Re: [-empyre-] Contrapunto en Espiral
dear Raul, Kate, and everyone,
I live in
a territory where asynchronic temporal relations inform a projection
to the future as it were the past. I do not envision a tech-free
unpolluted corner, but rather a post tech era where mountains of
dischargeable mobile phones, decaying satellites and abandoned
highways compose a very complex mis-en-scene. Next to those piles of
artifacts and decaying structures, there are small sustainable
communities because famine and water scarcity, not oil, fueled the
wars - which I see, inevitable coming in the near future-, where a
lot of people have died. Not a pretty picture.
i have a vision of a city stretching between Los Angeles and San
Francisco that cannot sustain itself except in the margins.
Thus, a border space/ crossroads. The Carrizo Diaries start to touch
on this... in their generative 'echoes' of an uncertain future; I tried
to imagine
structures of debris containing habitations -- thinking all the while
of Constant's Babylon models (which i saw at the Documenta XII -- and
Aliette Guilbert references in her post this month, re:Delineations, of
April 9).
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/carrizoparkfielddiaries/album/pages/
debris.htm>
, even though they use technology in
their mode of production, the actual artwork is completely human
centered.
The generative fictions that both distress and enchant my imagination
are ones that, despite linguistic filtering through the machine
language (large photoshop files, Final Cut Pro Video, Flash, PhP, java,
in my practices) still assert some strange material presence that seems
to beg to be recognized as human. I work at the image building until
a strangeness of the images refuses the obvious gestures that these
programs are designed to deliver.
Maybe matrixial strategy is in the set of all possible interactions
here: x = (christina)(photoshop) / documentary images
i dont mean that the software has a consciousness except for on a
really simple linguistic process level. Still because I remediate the
pages of my diary, my raw experience with the landscape, by forcing it
through the tunnel of a linguistically narrow architecture (the
commercial tools), on the other side of the tunnel, the work 'comes
out' as a kind of difference. Like, as if it's a queer
condition--refusing accomodation and disappearance, it asserts itself
as Uncanny -- unheimlich --.
Meanwhile back in the tunnel, the software has tried to assert itself
over the content -- to move towards purely formal solutions. In the
Diaries, I experienced a powerful desire to sublimate my desire for
clarity under layers and layers of 'beautiful' occlusions. Thus:
'forgetting' where i had been, what the diaries want to record. So on
the one extreme margin of this project, is the raw experience of
drawing, of making performance work in the dry lake bed, shooting film
at dirt level, remembering Ana Mendieta, as in the 'carrizoclip' here
http://www.christinamcphee.net/cpdstrikedipslip.html; on the other
extreme margin, is the superslick dark pools of the installation
prints, mirror like, apparently impassive, reflecting, in their
surfaces, back to you, the observer, the witness, standing there .
<http://www.christinamcphee.net/carrizoparkfielddiaries/
transportinstallation1/pages/aftershocaccelsubt1_jpg.htm> : there,
where you stand, you absorb the distant place, Carrizo Plain, into the
reflected image of your body in the mirrored wall. The Carrizo
becomes abstracted to the point of disappearance.
To locate the matrixial space then would be to find it in the cat's
cradle of impulses between the 'remembering of the performance and
documentation work and the 'forgetting' of the pseudo perfect mask of
photoshopped image. It seems to me that this condition, of being
only able to remember part of the time, partially, 'through a glass
darkly' , is 'completely human centered.' I desire a strange
(unheimlich) use of the mode of production (the commercial software) in
service of a generative human space (fictional, fluid, resistant to
categorization, escaping being tagged and identified).
Using the radar to stay under the radar (a coyote trick). Maybe,
escaping the prison (pace Ryan) .
I do
not want to fetish poverty or lack of resources. When I am confronted
with the amount of work that I do without financial remuneration
(unluckily, I or the project have not won the lotteries of the art
funding agencies), figuring out how to keep a level of honesty with
the artists so the art market game doesn't sabotage the social
relations we have established, and spending hours negotiating
resources so the project comes to live, I have no choice that
decenter from technology in order to keep me sane.
This describes my situation quite well also. I have to continuously,
willfully choose to resist imagining being a pawn in a large system
against which i have no resource.
The lack of financing is a kind of silencing. You cant go on with the
festival without more funds. In order to get the funds, you would have
to try to adapt the strategies of the curatorial practice to accomodate
bureaucratic agendas, perhaps including 'the art market game'.
The Transport Gallery show was silenced in another way by the people
who ran the gallery, artists in a loose collective. Without
explanation they stopped answering phone messages, so that almost no
one could make appointments to see the show. Even though there was
extensive publicity in LA, almost no one was able to see it, unless
they knew me, and could arrange with me to visit the space.
Like the content of the installation itself: the conditions of the
installation became one in which the host group itself 'forgot' to
remember the installation. What was going on? Was the installation
itself a matrixial space, in that its presence was so intense? I
learned from listening to an acquaintance's voice mail that persons
running the gallery had lied to him, indicating that the show had
closed early so that it could go to a university space. Does this
mean, as Raul says, that there is a political dimension to the project
itself, insofar as it is born of resistance to being sublimated to
forgetfulness, to amnesia and to totalizing technology? That it still
insists on being some kind of 'diary', which suggests person - subject
- aliveness outside the prison? Is this frightening? What was the
ferocity of rejection about? I will never know, probably: but one
wonders,
is this a kind of witness to something we dont want to see or know:
"we say that it did not happen, we say that we did not know
(Multiplicity, Solid Sea, at
<http://naxsmash.net/noflightzone/texthtml/peregrine.html>)--
in the case of the Carrizo Parkfield Diaries, the fact that
Calfornia;s urban space stretches over completely unpredictable seismic
terrain, over which we do not have control, and with which we must
develop some kind of rapprochement and negotiation?
in the fact that a totalizing media landscape is not possible, because
life always (already) exists outside of whatever we might imagine as
'landscape'?
Renee;
You have reassured me that there a lot of us understanding that the
geometrical complexities of the Cosmo where we live can not be seen
in a binary opposition. There are too many interpretations
circulating knowledge and wisdom, that to fall into the binary
rationale seems an out place resource.
I must confess, that one of my inquiries into new media is the seeded
condition of the 01 algorithm rooted in ancient Arabic math. Please,
don't take me wrong here, I am an Arab descend and truly love the
geometrical grammar that enriches that culture, but questioning the
binary opposition ruling the technological "revolution" always has
been on my mind. There are others mathematics that could help to
break away from that binary opposition and produce technologies that
don't damage the ecosystem. Too bad I have not enough time in my life
to deeper this inquiry.
Algorithms develop into the 'contrpunto en espiral' : Bach's Fugues,
the Fibonacci Series in plants. Generative possible futures. the
binary might be conceived as a staging space, or birthing zone.
Ryan,
Agency, there is one of the key, how we enact it is our secret.
A hermeneutic technique (Hermes, our god at the crossroads ) :
Too many human have come to believe that they are more powerful than
nature. A few weeks ago, I was looking into Christina McPhee's The
Carrizo Diaries. I was working on a poetry book wanting to reclaim
old mythical practices that are connecting the information of the
universe with spirituality and the path of live.
I realized that her investigation was a product of a real experience
and her closeness to the universe has allowed Christina, as women did
in ancient times -Sibylla, Phythonissa-, all prophets who understood
nature and its information, to predict the out coming. She called it
"a generative fictional future," but I saw an experiment involving a
higher level of ecological consciousness to predict, like the way in
which the oracle envision the future, only that she is using a
database of real geological data that employs interaction to predict
the "future" and its outcome via the large prints.
I was mesmerized by how human and geological memories intersect in
Christina's project because it demonstrates that in the khaos, our
human data/wavelength always has been associated with the cosmic
energy that, in numerous ways, inform the earth's transitions -where
we are a small part, an intrinsic part that today is contributing to
ecological damage-, which surfaces in her work as a political
commentary.
A few years back, when I was organizing "Nomadas: Plural Identities
in Traveling Territories", for Chicago's Randolph Street Gallery, I
understood that the dialogue among works of art is deeper that what
the art historians of critics think. The Carrizo Park Field Diaries
showed me the way in which re-assemblaging the data to envision the
future is closer to the process I employ in the making of Arte Nuevo
InteractivA 05, that of producing a third meaning that is not the
actual data or our intention, it is an information that comes out,
naturally, as part of the process/mechanism we have set up for the
artistic practice.
Best to all, Abrazotes,
Raul
thanks Raul for drawing these traces.
Christina
--
Raúl Moarquech Ferrera-Balanquet MFA
Curador Ejecutivo/ Arte Nuevo InteractivA
http://www.cartodigital.org/interactiva
interactiva@cartodigital.org
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