Re: [-empyre-] on 'meaningful articulations' : strategies

["James Barrett" <jim.barrett@humlab.umu.se>]

Kenneth's insightful "recontextualization of a gesture" and what flashed
up for me was the modification of the image-as-reality:

The State of the Union: The Fateful Embrace by Randall M Packer
http://www.usdat.us/secretary/archives/2005/02/state_of_the_un.html.

Every gesture seems choreographed in an opera of believers. Blue fingers
raised in a sign of faith [Context: the so distant Mesopotamian desert] as
the chamber is re-focused as the ritual stage it perhaps always was.

re:
>"contextual intervention:  articulation becomes 'meaningful' relative to
>context, to the sense of place, to the issue outside the hermetically
>sealed world of image propagation"

Are we talking about détournement here?

/jim B.


> Kenneth wrote,
>
> There are certainly approaches to using electronic and
>> computationally-based media that suggest the possibility of a
>> reconstruction of space and time into a meaningful articulation of
>> place.  It's not the global network, or the telematic embrace, but
>> perhaps new approaches to performance and presentation that allow the
>> artwork to respond more directly to its place.
>
>
> One wonders if this very point, of creating new approaches to performance
> and presentation, articulates 'place' in a new way that can
> overcome the anomie and drift conditions of modernity at the very moment
> that it recovers a sense of the  the real. (apologies to Hal Foster).  I
> am thinking of Allan Sekula's Fish Story, here for example, but there are
> many others from many realms of human suffering and its consequences,
> including, Chantal Ackerman, Trevor Paglen,  Sue de Beer and Shamim
> Momin's collaboration on the exhibition of Sue's work  "Black Sun"  for
> starters,  just off the top of my head.   A senior White House official
> notoriously stated, in a New York Times magazine article last summer,
> something to the effect, you guys (the reporter) think you are reporting
> on reality; but hey, we make reality, we are the empire, you guys still
> think there is a reality out there to report on, but you're deluded. ::
> Isn't that fascinating. ::  A comment clearly made before Katrina.  And
> also, the official's statement had on offer a denatured yet still potent
> expression of the post modernist eighties malaise (media creates reality ,
> therefore reality is nil, checkmate, stalemate:  the only way left a long
> walk in the dark with Artaud).  The American administration were in their
> own eyes (sois-disant) the perfectionist manipulators of iconophilia.  But
> surely now new media works in a way such that images start to live
> counter, contra, lie in wait for truth. Certainly Nato's curating and
> writing and Ryan's practice seem to desire such. And does so by contextual
> intervention:  articulation becomes 'meaningful' relative to context, to
> the sense of place, to the issue outside the hermetically sealed world of
> image propagation. Even as lo res a landscape as a parking lot revives in
> the critical practice of Ryan Griffis.   When the FBI attacks Steve Kurtz,
> they seize his projects because they are taken to be 'sui generis' genetic
> manipulations.  An image-type, a brand mentality (gee i see a petri dish,
> this must be bioterrorism!) produces absurd and terrible sequelae (jail,
> trial.. worthy of Kafka).    Critical process, of which the FBI is
> apparently oblivious, involves recontextualization of a gesture, like
> Steve's experiments, into another realm, so that an otherwise hidden
> problematic can open up to view, can be given place: in Critical Art
> Ensemble/Steve Kurtz's instance, the whole problem of genetically modified
> food production. Surely this is par excellence a "meaningful
> articulation".   Surely this is a re(coup)eration, seizing, of the real.
>
> --cm
>
> refs:
>
> Critical Art Ensemble
> <http://www.critical-art.net/biotech/index.html>
>
> Nato Thompson, "Strategic Visuality: a project by four artist/researchers:
> Trevor Paglen, The Speculative Archive, J. Morgan Puett with Jorge
> Colombo, and the Center for Tactical Magic" , CAA Art Journal, spring 2004
>  <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_1_63/ai_114632849>
>
> Trevor's prisons <http://www.paglen.com/carceral/index.htm>
>
> Sue De Beer, Black Sun
> <http://www.whitney.org/information/press/170.html>
> http://www.haberarts.com/debeer.htm
>
> Allan Sekula, Fish Story
> <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n6_v84/ai_18356708>
>
> Chantal Ackerman, general discussion of her work
> <https://secure.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/archive/innovators/akerman.html>
>
> Ryan's parking lots  http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?32225
> and general compendia... at  http://www.yougenics.net/griffis/
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: marc <sparkle@c-level.cc>
> Sent: Nov 4, 2005 1:27 AM
> To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] 	on "meaningful articulations", Re:whispering in the
> dark.
>
> Kenneth and the rest of the hidden empyre,
>
> howdy,
>
> Christina Ulke and I have been collaborating on the framework. We both
> thought it would be a meaningfull investigation for this board..
>
> The commodification of discourse often is an operative fiction with
> only some examples in reallity. One of those more real spaces of
> commodified discourse IS in the global network.
>
> One finds commodified discourse when there is an abundance of language
> that does not properly describe physical reality.
> (IE. tech utopianism that fails to acknowledge the labor issues
> implicit within technology. EG. un-critical aesthetic investigation
> done in concert with an  exhibition )
>
> It is prevalent in art discourse when the economic structures that
> either support or spotlight work remain ignored and as such fail to
> fully describe the work. This ins't about truth in advertising,
> institutional support can be good and may even add to production- its
> about acknowledging that institutional and economic elements are a part
> of any work's architecture or social life.
>
> If a digitally based artwork or cultural product is innately tied to a
> place then perhaps our ugly little term can be avoided. But anything
> that promises to "reconstruct space and time" in a purely fictive
> environment is highly suspect. What's wrong with the space that its
> reconstructing (besides the obvious poisoned environment, toxic social
> policy, war racism and sexism, theft, greed...)? And why does something
> need to be reconstructed (in a controlled environment whose defined
> parameters within the scope of man that only meets a fantasy need and
> feeds and houses only the imagination and someone's bank vault)?
>
> And yes, there are "are certainly approaches to using electronic and
> computationally-based media that suggest the possibility of a
> reconstruction of space and time into a meaningful articulation of
> place." A meaningful articulation! I woke up this morning and made five
> meaningfull articulations before I got into the car. But no one
> listened to me because I wasn't yet in the office, Or I wasn't in my
> studio, Or with my activist affinity group who would act on my meaning.
> Or I wasn't at my pulpit. Or I wasn't ordering my soldiers out of the
> trench and up to the top of the berm. Or I wasn't connecting two lost
> friends who had hated eachother for years...
>
> Oh, I made a meaningful articulation the other day. It was so good....
> Look, fortunately, meaningful articulations are a dime a dozen. And
> that is the beauty of being human, that we can articulate meaningful
> things whenever, where-ever and however we can. But meaning becomes
> socially constructed and up for criticism when it takes on value...
> when someone says that this meaning is more worthwhile then others. And
> here is the point for criticism, why is one meaningful statement
> considered notable and another one ignored like so many crushed dreams?
>
> The internet and hyperspace are a global pillowcase of immediate dreams
> and distant products. Occassionaly, these distant products have the
> marketing arm of the strongest economy and military in the world.
>
> More latter.
> It is quite possible that I totally misinterpreted the spirit of what
> you wrote. If so, let us acknowledge that this is par for the course.
>
>
>
>
>
>> Hi Christina,
>> ---
>> Could you clarify your ideas on the  "commodifation of discourse"?
>> I'm unclear as to how and where this is occurring.  Is it the
>> concentration of discourse within the university/conference system?
>> MIT Press? Siggraph? The abstraction of "place" into decentered space
>> and time?... (but that's a more generic quality of Modernity isn't
>> it?)  There are certainly approaches to using electronic and
>> computationally-based media that suggest the possibility of a
>> reconstruction of space and time into a meaningful articulation of
>> place.  It's not the global network, or the telematic embrace, but
>> perhaps new approaches to performance and presentation that allow the
>> artwork to respond more directly to its place.
>>
>> I wonder also if there's a critique per se here of the notion of
>> interactivity itself?  It seems to have been effectively appropriated
>> by the world of management science and is couched more in terms of
>> control, efficiency and ease-of-use for the "user".  Artists are not
>> users, but rather makers.... what is the nature of the things made?
>> Use-value?... or something else?
>>
>> Kenneth.
>>
>
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