[-empyre-] 'The art of the accident'

Sat Nov 29 03:08:48 EST 2008

Hello and thanks, Steve,

I would like to hear more of what Tim was saying about art, technology and
performance.

In the meantime, Steve reminds us of the "city of the instant." Tim had an
interesting quote of the day about how western politicians think in terms
geopolitical entities and how terrorists but also resistance fighters
think--and always have thought--of themselves as networks (*réseaux*).
At the same time, PV, to quote him one more time, also noted an evolution
from organized battles *(batailles rangées*) that are territorial to
organized panic (*dé-rangement*) that is more linked to networks.
 Of interest is the coverage of the Mumbai attacks. It creates panic among
the population not only in India, I am sure, but in the west. What I have
seen has been really reductionist, uses the usual buzzwords and with
recourse to what Virilio calls the instrumental image totally *
decomplexifies* issues and reduces time and space to the instant.

Verena

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 8:29 AM, <S.C.Redhead at brighton.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi Everyone
>
> I thought the posts this week were fascinating. Still mulling over the
> ideas, critiques and discussions. Thinking about them and watching the
> Mumbai events live on all sorts of international 24/7 TV news channels
> (though sitting physically in the UK in front of my screens) has made me
> concentrate on Virilio's notion of broadcasting creating a 'city of the
> instant' like never before.
>
> I agree with Tim about Virilio and Stelarc.  Virilio certainly started out
> approving of Stelarc but has moved to quite a critical position on him - and
> without any progressive foundation for this change of view. As Arthur Kroker
> exclaimed at the San Francisco symposium recently on Virilio - 'give me a
> break!!'Virilio's work undoubtedly comes with a health warning, despite his
> many insights. He is as Verena says quite a conservative thinker, though
> much of the publishing discourse of the last 30 years (Verso books for
> instance) aligns him with, say, a left theorist like Slavoj Zizek or a
> radical thinker like his late friend Jean Baudrillard. Virilio's seemingly
> obsessive fascination with accident and catastrophe sometimes recalls
> earlier unpalatable twentieth century thinkers like Ernst Junger (who
> Virilio references in some of his works).
>
> Best wishes
>
> Steve
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto:
> empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Timothy Murray
> Sent: 26 November 2008 03:42
> To: soft_skinned_space
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] 'The art of the accident'
>
> Welcome, Steve,
>
> Thanks so much for your fascinating post on
> Virilio's museum of accidents.  As you may recall
> from my brief presentation at the San Francisco
> Virilio conference, a small part of which I
> include below, I am troubled by the irony that
> his artistic interests distance him from exciting
> developments in new media art.
>
> While Viriio expresses concern about "speed
> pollution," we could take the lead from many
> artists, such as Irvine's Beatriz da Costa, who
> has profited from the speed of technological
> interfaces to map the air pollution streams
> traced by slow flying pigeons carrying miniature
> monitoring devices.  In this case, speed
> pollution itself ends up helping to counter the
> degrading conditions of the inefficient
> technologies that pollute the air.  To be fair,
> it is important to note that Virilio moderates
> the pessimism of his account of interactive media
> by acknowledging the importance of tracking its
> future.  In an interview with me and Gaëten
> Lamarche Vadel in Sites, the journal of 20th
> century French Studies, he marvels at how
> "programmed situations make images appear that we
> wouldn't have imagined, because they themselves
> have been subject to modifications linked to the
> environment that one has created around them.
> There you rediscover the accident.  I am an
> amateur of accident.  I think that the accident
> is the future form of art."
>
> If accident is the future form of art, it's
> ultimate expression will take place, he suggested
> in the same interview, in the form of passage
> through which the environment of events consists
> of an environment of passage, one that ultimately
> ruptures the unity of time and place.
>
> But I remain uncertain about how far Virilio is
> willing to open himself to the accidental future,
> at least in the arena of the arts.  For his
> notion of artistic resistance seems to be
> circumscribed and delimited by his identification
> with the same aesthetics of the past that is more
> loyal to the logistics of perception than to the
> pollutions of speed.  This became particularly
> evident when I asked him to elaborate on his
> sense of the future of dance and performance,
> which have aggressively transformed themselves
> via the technological interface.  The context of
> my question was a statement he made in
> Cybermonde, a book highly reflexive about the
> performing arts, that theatrical "telepresence"
> delocalizes the position and situation of the
> body in a way that negates the here and now, "le
> hic et nunc," for what's happening, "le
> maintenant."  "Ici n'est plus," he writes in
> Cybermonde, "tout est maintenant."  Just how we
> might understand this temporal distinction
> between "le hiv et nunc" and "maintenant" becomes
> clearer when Virilio expresses his anxiety about
> current techno developments in dance, occasioned
> by his concern that "dance and theatre are arts
> of the "hic et nunc" and of "habeas corpus."
> These are arts that present the body.  That's
> their force.  Whether it's Cunningham or others,
> there's a tendency to perform (à faire danser)
> specters Š To remove the body of the actor or
> dance," he continues, "to replace it with a
> specter is the equivalent of transforming dance
> or theatre into a form of automation.  Why
> wouldn't one oppose the resistance of the body to
> these technical derivatives?  Particularly," he
> adds, "since the body is the very place of
> resistance.  Not simply an ideological
> resistance, but an ontological resistance. It's
> the essential nature of theatre and dance to
> present the body, not to telepresent it."
>
> What's striking in these strident words is their
> commitment to an ontology of performance that's
> concomitant with the long history of classical
> theatre in France that is inscribed in the
> presence of the body and its framing in the
> unities of time and place, "hic et nunc."  I
> probably don't need to elaborate on the
> metaphysical and ideological implications of this
> tradition, from its grounding in the absolutist
> ballets of the Sun King to its reference to the
> Eucharistic body, which is presented in religious
> ritual as the "hic et nunc."
>
> To be fair to Virilio, he's also concerned with
> how the reductions of telepresence in speed and
> scale can have a negative impact on human agency.
> But I'm wondering whether Stelarc [who addressed
> the San Francisco gather via Second Life] might
> be one of the many artists who might have a
> different appreciation for the potential of
> miniaturization, as the interface of the
> performing body with the new media network might
> well extend our notions of the localized "hic"
> and the corporeal "nunc."   Just last spring, I
> sat in wonder while watching an animated
> conversation between Stelarc and Ashley
> Ferro-Murray, a choreographer now in Performance
> Studies at Berkeley, as they traded their
> expressions of excitement over how the condensed
> speed of censors and interactive technologies
> have sensitized them to the miniaturized
> movements of their corporeal digits and
> facialities in ways that have expanded the
> terrain of performance and realized the
> longstanding inscription of the body in its
> technological interface and horizon.  Their
> willingness to inhabit the accidents and
> pollutions of speed transforms performance from
> its ontological isolation in the unities of time
> and place and their stultifying ideological
> legacy by opening it to the accidents and
> uncertainties of resistance and its catastrophes.
>
> I hope everyone will excuse me for this longish
> post, but Steve's opening words on museology
> prompted me to position these interests within
> the technological context of new media art.
>
> Best,
>
> Tim
>
>
> --
> Timothy Murray
> Director, Society for the Humanities
> http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
> Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
> A. D. White House
> Cornell University
> Ithaca, New York 14853
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-- 
Verena Andermatt Conley

Department of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages
and Literature
Dana Palmer 202
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
tel: 617-495-2274; 617-496-6090
fax: 617-496-4682

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~rll/

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