost a cold description of an object that most people would want to pass judgment on. I say “almost” because I don’t want to pretend that neutral description is possible, but there is a permanent delay in reaching a conclusion in this second mode of writing that I think is worth holding onto.

There are also certain genres that we are not interested in. All those catalogue essays, for example, I don’t know who reads them, to be honest. They have a certain mode that you know in advance—you know what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. I’m being grossly unfair here; there’s lots of fantastic writing in catalogue essays, but as a genre I feel it has no audience, and for good reason. We also don’t have reviews, for example, in the magazine because when we started to think about reviews we kind of fell asleep. People should trust tedium as a guidance system for what is good or bad. I don’t know many artists who are excited to read those big long articles in the middle of most art magazines, and if art magazines aren’t read by artists, then something’s going on. Part of what we wanted to do with Cabinet was bring different modes of writing —including new experiments in critical writing — and see if we could help dislocate some of these sedimented tendencies.

mbg: So is there anything left to keep from critical writing?

SN: From critical writing in the dominant mode? Yes, there’s carefulness and specificity, and that has to co-exist alongside the potential for abandon, exuberance, speculation, adventure. At Cabinet, we’re looking for writing that is anchored somewhere; we like the text to hit ground at some point and have traction. It’s not about creative writing, otherwise it becomes an exercise in just making stuff up and I don’t think that’s ethical or interesting in the context of our pages. I’m a traditionalist in this sense: academics have produced all sorts of great texts about the world and how it became what it is, and we have to take that work on board and think about it.

mbg: Okay, so you’re talking about a kind of faithfulness to facts and histories of ideas that results in specificity. Where does critical processing come into this?

SN: To take an example, if we have a fictional dialogue between Robert Smithson and Andy Warhol walking through New York—a text that Saul Anton wrote for us in 2001—we want the conversation to stage exactly what those artists could have and could not have said. This requires thorough familiarity with their work and writings, absorbing it, and then producing wholesale something that is built on all that research but doesn’t end up just rehearsing the same positions. The dialogue genre will itself produce new knowledge and insights into the two artists.

Many texts that we normally think of as being critical share a strategy: they aim to show the reader the falseness of some other person’s position by carefully dismantling it. It’s in part a game of intellectual one-upmanship. These are very authoritative modes of passing judgment, and they have a lot to teach us, but these are exactly the modes of engagement that we try to sidestep. There’s a place for those traditional modes of critical writing, but we’d like to be a venue for modes of writing that undermine themselves, that are at times excessive or not appropriate, and they certainly don’t worry about decorum, or how things should be done. They might even undo their own authority by overreaching or by refusing to gather things up in the right way. They definitely shun disinterestedness as the primary criterion for criticality and they want to interact with the object in as many different interested ways as possible. They are experiments or essays in a deep sense, and they might fail, which is ok.

mbg: So I have a couple different questions related to what you’ve said so far. You mentioned that artists don’t read art magazines very much. Anecdotally, this feels right to me. But I wonder whether you have any hard evidence about how much more artists read publications like Cabinet.

SN: Hard evidence? No. Scanning through our subscriber list, I’d guess that roughly half of our readers are artists, just from the names I recognize. But then I have a skewed set of friends, you know? [laughs] Not knowing your readers is very helpful because the moment you start imagining the reader, you risk attempting to cater to that reader. When we’re editing a text, we never imagine, ‘will readers understand this?’ ‘will readers like this?’ ‘will readers be disappointed?’ None of those questions ever enter our heads.

mbg: What are the questions that enter your heads when you’re putting together an issue?

SN: Do we enjoy this? Are we learning something from it? Can we understand everything we are editing? We think of ourselves as the first readers. We’re a large group, so hopefully it’s not just one ego being refracted.

mbg: I’ve always wondered how you come up with the themes of issues.

SN: Sometimes one of our editors will suggest a particular topic. That happened with “Electricity” and “Ruins,” for example. Other times, the topic comes out of conversations between me, my colleague Jeffrey Kastner who’s senior editor of the magazine and is in the office with me, and one other editor who randomly walks in. “Insecurity,” for example, came out of a conversation in that way. And sometimes people from outside have suggested themes to us. “Shame” was suggested by a reader who was a professor at the New School.

mbg: How do you decide whether an idea is a workable topic for an issue?

SN: We would like the topic to be large enough so that it can extend into all the sorts of nooks and crannies of culture. Some theme ideas, even though we liked them, seemed too specific to two or three disciplines, at least given the amount of time and energy we have to devote to each issue. We also would like the topic to be untimely. If everyone is talking about a particular topic, we definitely prefer not to do it. We prefer something that has fallen out of favor or is marginalized. We liked “Shame,” for example, because it was important in 18th-century philosophical discourse before guilt sidelined it in the 19th century. We’ve in fact only done one issue that was timely, which was the “Animals” issue. We were doing an issue on “Evil,” and mad cow disease was happening. Those scenes of cows being burnt in England were so incredible that we decided to postpone the “Evil” issue and do an issue on animals. That was the one time where we responded to something happening in real time.

Part of this is just functional. It takes roughly nine to twelve months for us to go from an idea to getting it together to publishing it to getting it back from Belgium where we print. Something that is timely would be untimely by the time we get to it. The other part of it is that if everyone is talking about something, I don’t see the point of being one more person talking about it. There are so many things to talk about.

mbg: Your upcoming issue on education seems pretty timely.

SN: To be honest, that’s a reason why we are uncomfortable with it. We’ve even thought about canceling it but we’ve already put it in the distributor’s catalogue and received submissions for it, so we’re going to go ahead and do it.

mbg: And you recently had a show touching on the topic of education at your space—videos of classrooms by Darcy Lange. Do you think of your space as an opportunity to be more timely?

SN: No, though Lange’s work is of course about pedagogy and education. In the 70s, he made a series of works in Birmingham and Oxfordshire in which he would put his camera in a classroom and film the whole class and then show the tape to the teacher, and tape the teacher watching the tape and having a discussion about his or her performance. Then he would show the tape of the classroom to the students and tape them watching the tape and having a discussion about their performance. I think it’s an incredible body of work and one that had never been shown in the United States.

mbg: How do you understand the relationship between the space and the magazine?

SN: Some of the shows have come out of the magazine. Recently we showed work by Victor Houteff, a Seventh Day Adventist from the 1930s who founded the group in Waco that was later taken over by David Koresh. Houteff’s paintings were part of his evangelical work and they’re amazing—many of them offer strange timelines of history understood through Houteff’s particular religious framework. We showed them in the magazine in 2001 and we all loved them, so now, nine years later, we decided to show them in the space. I don’t know many places that can show this kind of historical material on its own. Our shows will go back and forth between contemporary artists—our next show is with Mark Dion—and historical stuff.

mbg: So the shows are just based on whim?

SN: They’re based on what is interesting and would be great to see and learn from. Whim, in some sense, in that if we ever tried to get a grant for the space, I don’t know how we would describe the program, but not whim in the sense that we of course think that the work we show is absorbing and compelling.

mbg: How do you fund the exhibitions?

SN: We have a budget of about $2000 a year for it.

mbg: No.

SN: Yeah.

mbg: So the work and labor are all donated?

SN: Well, for example, with Darcy Lange’s show, they sent us the DVDs from New Zealand and uploaded the scanned pictures for us and we printed them out on a donated Epson printer and mounted them ourselves. The whole show cost $250, and I think it was a great show.

mbg: And you use the same space in which you produce the magazine, eliminating those costs.

SN: Yes; whoever is in the office working also oversees the gallery. That’s the only reason why we can pull it off. I love having no budget on certain things. I love the fact that at the end of this year we’ll probably spend less than $2000 having done about eight shows. I like the ethics of being tiny. Olafur Eliasson will forgive me, but his waterfalls piece is antithetical to what the ethics of the art world should be, I think. With that much money, you could have 1,000 great art projects instead. That’s one a day for 3 years. Those kinds of enormous projects should be rejected out of hand. I’m not saying it’s comfortable to do things with the budget we have, and I’m not saying it’s fair to everybody who participates because we can’t offer any fees, but all the participants know that we’re not getting any money for it either, so in that sense we’re not abusing them, or if we are, we’re abusing ourselves first and inviting others to join us. If it’s unethical, it’s a shared unethics.

mbg: As you’re talking about ethics, I want to go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that what you called “creative writing” unethical in the context of critical writing.

SN: Not creative writing per se, obviously, but creative writing in the mode that we are interested in at Cabinet. We want to look at historical materials and the pre-history of the contemporary. If we un-tether the texts completely from the factual and historical, if the speculative, the imaginative, the creative, the unbound, the adventurous become our only guidelines, then we would end up with what I mean here by creative writing. We want an attention to style, and we also like to offer the freedom to mix genres and voices within the same text, but we also want to always signal our commitment to the factual and historical and the idea that there is some stake there that needs to be taken seriously.

mbg: I have another question about ethics. I get why the idea of a Cabinet of Curiosities is attractive for its rich juxtapositions, but I sense some ethical danger here, too, given the place of such cabinets in the history of colonization.

SN: There are dangers in what we’re doing. Historically, certain types of curiosity, women’s curiosity for instance, has been highly regulated and censored. And of course, with the figure of the collector, there is the danger that the objects, whether textual or actual artifacts, are simply there to reflect the collector himself.

But dilettantism is another way to discuss this. If you learn a little bit about something, this may seem like dilettantism from the specialist’s point of view. But gaining little bits of knowledge about many things can also be an additive process whereby you start to care about the histories and the artifacts that surround us. You begin to think, “my god, this window next to us, when did this become the dominant way to decorate a window frame? Where is this wood from and who made this thing?” All of these little bits of knowledge become a way of thinking around the social, material world around us. Those little bits of history, I think, if offered to you in the right way, can help to shift your perspective. We become more careful about thinking about why the world is the way it is. In that sense, I do think what we’re doing at Cabinet is ethical.

mbg: I think you’re right, in an ideal world that’s how the magazine functions. It doesn’t always function that way, though. Cabinet’s aesthetic seems to play right into a trendy, mostly cosmetic antiquarianism right now. I still read The New York Times, and last summer they printed an article about the “new antiquarians,” 20- and 30-somethings in Brooklyn who are collecting relics of a colonial past, but are completely disassociating these objects from any kind of historical, political context.

SN: Well, first, I think collecting objects is a little bit different than putting texts together around ideas. Texts are harder to fetishize than objects. Second, that is a trap that we have certainly fallen into at times: a bad issue of Cabinet may have too many articles about “19th century fads,” as one of our editors put it. That’s a danger, but I hope that a good issue of Cabinet is not just about antiquarianism. And I hope that many of our articles can be read as a pre-history of what happens today and help us understand our relationship with the world today. Sometimes this is explicit in the articles, and sometimes it’s not, and we’re trusting the readers to make the connections. If they don’t, that’s a failure of our part and we need to then address that in some way.

mbg: Or also a failure of all texts in some way. You can’t, of course, guarantee the reader will read the same thing you wrote.

SN: Which is maybe why it’s best not to think too much about the reader. [laughs]

Above copied from:

http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/interview/index/146/73