[-empyre-] communities / machines

[Johannes Birringer]

dear all

well, following Simon's excursion, i had thought we had moved on quite a long ways (from discipline/punish and the panopticon), and are, if anything, living
in more uncontrollable predatory societies or situations. but what interests me about the discussion here is that is claims "communities" where i see none, 
and i want to learn to understand. 

Helen writes:

>.many - actually, most - of the communities i consider myself a member of
are not physical communities at all. i value & enjoy face-to-face
meetings, & sometimes there are things that are more efficiently done in
the flesh, but most of my networked community interactions are
virtual/remote & this is perfectly successful.
>>

I would argue there are no such communities (non physical ones) that work perfectly successfully, unless
you argue that networking itself (via internet protocols and communications) is a form of non-dissociative "sharing" (of what) and understanding different or
indeed shared (culturally transmitted) methods of working (rehearsing, composing, performing together, as musicians, say, do when do perform in a concert for audiences ).
It seems you are arguing for "creativity" in regards to non distinct, non-forms  or, if i understood the irony of  Eugenio's comment,  facebooklike ant-community. If Lady Gaga has 11 million facebook friends,
what does that mean?  Not much, in my opinion. 

Since you initiallly introduced the training on which all theatre forms (and other performing or visual arts forms) are based that apply a range of artistic criteria and sustainable knowledge (and surely filmmaking 
also has criteria which may or may not appy to YouTube, and so do design and architecture, no?), I was surprised how quickly creativity (among artists as you say) is shifted into cybersapce and net-conditions.

Now, it appears that the creativity addressed here iks closer to the machinic, as i gather it is explained in some writings on assemblages. 
I found an effort at defining this in Andreas Broeckmann's piece "Remove the Controls": 

"Today's social environments are fully permeated by technical apparatuses, tools and infrastructures which form complex assemblages of objects, spaces and behaviors. Our bodies are fitted with cyborgian extensions (glasses, walkman, car, elevator, pace-maker), and the way we work, rest and play is intertwined with our machinic environment. We are ourselves part of the machinic assemblages that surround us.

The principle of the 'machinic' relates not so much to particular technological or mechanical objects connected to or independent from the human body. The 'machines' can be social bodies, industrial complexes, or psychological or cultural formations, such as the complex of desires, habits and incentives that create particular forms of collective behavior in groups of individuals, or the aggregation of materials, instruments, human individuals, lines of communication, rules and conventions that together constitute a company or institution. These are examples for 'machines' which are assemblages of heterogeneous parts, aggregations which transform forces, articulate and propel their elements, and force them into a continuous state of transformation and becoming.

As an aesthetic principle, the machinic is associated with process rather than object, with dynamics rather than finality, with instability rather than permanence, with communication rather than representation, with action and with play. The aesthetics of the machinic does not so much concern itself with the intention or result of artistic practices, but with the translations and transformations that occur within a machinic assemblage" (cited from http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/45.htm).


I got the impression that the discussion so far proposed to celebrate this lack of "concern .. with the intention or result of artistic practice".  
Broekmann seems more optimistic (than I am ) that something will come of it, when he suggests to look out for those "moments" when something interesting might happen.:

"looking for those moments, those forms, those planes of consistency where auto-production emerges of its own accord. Or rather, constructing such zones, watching and waiting for it to happen - the way it can happen on the dance floor, or on a listserver. Not pure chaos, which tends in the end to be rather uninteresting, but chaos articulated on a plane of consistency, selected and articulated, so that complexity arises of its own self-organizing accord."


regards
Johannes Birringer
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