[-empyre-] Hello from Hell

[Eugenio Tisselli]

Dear all,

I am sorry for being silent during this weekend, but I was also experiencing extreme temperatures in a small town called Morille near Salamanca, Spain, inhabited by a mere 200 people. No Internet, no phones, but I returned totally energized after a 3-day art & poetry festival done together with the local community. It may be interesting for you to know that there is an art cemetery there, and every once in a while artists (well-known or otherwise) go there to bury one of their pieces, in what sometimes becomes a very intense ritual. Everybody in Morille participates in these burials, and they are very proud of having this "Museum-mausoleum" in their town.

Anyway, I want to thank you all, especially Simon and Helen, for such an interesting week of discussion. I don't want to put down any "concluding remarks", since the discussion continues, so I'll be popping up from time to time. But, to me, Julian's contribution reflects the tension happening in digital networks in a great way:

"Exlusion has an awful name, largely due to xenophobic, classist projects
throughout history, but we're all already practicing exclusion in the interests of our cherished communities every day. In consideration of this topic, one could say any social network is the industrialisation of social exclusion (network anxiety) - "Am I your friend or not"?"

Yes, any community has to constantly define and protect its borders, if it wants to retain its existence as such. But how permeable / flexible can the borders be? Do permeability / felxibility have any relation to the community's collective creativity? These things, together with the new ones I'll read here, will be running around in my mind.

Best,
Eugenio.




--- El mar, 7/13/10, Simon Biggs <s.biggs at eca.ac.uk> escribió:

> De: Simon Biggs <s.biggs at eca.ac.uk>
> Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] Hello from Hell
> A: "soft_skinned_space" <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>, empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Fecha: martes, 13 de julio de 2010, 12:56 pm
> Living in Scotland I have evidence
> for the opposite take on creativity and
> temperature. Even in the Summer it is can be so cold you do
> not want to get
> out of a warm bed. Being originally from South Australia, a
> hot place at
> times, I remember the blistering heat and its draining
> effects on energy.
> However, I also fondly remember long nights in the studio
> working during the
> cooler (eg: less than 40c) hours. I am not sure which is
> the more
> deleterious to creativity.
> 
> But, putting the weather to one side...and addressing each
> of Kriss's knotty
> and knotted points.
> 
> 1. I hope we are not restricting ourselves to the visual.
> My hope was that
> this theme would allow us to discuss creativity in general,
> not visual (or
> any other) art in particular.
> 
> 2. I agree that experience is creative and therefore a form
> of agency. I
> would also argue that it is not something restricted to
> particular forms of
> experience (eg: interpretation) nor to certain kinds of
> agent (eg:
> conscious). I would like to suggest that creativity is
> about relationships,
> interactions rather than actions. You mention Deleuze on
> this point, but we
> could also look to Tim Ingold's thinking concerning the
> nature of relations,
> interaction and agency. To some extent he counters but also
> augments
> Latour's approach, describing the eliciting of creativity
> as less a quality
> of interactions than "lines along which things continually
> come into being.
> Thus when I speak of the entanglement of things I mean this
> literally and
> precisely: not a network of connections but a meshwork of
> interwoven lines
> of growth and movement" (see ref), possibly evoking
> Deleuze's use of the
> metaphor of the rhizome. To me this (poetically) evokes
> Darwin's "tangled
> bank", itself a metaphor for creativity and agency beyond
> the human and
> certainly beyond the narrow conceptions of an exclusive
> creative arts
> discourse.
> 
> 3. From this position it is impossible to disagree with
> Foucault's take on
> art being about sign value and property. One could regard
> art as the
> utilisation and capitalisation of creativity (the
> Situationist position and
> one that Baudrillard echoed). This dynamic can also be seen
> to affect other
> domains of creativity, such as scientific inquiry or
> invention (tinkering,
> relating to your reference to tacit knowledge). Governments
> and corporations
> (and many of us in our daily lives) refer to this as
> innovation, seeking to
> neuter creativity as agency and deploy what is left as art.
> We hope to
> render the potential of our interactions (creativity) safe.
> Our institutions
> are there to ensure this happens. The question then is how
> we remove these
> safety barriers and, perhaps more probematically, how we
> could live in such
> an unsafe world? Perhaps we really do need to be
> protected?
> 
> 4. I am not sure how to approach the idea of thinking
> images in this
> context. Images can be thinking, but can they think? I
> would be tempted to
> agree. It depends on what you mean by thinking (and
> meaning). Can images
> have agency? Yes. Can images make meaning in their
> relations, irrespective
> of human intent? Yes. However, agency is about
> interactions. Can the
> interaction between images, without interpretation, be
> meaningful? I'm not
> sure. If there is no reception in this chain of events then
> is there meaning
> (what is meaning)? Perhaps. But I like the idea and often
> use it in my own
> (auto-generative) work (writing that writes itself and is
> not intended to be
> read by people but by other instances of automatic
> writing).
> 
> 5. Nothing ever only takes place in the brain and lots of
> our interactions
> do not involve the brain at all. As for the mind, does that
> take place in
> the brain? I would treat the relationship of the mind to
> the brain
> similarly.
> 
> 6. Innovation (utilitarian creativity) possibly does
> require privacy. I am
> not so sure about creativity per se.
> 
> 7. ...and yes, intimacy and privacy are not the same
> thing.
> 
> ref: Ingold, T (2008) Bringing things to life: Creative
> entanglements in a
> world of materials, presented at the Material Worlds
> symposium, Brown
> University, http://proteus.brown.edu/cogutmaterialworlds/4080
> 
> Best
> 
> Simon
> 
> 
> Simon Biggs
> s.biggs at eca.ac.uk 
> simon at littlepig.org.uk
> Skype: simonbiggsuk
> http://www.littlepig.org.uk/
> 
> Research Professor  edinburgh college of art
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/
> Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative
> Environments
> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/
> Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and
> Innovation in Practice
> http://www.elmcip.net/
> Centre for Film, Performance and Media Arts
> http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/film-performance-media-arts
> 
> 
> > From: Kriss Ravetto <k.ravetto at ed.ac.uk>
> > Reply-To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> > Date: Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:13:49 +0100
> > To: <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> > Subject: [-empyre-] Hello from Hell
> > 
> > 
> > Hi [-empyre-] Creativity as a social ontology
> community,
> > 
> > I have been baking here on the East Coast of the US
> with the record
> > heat wave, and I agree with the point about creativity
> and temperature
> > (I do not feel very creative).  Apologies if I am
> not coherent, there
> > is still some morning breeze here.
> > 
> > Given that I come to the question of creativity and
> social networking
> > through critical theory ? I teach film and media
> theory at the
> > University of Edinburgh.  I am aware I am going
> to change the tone a
> > bit.  I would like to start by rethinking a few
> points (particularly
> > terms)  that came up in last week?s discussion,
> and ask if James and
> > Simon had some thoughts about these issues:
> > 
> > 1)  ?a tendency to focus only on the visual.?
> Hasn?t this  focus on
> > the visual changed with immersive and more interactive
> work that
> > attempts to be more affective (trigger kinesthetic as
> well as
> > emotional responses)?
> > 
> > 2) ?complex nature of our experience? ? How do we
> understand
> > experience? Isn?t it also creative? Or are we back to
> oppositions
> > about active / passive, the singular and the
> general.  Experience
> > seems to fall into the category of what Deleuze called
> the problematic
> > since it cannot be singular (yet we perceive it as
> such), since it
> > requires action, interaction, mediation, and some
> creative
> > interpretation.  When we talk about ?our
> experience? are we talking
> > about something that is also a creative network ? that
> is not owned by
> > anyone?
> > 
> > 3)  artist genius as Foucault argued is now a
> question of signature
> > which means copyright and
> legality.   The social science network seems
> > to operate on different principles and I would argue
> that it is a
> > platform designed to produce social creative
> ontology.
> > 
> > 4)  I am curious about what people mean by the
> ?ideology of the
> > visual.? If images think then they must not think in
> terms of
> > language, but in terms of images, no? Therefore, if we
> are talking
> > ideology, aren?t we talking the creation of visual
> concepts.  The
> > problem here is can a single image think, or do we
> need a chain of
> > images to think (like the Lacanian chain of
> signifiers, i.e. the
> > cinematic)?  This has been debated since the
> 1960s (Metz, Pasolini,
> > Dayan, Mulvey, etc.)
> > 
> > 5)  When we talk about sense, we talk about it as
> tacit knowledge.
> > Where does sense take place: take vision for instance,
> do we claim it
> > only takes place in the brain? Or are there other
> interfaces? Do they
> > make sense?
> > 
> > 
> > 6) When we talk about Privacy or secrecy / trade
> secrets (i.e., no
> > open lab) then yes, innovation needs privacy in its
> inception. (This
> > is the subject of my husband's Mario Biagioli?s,
> current work, "From
> > Ciphers to Confidentiality" in States of Secrecy).
> > 
> > 
> > 7) Intimacy leads us in a completely different
> direction. Privacy is
> > the problematic term here: when we refer to secrecy
> (in terms of
> > innovation, we are talking trade secrets, and nothing
> intimate), but
> > rights to privacy do touch on this, yet again, privacy
> seems to me,
> > not to be intimate.  Innovation or creative
> communities need not be
> > intimate, unless we are redefining what this term
> means.   Also, I am
> > not sure that intimacy is related to place.
> > 
> > But this leads to the question of platforms as
> space.  How does a site
> > relate to space? Yes, we can reveal intimate secrets
> on such sites,
> > but there is something spatially distinct an
> estrangement, and at the
> > same time the spectacular (as Victor Burgin argues).
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body,
> registered in
> > Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
> 
> 
> Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in
> Scotland, number SC009201
> 
> 
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