Latest Entries
Liam Gillick’s presentation at the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, Oct 24, 2009
16 April '10 by admin, under thoughts.
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Marcel Duchamp clip from The Shock of the New (1982) The Mechanical Paradise
11 April '10 by admin, under artworks, bio-feedback / cybernetics, formal / structural / grids, inter-bodies / half-objects, mirrors / displays / frames, videos.
Here we can see Duchamp’s shift from linear thinking (Nude Descending Staircase) to something more circular (Bride Stripped Bare..), something he would later call “delay”, as Jerrold Segal notes, “suspended in a space it never traverses.”
The clip of course seems to reffer more to these movements in relation to asthetics, psychological and (male) sexual frustration. What is lacking in Robert Hughes analysis lies in relation to a social, political and economical shifts occuring at the time: a shift from a simplified modernist linear progression of technology moving towards a more lateral, circular and rhizomatic technological progression in a lumming post-modern era.
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3#
10 April '10 by admin, under artworks, film / photographic.
3#” uses a track “composed” by media artist Seth Price, its music based on the forms of 1980s electronic pop songs. Price uses music production software to copy the structure of popular music from the recent past. By editing out one element (in this case, the singer), he comments on the genre through an imperfect copy. The video uses text (some quoted from Morrissey’s lyrics) and graphic transitions to outline an argument about how and why pop music functions, pointing to its promises of unique, infamous, and sublime experiences through repetition and mass distribution.
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Jorge Pardo: Project – Design Process as outcome
31 March '10 by admin, under artworks, books, formal / structural / grids.
Jorge Pardo. Project, 2000. Volkswagen Full Scale Model, 1995.
Photo: Cathy Carver.
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I
30 March '10 by admin, under thoughts.
standing for I, Identity and Index
The mapping of emergent subject surfaces.
Map of rhizomes.
My existence is irreconcileable with itself. Nothing in me is singular. I am many. “Man’s soul is entities (plural)” -Aristotle.
Does thought confer identity? Does interaction with the other confer identity? Perhaps the answer to these question depends on what “thought” and “interaction” mean? Thinking and interacting always belong to Being (as what makes it possible) but it does not always (indeed it hardly ever) correspond to Being. It is not always faithful to Being. When it is so faithful, “Being and thinking are the Same”. But it is never the case that thinking can be without Being, whereas Being can certainly be without thinking or interacting, though without being realized, i.e. without being “in truth”.
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Re-distribution of the Sensible
30 March '10 by admin, under books, thoughts.
The following bit of text is from Re-distribution of the Sensible catalogue, text by Warren Neidich:
“The logics of perception and experience are no longer materialistically defined only by contours of geometric and linear time and space arranged hierarchically in a rigid lattice but rather follow curved, non-linear Rheimannian paradigms that are expressed in complicated, non-hierarchical, rhizomatic shifting patterns. Consider for a moment the way commodities are now linked together as branded networks that intensify their desire quotient or how people communicate on chat rooms or move in and out of blog sites. Sovereignty, utilizing these methods and those of the global market place with the help of the continuing scientific research on perception and cognition, has conspired in creating powerful complex networks of attention which allow for the manufacture of explicit “connectiveness” that today defines the distribution of the sensible. Phatic Stimuli, as Paul Virilio refers to them, have evolved into highly attention grabbing conglomerates of stimuli that act as multiplicities and operate beyond the sensorium reaching into the folded gyri and sulci of the brain itself. These networks form a hegemonic cultural syntax which is inscribed en mass on the society as a whole producing new forms of subjectivity and in the case of a world tuned into global media, a bounded multitude. When these networks are internalized and become part of the automatic operation of the body’s or mind’s habitual relationships they form a Society of Control rather then the Disciplinary Society. Self-Censorship is a perfect example of the Society of Control and how insidiously this process becomes self-evident. These images together produce the “Institutional Understanding”. This “institutional understanding” is the framework through which most of us operate in the real world of material things.
But artists also create their own distribution of the sensible. They use their own historical referents, materials, processes, apparati, spaces, performances, to create complex assemblages that together compete with institutional arrangements for the attention of the brain and mind. [...]
They inhabit the same spaces and temporalities as the institutional arrangements that characterize the institutional understanding. Their presence however acts to bend and contort it, in the end, altering its static and rigid arrangements in significant ways. Works like installation art, performative sculpture and urban geographies act to redistribute the facts of this distribution of the sensible while conceptually-based works, relational aesthetics and the institutional critique operate on more metaphysical levels superimposing meaning, contexts and critiques upon it in order to change the way those distributions are read and understood and processed for instance as memories.” The Re-destribution of the Sensible – Warren Neidich.
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Human figure in public art
30 March '10 by admin, under dance / body motion, inter-bodies / half-objects, public art, thoughts.
The human cannot be seen anymore through the figure of the body in its tradition sense. In order to engage with the human body is a question of ignoring, forgetting it, and replacing it with what ever we have leanrt it not to be. From here let the unexpected forms which we originally thought to be unrepresentable of the human a chance to develop and embody human manifestations. The paradox of this thinking follows the paradoxes which emerge with defining the human in the digital age.
The human figure has already gone a transgression embodying everything else but itself.
I want my audience to feel this flow from displacement to a “new” re-embodiment (Mark Hansen explains quite neatly the definition of “new” in new media). This is what I believe to be at the core of anti-monument public art. Anti in the sense of responding to the traditional and narcissistic attitude of engaging with the human figure and understanding what might be. Of course I’m in no way presenting a solution but a redefinition of the problem which I think is at heart in public art. (and public art which relates to its history and respondes to it in a constructive yet marginal way).
The first step I believe is to create a complete rupture from any narcissistic tendecies in the construction of any discourse related to identifying where ‘is’ the human and the self (if any definition of that still survives) inside the art in question. And focus on things that might have been disgarded and neglected in order to create this conventional perspective in the first place.
To understand the problem at stake we need to revisit the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus in which the act of creating the world is partly through forgetting to insert the human in it. Their desparate solution to fix this problem was to give the human “fire” to compensate his lack of qualities. This act of forgetting I believe comes very much in play when considering new media and new media art: flows from disembodiment and reembodiment experienced through such systems requires us to rethink the origins of the human “figure” and human “essense”.
Yes, I do hate Anthony Gormley.
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Research Diagram
23 March '10 by admin, under Uncategorized, books, thoughts.
Stated using gliffy to create diagrams for organizing thoughts and the content for my current writtings. Here is a link to research diagram
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A Self Burial by the Sea
15 March '10 by admin, under artworks, public art.
The Glue Society has unveiled its latest installation at the Sculpture by the Sea festival in Aarhus in Denmark. The piece, entitled “It wasn’t meant to end like this”, is a huge mechanical digger that seems to have buried itself under 300 tonnes of rubble…
As the Glue Society’s James Dive says, “[the work] has a subdued, still quality, despite its physical size.” It certainly gives the impression that this 25 tonne digger is attemtping to hide itself away.
“It wasn’t meant to end like this” follows previous artistic explorations via a sculpture of a miniature man defecating on a ten foot pigeon (shown in New York) and their infamous God’s Eye View project, which attracted hundreds of comments on the CR blog.
Sculpture by the Sea, the Australian sculpture festival, has recently added Aarhus to its roster of visiting cities. Other work by the Glue Society collective can be viewed at gluesociety.com.
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Making This Post Public, Is It Worth It?
09 March '10 by admin, under Uncategorized.
It seems to me necessary to mention, at this stage, that one of the main functions of this blog are for a personal access to what has become a very large database of ideas and sketches that I have accumulated over more than 4 years. Less than 2% is actually made public on this blog. With how my practice has developed over the last year it seems important to speak about this private function to a tool that seems to be primordially for a public expression of ideas and concerns, and of sharing. My decision to make most of my post private does not come from the fact of fear of my ideas being stolen but of in a very simple way further explore the sense of holding back and symultaneosly (or contradictory to its essense) showing signs of an interface. I feel to some extent that this hesitation, (could be seen as a counter sadomasocistic ritual described by Deleuze and Gautarri when reffering to “Body without organs” whipped into a formless and empty vessle to entice further desire and flow. My concern is mainly a concern over questions of perserving a discourse on subjectivity as such, and not a sense that I think I’m holding back something that I think is too good. This also does not mean that I defend on this conservative notion of sensing a threat on my privacy, or an abuse of my good will of becoming public, I’m not interested in that, I dont think. Other concerns might be linked with the fact that I write very badly, I’m all too aware of my dislexsia and my love for writting sentences with no verbs. Hopefully the quality of writting will increase the more I write and practice. Again this adds to the ideas and general fustration surrounding the lowering of the quality of communication due to the reputation that a “blog” has gained over the last years – exposing (and more and more often forcing) a wave of lazy and badly constructed english. But seeing this in a historical context this has always been an interesting phenomena to observe the fabrication of slang and new ways of writting and speaking. These changes in communication seems to be more and more dependent on the technological structures through which spoken or written word flows, from the telegraph, fax, email to the revolutionary text messaging. The blog is simply another one of those technologies that shapes language into new representations…. But yet, going back to my initial idea: Its more a question of discussing what it means to be who I am, how does that change when someone decides to go the whole mile and do their best to throw up everything they can think of (or not think of)? Are they more themselves than I am myself? Who defines that, where and when are these validations going on?
I’m am in pursuit of a subtle challenge, or intervention, on the actual nature of this system and question its social function(s). To turn its skin around, and to redefine the space of its insertion.
I find it interesting that what lies between me and the world is a lousy (hardly visible) button on my wordpress dashboard that changes posts from private to public with one (unconscious) click. Yes, we could associate this with something like Doctor Strange Love and the whole activity and intellectual production of humankind being boiled down to the decision of pressing the button and destroy the entire planet…or not.
Emma Heddith, for example, is an artist I had the priviledge to meet during my stay at the Wysing Artrs Centre in early February 2010. Her works seems to master this space of hesitation before appearing, with a delicate but precise tone and criticality.
Click here to view some of her interventions, or maybe better described as pre-interventions: http://www.overidentification.blogspot.com/
The title of this blog comes actually from one of her projects called ‘Coming To Have a Public Life, Is It Worth It?’ at ‘Art Now Live’, Tate Britain, London (2007)