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20180918

A art-critical/pedagogical practice with teenagers: School of Performance (1995) Avdej Ter-Oganian.

Received my copy of Malfeasance – Appropriation Through Pollution? (2011) Michel Serres. I dislike his etymological, latently nostalgic word games. He adores a reality that remains inaccessible for non-germanic folk (this statement is best exemplified by a cry on pg. 55. “Old Europe, what ignorant ruling class is killing you?”). But I like the coarse tone of the book. He argues that human cruelty is derived from the cruelty of our neighbouring animals and that a process in religious practices, which developed the concepts of afterlife and holy-land (sites that are not tainted by bodily impurities), were needed to produce a tangible, object-like earth for us to habit and study. Science is possible only through religious traditions.

Serres argues that people who seek to live without producing waste are modernity-producing-myth-reenactors. He argues that the founding myth of modernity is a story of a man who left his grave without leaving any waste behind: “[L]eaving no trace whatsoever that would allow us to infer a history”. This myth enforces the de-territorialization of localized cultures: Colonization of any-and-all terrain is possible only because there is a holy-land which lies beyond reach. “[O]ur being is not there” or even here, someone else will judge us – We are tenants of our bodies.

Current economic schemes which focus on intangible services and brands echo the same shift. This has a convenient impact on consumer culture: When we were branded clothes we get excused from the pollution these objects develop into. The objects are just on loan – This means that hiding a logo is a process of claiming responsibility over it.

Human misery marks the limit of possible life. Those who have a place have. Those who have no place have nothing, strictly speaking. Do they exist? They have fallen below the level of animals. (pg.12)’

I don’t agree with his view that “our appliances rig out the organs of our bodies”. I believe the body has the potential to change and the potential to develop into something else then flesh-defined, which has other then personal desires. For me “exo-darwinism” in development can result to altruism. Serres points out that “since the emergence of blacksmiths” we have know that, the stuff we produce taints the world and destroys habitats. Our understanding of the anthropocene is not new. We know that we are wasteful and do it anyway. He argues that we cause pollution to keep the nature at bay, to kill tigers. I wrote something similar in 2016 “Zoos provide us an opportunity to approach animals rationally”.

[…] sewers, garbage barges, factories. and loudspeakers can be thought of as orifices, pores, mouths, anuses. […] Our species wins out and becomes the master and possessor of nature. (pg.40)

The text might offer me some tools to develop a “performance architectural” / postricturalistic analysis of build environments too. Serres talks about language as a maze, which locks subjects inside it using prepositions (in, for, to, from). These spaces (made of prepositions!) pit us against each other by creating categories of subject/object. Prepositions feel like a great route for developing and understanding of text as space / space as text!

[…] this is how the walls of a dwelling or the partitions of a room function. (pg. 44)

Serres claims that e-waist is send intentionally to “the mangroves of poor countries” to cause disarray and recolonize these sites and that we should see advertisement selling e-goods as exactly the same waste. He continues that mass-media (facebook etc.) makes it impossible to talk to out neighbours (by monopolizing communications): Streams of noisy information appropriate all possible relations, everywhere.

Spatial expansion is becoming total. (pg. 52)

Pollution should be addressed simultaneously as a hard substance and a soft coercive substance. The division between hard and soft pollution (ie. e-waste and e-good advertisement) is superficial: Both manifest the same desire. He does not want to separate nature from culture? Because of pollution “We can no longer enclose a piece of land”. Pollution makes it possible for us to envision collaborations without a need for nationstates!

Consequently pollution, both hard and soft, signs its will to power, its desire to expand spatially – yes, the war of all against all. (pg.68)

Serres believes that we have reached an impasse. Wars are over because there is no space to fight over, our war against the world is at its end. He believes that humans can and will destroy every other species. He does not believe that new species will emerge from pollution.

The war against the world replaces, integrates, summons, adds . . . and terminates all the wars among men. Peace with the world requires peace between men.

Idea: Make waffles out of plastic by melting milk jug lids. #ॐ

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20180917

The most important text written by a person of Finnish origins in years (possibly ever).  Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note (2018) Linus Torvalds.

My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.

To tie this all back to the actual 4.19-rc4 release (no, really, this _is_ related!) I actually think that 4.19 is looking fairly good, things have gotten to the “calm” period of the release cycle, and I’ve talked to Greg to ask him if he’d mind finishing up 4.19 for me, so that I can take a break, and try to at least fix my own behavior.

I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow.

And yes, some of it might be “just” tooling. Maybe I can get an email filter in place so at when I send email with curse-words, they just won’t go out. Because hey, I’m a big believer in tools, and at least _some_ problems going forward might be improved with simple automation.

I know when I really look “myself in the mirror” it will be clear it’s not the only change that has to happen, but hey… You can send me suggestions in email.

We visited Magazzino and Dia: Beacon last week with the ISCP crew. Both sites were spectacular and the trip led to an observation.

At a glance the supermarkets in New York seem to have absolutely everything. The shelves are jampacked with cans, boxes and soft plastic bags – But when one investigates them closely it’s apparent that the shelves are empty. An entire isle can boast a spectacular variety of cans, dressed in different colors and ornamented with different brands but if inspected, they are all the same product. All of the cans have beans in them. Supermarkets house a phantom of variety.

Dia: Beacon exhibition felt the same. When I entered the space I was confronted with 20 meters of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes. At first it felt spectacular. But I felt an eerie stab as I realized that they were all the same art piece. I tried to think of this as a form of critique, but after witnessing the same logic applied to nearly every other artist in the exhibition, it became clear that the function of the site was to celebrate abundances, masses and superstructures which facilitate the production of clones. Minimalist artworks in the Dia: Bacon setting came off as a clone army of proto-zombie formalistic stuff. This was not a disappointing experiences, on the contrary: It felt like strolling past colorful isles at Macy’s. It’s relaxing to see stuff.

Learned about David Hammons’ Pissed Off (1981). A bright sight, sabotage is the way forward. More on the performance Stop And Piss: David Hammons’ Pissed Off (2013).

I had an intensive week. I’m editing my PhD proposal, applying for additional funding for Trans-Horse and met with Lisa Le Feuvre from the Holt/Smithson foundation (concerning Land- and Environmental Art Conservation). Prepared a 4k video of our work on Up and Under (1998) from the still photos I shot in 2013.

 

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20180820

Reading chapter 3 of Theatres of Immanence – Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (2013) Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, in preparation of todays Performance Philosophy Reading Group at the CPR – Center for Performance Research.  The text has a very nice summary of Deleuze & Guattaris’ notes on animals, with a focus on the processes of becoming-animal and the art of butoh co-founder Hijikata Tatsumi and artist Marcus Coates. The author claims that “time-based arts of performance (and video) […] are particularly well suited to drawing our attention to the difference between human and nonhuman as a temporal one, as something to do with relative speed of perception and action”. I agree! When horses are conveyed trough a medium such as video they are flattened (abused). This abuse makes it more easy to identify how technologies that are perceived as neutral (such as cameras and roads) enforce human-centric world making (only humans fit in camera frames).

Humans and nonhuman animals are not ontologically different in kind […] rather they differ in terms of what their bodies can do, in terms of their affects, which includes the relationship their bodies have to duration. […] becoming-animal in performance involves embodying new ways of being in time and, in doing so, exploring how we might expand, extend or otherwise alter our human powers of perception and sensation alongside those of nonhuman animals.

The text offers a very short summary of “animals on stage” art-thinking, arguing that theatre is the last human venue were distinctions between humans and animals are played out. Animals on stage create a rupture from representation: The presence of live animals introduces a non or anti-intentional force (This applies in an interesting way to Mounted Police forces – The horses cannot be negotiated with, hence law is only enacted). The text also identifies that the stage as an apparatus attaches meaning (or the illusion of intention) to the animals presented on it.

According to Nakajima Natsu, a student of both Hijikata and [Kazuo] Ohno, Hijikata instited on the need for dancers to track down ‘all the signs of domestication of the body’, to locate their habitual ways of moving and to attempt to shed them like a dead skin. […] ‘Forms exist so that we can forget them’.

Butoh as an unlearning, body re-wilding process? An opposition to bodybuilding? Anyway… Butoh is not based on the notion of a sovereign author, nor does it assume the value of bodily control. Imitation might be necessary for becoming-animal but practitioners should believe that they can actually become animals.

‘You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog’. [Deleuze & Guattari]

Deleuze & Guattari use the term animal as a verb: “The wold is not fundamentally a characteristic or a certain number of characteristics; it is a wolfing”.

[…] the affects or powers of a body are not fixed for Deleuze; rather, they are constantly increasing and decreasing depending on to what extent the other bodies we encounter ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ with us, to what extent they bring us ‘joy’ or ‘sadness’. What I can do is extended or expanded when I encounter a body that brings me joy […] ‘the affects of hoy are like a springboard that makes us pass trough something that we would never have been able to pass if there had only been sadness’ [Deleuze].

[…] affect has its own reality that comes prior to and produces affected bodies.

Can horses join these realities? Yes they can! When we act as their prosthetics in navigation (trough us horses have access to the internet). When we loose contact from each other, we cannot have access to the same reality again. If I die the horse will not miss me, it will brief for my death in a similar way I grief for something I’ve forgot. Something which I cant remember anymore.

Affect is not synonymous with human emotion, for Deleuze and Guattari; rather, it ‘crosses species boundaries that are normally ontologically policed’, passing between bodies of differing species and drawing them into ‘unnatural participation’ and ‘unholy alliances’.

Becoming is not product or goal oriented, constantly aiming to arrive at some imagined end-point; rather, Deleuze and Guattari insist that ‘becoming produces nothing other than itself’ or, again that ‘there is nothing outside of becoming to become’.

Focusing on speed (as an issue when forming relationships with animals) reminds me of Eyal Weizmans’ observation of highways of “walls of speed” which are intended to segregate citizens.

Different animals have different ways of being in time that produce what lies above and below their threshold of perception.

In the text this idea is explored further in relation to  dynamic is discussed in relation to Marcus Coates Dawn Chorus (2007) video. During the production of the video they realised that when a birds song is slowed down, more notes can be identified (realtime 4-5 notes, slowed down up to 40 notes).

[…] the political dimensions of becoming-animal lie in its resistance to an ontological distinction, and therefore hierarchy between human and nonhuman animals. […] Two ways of performing this opening […] are to affirm the immanence of becoming to imitation; and to explore affects as a durational or temporal relation. […] Deleuze’s emphasis on affet invites us to break with the condescension of pity in favour of ‘unnatural partisipation’

I don’t think that anthropomorphism is bad. It is a form of imitation, a process of simulating other beings (in a human-sense-making matrix). It can be helpful for developing genuine localised knowledge of animals. For example rumours of a horses behaviour, explained in human-terms, passed forwards at a stable environment, may help us understand how to better work with a particular animal. Anthropomorphism also gives us important information on how we approach others: It helps us map out the specificities of our human-centric understanding and highlights our failures in developing an understanding of others (hiding it, will not change it).

Also, Timothy Morton argues that it’s telling how stigmatised anthropomorphism is: Perhaps it’s not permitted to sympathise with a pigs, because showing sympathy towards them would reveal their exploitation to be sadistic and cruel (But Humans are not bad, right? We’re only “misinformed”.) Jason Hribal argues that by retelling anthropomorphic stories, we can show the mechanism that build institutions which benefit from the humans/animal (and master/slave) divisions. For example: Disney stories illustrate our disgust to some species, only after this informations is outed we can affect it.

Side note: Humans can only slow down information (to make it understandable for themselves) but they cannot speed up their information intake – Humans always hear in “real time”#ॐ. If fast information streams are slowed down they can come understandable for humans (because data of the recoding becomes accessible to human sense-making and perception speeds), but slow messages will loose their data when they are speeded up (because the data is compressed and the resolution will be too high for human sense-making and perception). This means that humans cannot develop realities with beings, which make sense at a slower pace then they do. Even when they alter the speed in which signs of slower-then-human-sense-making-animals are experienced (ie. the speed of a recording of whale singing), they cannot make sense of what they hear slow enough. This means that human relationships to beings that reside in slower pace realities are noisy. To gain information from such realms, humans need to decrypt their experience, which is a slow and time consuming process. Humans must think fast to understand slow.

 

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20180813

I got the opportunity to interview Agnes Denes last Saturday at her Soho studio. The interview focused on the conservation efforts of the Tree Mountain (1998).

I asked her what it felt like when it was discovered that the rice of the Rice/Tree/Burial (1968) was contaminated (the soil used in the planting was from a nuclear plant water cooling overflow site and the rice developed a red hue). She explained that that was not a problem for her, as it is inevitable that artworks change. Artworks in galleries change when audiences see them and art made outdoors changes when nature effects it (This feels like a reference to Hans Haackes’ Recording of climate in art exhibition, 1968-1970). Like many artists she does not believe that artworks can fail. I continued asking how much an artwork can to change before it becomes a different piece.

Eero: How much can original plans change until…

Agnes: It becomes an other artwork? It does not matter. It doesn’t matter. So it’s an other artwork. It is still used, still your communication, it’s still your mind. It’s not a problem.

This prompted me to think that the Tree Mountain is an artificial intelligence – It has a mind of it’s own, which exists outside the artist and effects the world according to it’s own logic. The Tree Mountain is a complex prosthetic, an organic device which recreates her thinking (perhaps it is a “landscape organism” as Nancy Holt describes the gravel pits in Pinsiö). This means that questions concerning the restoration / conservation of the artwork should also asked from the mountain itself.

I asked her how she defines “visual philosophy” (a term she uses in The Dream, 1990). She explained that when she started as an artist she believed that she could “revitalize all of knowledge” but she soon understood that this was an absurd goal. In the process she started to experiment how to “visualize impossible processes” trough art (such as logic, mathematics etc.) and the concept developed from this. I interpret that “visual philosophy” is a method for displaying material and social structures which produce knowledge: It seeks to create representations of how our perception of the world functions. This is a two way process (at least in the case of the Tree Mountain). When we make sense of the world, we make the world and this worlds then starts to make sense of us. I think this is why she call the mountain “a living monument”.

“Visual philosophy” feels like a prototype of (artistically steered) object orientated ontology. The geometrical shapes she works with, illustrate human processes of sense making. The shapes map-out how human intellects effect the world. The shapes she presents as artworks don’t actually show the world – They show how the world is being made. This feels very similar to the way Robert Smithson talks about maps. He argues that a map is being read in relation to a terrain and the terrain is being read in relation to map but neither produce an authentic reality. If there is something authentic, it is the relationships of these elements (map / terrain).

All of the trees in the mountain are of the same species (this has prompted critique from professionals who work with reforestation). During the interview I learned that there is a reason why all of the trees are the same: They illustrate the arrogance of human design. She explained that the Tree Mountain is “a forest which tries to be a virgin forest” and defined her desire to develop a virgin forest as “arrogant”.

Agnes: We copy and copy and copy. […] We have a tendency of copying. We also have a tendency of not seeing too far because we are surrounded by other sheep.

The trees in the mountain are owned by selected individuals and their ownerships cannot be sold or traded. They are inherited by the owners offspring. People own the artwork but they cannot sell it. This means that the aftermarket of the artwork is designed by the artist.

She is a true pioneer of the environmental art movement. When compared to todays standards, her collaborations with experts (such as the rice expert who identified the contaminated rice of Rice/Tree/Burial) and scientist don’t feel very deep. But this is understandable because institutions or traditions for art&science collaborations did not exist when she started. The act of contacting a rice expert seems small but it was a pioneering gesture. She attempted to develop an understanding of the world by relying on knowledge sourced from outside of her own field. This gesture was motivated by political ambitions (related to de-development!).

Agnes: He [Leonardo DaVinci] was interested in developing things that didn’t exist and I saw the opposition. I was interested in undoing things what did exist. […]

Eero: What did you hope to undo?

Agnes: All of it.

Eero: All of it?

Agnes: Everything. You have to change. You have to not undo it but you have to see the other side. You have to see the other side to understand it.

At first I thought that she’s talking about humanity: But she is talking about knowledge and about undoing the particular kinds of knowledge, which have led to contemporary environmental catastrophes.

I’m currently editing the interview and I hope to interview her again. I’d like her to define what she means when she is talking about “virgin forests” and to envision some kind of utopian future for the artwork with her.

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20180807

Americans have talent. I’ve walked past phenomenal subway performances, rock solid drum work at the curbs, witnessed stage charisma to conquer the world with and heard talks which melt hearts. After witnessing an abundance of near perfect artist presentations, a doubt has emerged: They can’t all be that good (in performance)… What am I missing?

I’ve come to understand that American aesthetics are the current definition of what talent is. They are not better singers, performers or artists: They are the definition of what contemporary singers, performers and artists are. What is considered talent and charisma is defined by American aesthetics.

For example. The European versions of “Got Talent”, “Idols”, “Dancing with the Stars” are not shows about finding talent and identifying charisma. They are shows in which performers compete on who best fits the American standards of the aesthetics of personal presentation.

Unfortunately “working outside ones comfort zone” has been deduced into a style. Americans are locked into a brawl with the past.