Re: [-empyre-] Introductions and beginnings (October on -empyre-)
dear Ryan, deGeuzen et al,
I would like to highlight portions of Brian's text here within -
empyre- , thanks to Ryan for pointing to this post on the IDC list.
Brian Holmes writes,
:"The most dismaying thing to me is the slavishness of people
who call themselves artists or intellectuals, with respect
to their careers. The fetish-object that holds you on a
leash is mainly the way you think you are appearing in the
eye of your potential employer (or admirer, in an attention
economy). This seems to condition the vast majority of work
on so-called new media or whatever you want to call it,
where instead of state bureaucracies as in the equally
tiresome worlds of subsidized contemporary art, it is rather
telcos and equipment manufacturers who put up the money for
the service rendered by the artist: which consists in
naturalizing the new technology for the succesful anesthesia
of that shrinking fraction of the public who might
statistically be presumed capable of feeling alienated and
putting up some token resistance.
I would say that the above critique, cast in much more
precise terms and supported with specific case studies
(which I myself both do and also look for, by the way),
would constitute a sufficient departure point for something
a little more interesting. One of the things that could be
done right away is to use mobile communications media to
constitute groups which could build up a sensory, narrative
and relational consistency between each other, on a
deliberately singularizing basis, at collective variance
with respect to the norms of contemporary
hyperindividualism. Such groups could both report on the
manipulatory characteristics of the environments they
encounter (exploring, for instance, the kinds of intelligent
buildings or urban screens that now modulate our passage
through cities) and at the same time, develop dissident
mythologies, heteronomic signifying practices, alternative
sensoriums. The capacity to speak a language and to inhabit
an affective universe that peels away from the constantly
reiterated codes is not something that will fall ripe from
the sky or emerge full-blown from an aleatory experience,
but is rather the fruit of a long, immense, and reasoned
disordering of all the senses, to recall the phrase of an
earlier era. But today that entails a critique of the
immense labor of imposing order that is going on all around
us. "
"Naturalizing the new technolgy for the successful anaesthesia of
the ...........public......... who might be presumed capable of
feeling alientated and putting up some token resistance.
I think it is significant that the antidote Holmes implies is within
strategies of "narrative" that form outside the reified system of
consumer tracking, under the wire as it were.
I might also add to Brian's "anaesthesia" of the public,
"amnesia" (forgetting) so that there is no memory of any landscape
other than that of an electronically driven consumer interface.
"real' goes underground.
cm
Challenge two: the continued analysis of Brian Holmes, regarding
practice and theory in our current realities. To quote the end of a
recent post by Holmes' to the iDC list:
"The moment of believing you could "get there first" and determine
the destiny of a new technological phylum by sheer force of
enthusiasm has been gone since the tech bubble burst and the corps
started demanding hard returns on their investment. Nowadays, doing
anything real means accepting a minority, undergound status and all
the undertainties of working without any clear support or public.
The elected representatives of a democratic country just voted to
fuck off the Geneva convention. At the very best, the post-critical
future is a name for a contemporary utopia."
See the whole post and following thread here: http://
mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-September/000816.html
So, to get to the context of the Under Fire exhibition in Chicago,
and deGeuzen's contribution to it:
deGeuzen's (with Tsila Hassine) "Global Anxiety Monitor" and
"Historiographic Tracer" ( http://www.geuzen.org/underfire.html )
both represent an instance of research (in the general sense of
collecting/analyzing data) and symbolic framing. In this sense, it
contributes to the project of "tactical media" (if anyone's still
using that term) by assuming the role of a "tool" for engaging/
studying a given situation as well as consciously politicizing the
data and its means of collection (the tool itself). In many ways,
these projects, and much, if not all, of deGeuzen's work also
builds on the practices and theories of people like Martha Rosler
and Alan Sekula who practice a "critical documentary" in which the
potential for affect provided by photography is neither abandoned
nor surrendered to, but engaged to find those instances where
desires to represent and change reality can be made politically
reflexive.
In this light, i found the work of deGeuzen presenting some ways of
navigating (addressing positively) the previously mentioned
challenges, along with the work of other included artists like
Trevor Paglen, Mariam Ghani + xurban_collective.[iDC] Re: Toward a
Post-Post-Critical Future
Brian Holmes brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr
It is difficult not to be deeply shocked and worried by the
success of the current American government in making 9/11
into a new Pearl Harbor. This indicates a pretty high level
of capacity to perform affective and intellectual control.
Again this is done, first by the application of
data-gathering techniques (from questionnaires to focus
groups to data-mining of communications), then by the
modeling (or simulation) of a population's behavior, then by
subsequent experimentation with the introduction of new
stimuli, first into the model, then into reality. How about
yellow, orange, red on the nightly news? How about on your
dinner table? What effects would it produce on segment A of
the population? On segment B, C, D? At stake in contemporary
governmental theory, now more than ever, is the notion that
one need not act on individual players, but rather on the
rules of the game. Such interventions on the parameters of
human interaction have already been enormously successful at
the institutional level, in the context of what is known as
"neoliberal reform" (or in Europe, "new public management").
The goal has been to impose the calculation of one's
personal human capital, and of the risks to which one
exposes it, as the two great imperatives of
hyperindividualized subjectivity in the post-welfare world.
But that was yesterday, practically the age of innocence. In
the age of nano-bio-cogno-infotech convergence, the range of
"rules" which can be acted on is tremendous. As Jordan
Crandall points out in a recent text, what's being targetted
is that fraction of a second where you decide what to do,
before any process of reflexivity has been engaged. Hit the
right button and they'll never think twice! From the
neurochemical to the symbolic, Big Brother has already
decided what you are going to do.
The "intelligent buildings" being discussed on this list
form a perfect example of a cybernetic environment that is
conceived to support a particular range of interaction. What
I find inadequate - and at a certain level, even
hypocritical - are the kinds of strategies that are
suggested in terms of responding to this incredible wave of
new theory and new materiality of top-down control. The
discussion of Paske's "ill-defined goals" is mildly
interesting in this regard - at least people are thinking
about the problems of interactivity and its limited range of
binary choices - but still, an aleatory encounter with a
slightly dysfunctional machine is very unlikely to produce
anything more than an isolated inquiry as to what might be
going on in the more common experiences of normalized
interaction. As a critic, I think that the ambition of the
inquiries is much too low. As an experimenter, of course I
am very interested to go out and try just about anything -
but I don't expect to see much in the way of a result before
the theory gets a lot better. As a reader of the history of
the avant-gardes, I think a rehash of psychogeography tends
to remain yesterday's solutions to yesterday's problems.
The most dismaying thing to me is the slavishness of people
who call themselves artists or intellectuals, with respect
to their careers. The fetish-object that holds you on a
leash is mainly the way you think you are appearing in the
eye of your potential employer (or admirer, in an attention
economy). This seems to condition the vast majority of work
on so-called new media or whatever you want to call it,
where instead of state bureaucracies as in the equally
tiresome worlds of subsidized contemporary art, it is rather
telcos and equipment manufacturers who put up the money for
the service rendered by the artist: which consists in
naturalizing the new technology for the succesful anesthesia
of that shrinking fraction of the public who might
statistically be presumed capable of feeling alienated and
putting up some token resistance.
I would say that the above critique, cast in much more
precise terms and supported with specific case studies
(which I myself both do and also look for, by the way),
would constitute a sufficient departure point for something
a little more interesting. One of the things that could be
done right away is to use mobile communications media to
constitute groups which could build up a sensory, narrative
and relational consistency between each other, on a
deliberately singularizing basis, at collective variance
with respect to the norms of contemporary
hyperindividualism. Such groups could both report on the
manipulatory characteristics of the environments they
encounter (exploring, for instance, the kinds of intelligent
buildings or urban screens that now modulate our passage
through cities) and at the same time, develop dissident
mythologies, heteronomic signifying practices, alternative
sensoriums. The capacity to speak a language and to inhabit
an affective universe that peels away from the constantly
reiterated codes is not something that will fall ripe from
the sky or emerge full-blown from an aleatory experience,
but is rather the fruit of a long, immense, and reasoned
disordering of all the senses, to recall the phrase of an
earlier era. But today that entails a critique of the
immense labor of imposing order that is going on all around
us. The moment of believing you could "get there first" and
determine the destiny of a new technological phylum by sheer
force of enthusiasm has been gone since the tech bubble
burst and the corps started demanding hard returns on their
investment. Nowadays, doing anything real means accepting a
minority, undergound status and all the undertainties of
working without any clear support or public. The elected
representatives of a democratic country just voted to fuck
off the Geneva convention. At the very best, the
post-critical future is a name for a contemporary utopia.
best, BH
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On Oct 3, 2006, at 5:36 PM, Ryan Griffis wrote:
Thanks, Tracey for the introduction, and deGeuzen as well for the
invitation to participate in the discussion this month.
There are a couple of challenges looming, at least for me, that i
feel compelled to address, but certainly have no answers for. i
will just state them here, then present the context of the Under
Fire show that was mentioned by Tracey in the introductions, in
which deGeuzen presented some of their recent work.
Challenge one: the post-critical/projective/utopian realism - this
set of ideas has been most articulated in discussions of
architecture, but a primary point of reference is the work of Bruno
Latour, who is becoming a popular reference in a lot of
discussions. To (over) simplify the point, this challenge asks if
critical theory, in its dominant form, hasn't outlived its context.
Not just a post-Marxist position, the goals of those making the
challenge don't seem different from those employing "historical"
critical theory, but the question is whether or not the target of
critique has shifted and requires new tools and methods to engage
it, and might possibly require a form of positivism/pragmatism.
see:
http://tloguser.totalcare.nl/tlog_projective.pl?
owner=projectivelandsc&filter=39
http://www.ensmp.fr/%7Elatour/articles/article/089.html
Challenge two: the continued analysis of Brian Holmes, regarding
practice and theory in our current realities. To quote the end of a
recent post by Holmes' to the iDC list:
"The moment of believing you could "get there first" and determine
the destiny of a new technological phylum by sheer force of
enthusiasm has been gone since the tech bubble burst and the corps
started demanding hard returns on their investment. Nowadays, doing
anything real means accepting a minority, undergound status and all
the undertainties of working without any clear support or public.
The elected representatives of a democratic country just voted to
fuck off the Geneva convention. At the very best, the post-critical
future is a name for a contemporary utopia."
See the whole post and following thread here: http://
mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2006-September/000816.html
So, to get to the context of the Under Fire exhibition in Chicago,
and deGeuzen's contribution to it:
deGeuzen's (with Tsila Hassine) "Global Anxiety Monitor" and
"Historiographic Tracer" ( http://www.geuzen.org/underfire.html )
both represent an instance of research (in the general sense of
collecting/analyzing data) and symbolic framing. In this sense, it
contributes to the project of "tactical media" (if anyone's still
using that term) by assuming the role of a "tool" for engaging/
studying a given situation as well as consciously politicizing the
data and its means of collection (the tool itself). In many ways,
these projects, and much, if not all, of deGeuzen's work also
builds on the practices and theories of people like Martha Rosler
and Alan Sekula who practice a "critical documentary" in which the
potential for affect provided by photography is neither abandoned
nor surrendered to, but engaged to find those instances where
desires to represent and change reality can be made politically
reflexive.
In this light, i found the work of deGeuzen presenting some ways of
navigating (addressing positively) the previously mentioned
challenges, along with the work of other included artists like
Trevor Paglen, Mariam Ghani + xurban_collective.
i would also like to point people to a short essay written for the
exhibition by Dan S. Wang, which presents perhaps, a third
challenge regarding notions of "commitment."
http://www.art.uiuc.edu/projects/underfire/#essay
Without framing any direct questions, i hope that this provides at
least some defined space to start with -- and i know that deGeuzen
will have some provocations of their own. i also know that my own
US-centric bias is ever present in these discussions, so i hope
others will reveal those limitations and expand on them.
i look forward to the exchanges.
best,
ryan
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