Intracranial pressure, unpleasant
tension in the brain.. Ears like plugged and tends to sleep, but the body
cannot stay in peace and requires a movement resulting eventually in a
repetitive motion.[1]
Igor and Gleb Aleinikov
Preface
A state of panic, depression or
other types of anxiety seem to be the main agents causing the rhythmical
expression of the body gestures. Forming a repetitive pattern, in
this case, can be seen as the ultimate expression of individual autonomy,
perhaps as a form of meditation. Since the brain areas
that control cognitive and motor functions overlap with each other, repetitive
actions can relieve us from excess nervous energy, thus facilitating
concentration in moments of crises. It
significantly contributes and facilitates attention or perhaps - it is an
attention.
Repetitive actions can also be a big stimuli for mobilizing the
physical and mental energy that determines an individual’s market value in
general. Using a rhythm as a means for exploiting individual force, in sake of
a somewhat communal project, is a practice rooted and traced to
perhaps the very beginning of any social formation. Subjecting individuals to a
consent rhythm and patterns of repetition is granted as the only way to
contribute any extrinsic communal body, be it oared warships in ancient times
or a pornography in contemporaneity, revealing sexuality as a “performance,
public practice of a regulated repetition”[2].
It is through this externalisation of the performative body that rhythmical
repetition is able to constitute itself as an interface between the individual
and the social. Rhythm connects the individual with a community and expresses
him/her within the collective.
In the social sense the repetitiveness can be compared to the
biological processes where several contingent elements have to be subjected to
the consent rhythm in order to form a functional superior body. This urge for
cohesion from the side of consisting elements can be explained perhaps by
acknowledgement of their temporality and awareness of death. But what strives
those individuals to the first type of repetition (that is described here as
personal)? Most likely the causes are the same: suspense when facing “the void
of our own mental screen”[3],
as well as of the existence in general.
In utopian society those two polarities would have no separate
existence, but in the contemporary world with its increasing convergence of
social and geopolitical realms, where individuals are obscured by prevailing
social media, the urge for self-identification and self-declaration seems to be
the main driving motor creating the binary opposition between those of
individual units and social body. But what is an opposition if not the lack of
connection and communication, and the absence of valid interface in-between?
Due to rapidly increasing density, humanity seems to overpass
the natural state of society, moderated by environmental circumstances (e.g.
their correlation to other species), thus approaching the hyper state of
implosion when society is absorbed into its own body (an analogy can be found
in the astronomical black hole). Constituting units are too converged, thus too
active without given chance (or space) for passivity. (I cannot refrain from mentioning Gregory G. Sholette ‘dark matter’[4]
as well, where he describes the dominating integral part of society, dense
average population - staying invisible but still creating the gravitational
field of that society). Overwhelming rhythm seemed to be escalated here
to the highest degree, leaving no other option than
one of the operational machines to act in the tact to the dictated repetition.
The distinction between compulsive repetition and collaboration seems to be
fully dissolved in the prevailing noise of machinery convulsion of the social
body.
In contrast, contemporary art is
granted freedom previously unimaginable. Artists' practices are now based exclusively
“on personal sovereign decisions that are not in need of any further
explanation or justification”[5]. Today it seems that the radical separation
between artist and audience that Boris Groys mentioned in his book “Going
Public,” is approaching its apogee: rapid increase of participatory art events
is perhaps a definite symptom (and not an objection) to this argument. Art
is becoming a shelter and asylum for repressed individuality – a means by which
one can still provoke and affect the external rhythm. But what is the internal
here, described as a “personal sovereign” and how can artistic freedom be
understood? Is any kind of mastering the self on some level not a social
demand? Maybe this freedom can only be expressed in forms of rebellion –
perhaps a voluntary submission of the self to anguish in Phalaris’s bull (as
Kierkegaard has described it)[6]?
Or perhaps the desert islands described by Deleuze[7].
But what can the artists look for in a place deserted by rhythm, and what is
the abovementioned personality of the repetitive motion in this respect? What
is the source of that motion that results from that anguish and anxiety?
Perhaps the lack of connection again, perhaps the bad interface.
Too many perhapses. I just need to act. I just need to react and
wait..
1
Dance / Performance
Nothing is more profoundly, more
thoroughly pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every
sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.[8]
F. Nietzsche. Antichrist.
Rhythm does not requires us to
think – it strives to exploit, exhaust and destroy the body. Rhythm despoils us
of strength, rhythm deprives responsibility, it takes our freedom away, it
makes us functional, it gives an energy, it liberates us from isolation, it
strengthens. It variates us from operational machines to creative entities. It
does not obligate us to be alive (non-living bodies can be rhythmed). Doesn't
that mean it liberates life from obligations?
As Richard Rorty stated once “The
fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free
inside.... The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an
autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under
a despotic government is nonsense…” Does the same rule apply to
individuals engaged in certain rhythmical repetition or maybe it’s the other
way around - the mechanisation of the body liberates our mental
capacities? What is artistic freedom, or what is left to do in this context if we
are already deprived of supposed autonomy? Perhaps too late… Perhaps too
engaged… We have eaten the apple and have no need to regret it. We created the concept of Humanity and there is no way to retreat
from it now: we just need good tools – good interfaces in-between.
If nothing goes right go left. If individuals are destined to be
part of rhythmical (or lingual) norms is
creative freedom not what resembles
the full immersion into those very norms? A submission by renunciation.
What still can constitute the self here is some source of pleasure and joy. Pleasure and joy for rhythm is perhaps the distinctive
faculty setting a dance apart from a performance; something that
personalises and makes possible an action,
separating it from operation.
In contrast with a performance,
dance does not require a stage, feedback, justification and attention, but just
a sense of rhythm. It has no remunerative value. It is liberated from the
orthodoxies that constrain just about every other form of activity. It is only
attained by the full absence
of obligations. Dance does not need a viewer.
The
issue with the problem of Public Art in contemporary society with its
alienation proliferated by digitalisation of the space, presents itself as a
leitmotif for my recent projects. As a public artist, to provoke, challenge and
improvise with somewhat conventional connections, feels like the agenda of my artistic
practice in general. An artist acting “as legislator, as a sovereign of the
installation space - even, and maybe especially so,
if the Law given by the artist to a community of visitors is a democratic one,”[9]
still retains a distance from that community and remains external to the order
he created. He creates a community of spectators “but does so without belonging
to this community, remaining outside it”[10]
that hinders any possible intimacy necessary for the dance (but still eligible
for performance). The strategy I have chosen here is based on the concept of
Derrida's Pharmakon as a
self-contained medium formed by oppositions in it (poison and cure), and it
presupposes this digitalised environment as the remedy for solving the problem.
Dancing with a spectator – an activity that requires probably some new
means of communication. Exploration and experimentation of that communication
is perhaps the main motto and inspiration for my thesis work.
2
Communication
(Inner experience)
Coming from a culture widely influenced by transitory processes
and period of uncertainty, my practice as an artist was mainly shaped by the
subject of estrangement within urban areas and social spheres, mainly brought
about by the archaic forms of the inherited public relations and transvaluation
of those relations. My projects were mostly directed towards an exploration of
new and unconventional intersections of on some levels antithetical objects
(e.g. destructive properties of nature and digital firmness, public idioms and
private feeling, artist and spectator) and the properties gained as a result of
combination, forming the new set of possible interfaces, maybe more responsible
ones to our contemporary needs.
My artistic activity still bears a deep trace of that initial
inspiration keeping me curious to any kind of social or cultural structure.
Finding some possible void in them as the means for reformation brings a new
perspective of challenges that stimulates my working process on every project.
Practicing public art in a Kulturstadt like Weimar in this context seems like a
perfect synergy for investigations: the spectator with the aesthetic view
shaped through the highly admired ancestors in the field of art and culture,
and this authoritarian cultural background of the site where every intervention
is prone to bare the mark of vice and kind of blasphemy towards the
overwhelming patrimony of the city, became the main incite for my interventions
in the public sphere. This hereditary culture fully absorbed by museums and
institutions, casting legitimate sovereignty and ambivalent glance over
everything that is novel or experimental, presents the problem of the
contemporary role of a public artist in this historically inertial milieu of established
forms and images. But as I stated before every suspicion, ambivalence and
ambiguity is an affect caused by lack of communication, and the absence of a
valid interface.
The urge to create a new connection can be traced in all of my
previous and recent works. The first investigation within the legacy of Weimar
resulted in a video work ‘The Way to Buchenwald’ where I depicted the shift of
emotional experience of travellers on a particular road. I regularly took this
specific bus and observed the actions of the passengers, thus determining the
most characteristic patterns of behaviour. I tried to link those patterns to
the possible emotional experience of the travellers of the same road around 7
decades earlier. The image that came to my mind was the concept of a video game
where attention is concentrated on the features of the road, amplifying and
variating the emotional stream at the same time between hope and frustration,
between death and life. Mapping contemporary private/public obsessions and visualizing
the possible emotional simultaneity, I tried to explore historical connections
based on individual perception of a particular memorial.
Another example in this context is the work ‘The Public Artist’
which I realised during Kunstfest Weimar 2015. The work was an interactive
installation which consisted of a pull switch installed on one of the
streetlights in front of a student dormitory in Weimar. During the two weeks of
the festival every passerby had 24-hour access to switch on and off the light
in the private space where I was living, working and sleeping. The work was
motivated by the existing gap between the students in Weimar and its
inhabitants. Divergence of these two groups probably most clearly presents
itself to the program of Public Art (the studying program which presupposes
engagement between students and local communities). By giving a possibility to the public to
intervene in my privacy and everyday life I tried to create an engaging form of
communication and thus to mitigate the separation.
In some cases I used this tactic to experiment with locally
existing urban problems. In 2012, using the same media (as the one in ‘The
Public Artist’) of an analogue light I challenged my approach with the problems
of underground crossings in Tbilisi: places that seemed so insecure and dark
that pedestrians preferred not to use them but instead to risk their lives by
crossing streets with huge traffic. Several attempts of municipality to
illuminate these spaces was followed by vandal actions (perhaps committed by
some group of local adults) of destroying the lights. That problem of
alienation between city elements and citizens was not particularly site
specific but an effect of the dictatorial past of the post-soviet urban
environment (an urban milieu with no democratic formation, only supposed to
reflect the power of the system) I tried to renew the dialogue, thus evoking
the feeling of privacy by means of interactivity between the opposing sides.
The final piece was the lighting system, where every passerby could change
light conditions and colour of the particular space from red to blue or vice
versa by simply pulling down one of the cables installed throughout the
underpass tunnel. Providing the possibility for engagement with the space
eventually resulted in the prolonged illumination of that space.
The current project that I’m working on, one part of which is
supposed to be realised in the frames of Kunstfest Weimar 2016, is about
exploring forms of communication between artist and spectator in respect of the
new landscape of digital interfaces that are deforming and reforming any
conventional human relationship. ‘The Treadmill Runner’ is focused on forms of
artist-spectator relation – improvising it, modifying it and investigating it
in the context of contemporary social milieu saturated and mediated by all
kinds of algorithms and digital tools. It intends on delving into the
traditional collaboration between viewer and performer, and emphasizing the
distinctive features of it by converting them into the artistic media -
into the consisting part of the artwork itself. Through
the transformation of artist-viewer relation from context to content it tries
to facilitate the anticipation of possible forms of artist-viewer collaboration
in the era of the digital Pharmakon.
3
The prosthesis
In one of the dialogues written by Plato, Socrates describes the
myth of Theuth, god of writing and inventor of many other arts (such as
arithmetic, calculation, geometry, astronomy) but his great discovery was the
use of letters. He proposed his gifts to King Thamus of Egypt who was to
disperse them to his people. When they came to letters that according Theuth
“will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories" Thamus
replied that as father of letters and from a paternal love he has been “led to
attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours
– he goes on – will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they
will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters
and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an
aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth,
but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will
have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know
nothing.”[11]
This remedy for memory described here is articulated by Derrida
in his book Dissemination. To describe the duality, that contains
invention of writing in this case, he develops the theory of Pharmakon that represents something
essentially ambivalent but irreducible to simple binary oppositions - the
notion which already bears its own “opposite” within itself. “The ‘essence’ of
the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no ‘proper’
characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical,
alchemical) of the word, a substance…It is rather the prior medium in which
differentiation in general is produced”.[12]
The content of pharmakon is quite contradictory: whereas Plato’s
approach on writing is quite skeptic, perceiving it to be poisonous to the
individual and its psychic memory, Bernard Stiegler elaborates that it is an
essential part in development of individuals[13].
It presupposes on some level paradoxical relation of its elements. To avoid any
possible ambiguity and uncertainty engendered from this ambivalence, I would
rather replace the notion of pharmakon
in respect to the emergence of the new digital realm, with the more empirical
term of prosthesis (it implies causal
consequentiality better suited for my explanation), that would significantly
facilitate the comprehension of my work and my practice in general.
To legitimate this shift in terms that are describing the
duality of the emergence of such objects as writing or digital media I feel I
have to elaborate on the idea in a bit more detailed way. For this reason I
will briefly delve into the rational-irrational correlation that can be traced
throughout the whole history of human thinking. From the very beginning of
philosophical disciplines sensuality was mostly recognized as something
deceptive and undermining for thinking and reasoning. Rationality that actually
was perceived as the basis of philosophy, was waging war throughout the
centuries against any symptoms of irrationality as the fatal enemy of this
disciplinary field. Irrationality seemed to be also fatal for the overriding
and overarching project that is Humanity,
where rational reasoning is the main feature distinguishing humans from
animals. Diving into the irrational was legitimately perceived as the most
perilous act for society since the rationality that it was based on was quite
fragile without any proper backup. To use a metaphor - it is hard to enjoy
swimming without shores nearby. My point of view is that during the whole story
of mankind all our attention is stimulated and directed towards the creation of
these kind of backups for the human enterprise that according to George
Bataille was initiated as the shelter against death - as the result of
realising the precariousness of our projects in the face of death.
Invention of those backups can be seen as the main driving force
constituting every activity of individuals within society, as well as of
society itself.
Those social prosthesis, as any kind of prosthesis, are designed
to relegate the task onto them, which eventually approached its final phase of
development, gained a rigid form and irrelevance to human participation. They
are tools that we are creating when we don’t have the capacity or urge anymore
to do something on our own - machines undertaking the tasks which become boring
for us and through abandonment of which we are acquiring the space and psychic
energy for other social economies and new engagements.
The idea of prosthesis can also be interpreted as the act of
rebellion of the individual against the socium: their inventions provide a
space for personalisation and implements its temporary relief from the project Humanity. We can see through history
that these types of emancipation of something personal, sensual, instinctual
and perhaps even mystical is always accompanied with the new invention of some
social tool eventually causing that emancipation (or vice versa: the strive for
personal emancipation causing the invention of some social tool). A convenient
example of it can be the case of Blaise Pascal, one of the first advocates of
irrationality who at the same time created the first calculative machine
“Pascaline”. These tools and machines (that I call prosthesis) are exactly what
preserves and flourishes the individual within society, kind of lymphocytes
produced against the full absorption into the superior social body.
Beginning from 17th century and Pascal gradually increasing
capacity of those prosthesis for rational calculation was directly reflected on
the vindication of irrationality. Simultaneously with advancing calculative
technology (resulting in all kinds of algorithmic machines prevailing and
mediating today any kind of social network) the value of the rational was
gradually denigrated, superseded by the value of irrational, and eventually
resulted in insignificance and abandonment of that rational-irrational binary
differentiation. We relegated the task of computation on machines, thus we
relieved the space for something sensual and personal mysticism that is usually
viewed as paradoxical in respect to the rationalisation of the public space and
prevalence of digital tools and algorithms in contemporary social milieu.
This emancipation of sensuality is becoming explicit in the
field of contemporary art. In new tendencies like animism and trans-humanism
artists are seeking to establish relations of equivalence between the various
components of physical reality on the base of pure sensuality and somewhat
mystical perception. Inspired by Erik Davis’ Techgnosis the British artist Mark Leckey mounted an exhibition of
a new assemblage of objects placed in connection beyond a linguistic (or
rational object-subject) framework. “Something vital and mortal emerges from
something as cold and lifeless as code” he said in an interview given in 2013.
“…I feel we’ve entered a strange new sensory realm; the vivid and mortal
sensations created by the convincing visual surface texture of HD, the warm
regard you feel towards your stamped metal devices, or the aboriginal shudder
you get watching ASMR videos on YouTube. Paradoxically cold autistic cyberspace
takes us back to an appreciation of sensuality”[14] –
he concludes, but what he describes here as a paradox is precisely the effect
of the emergence of the digital prosthesis undertaking the task of “cold”
pragmatic interconnections, thus granting us with the possibility of various
new encounters with the objects surrounding us.
Today we are facing another obsession concerning attention and
repetition that are bases for the education constituting human beings. As the
contrast of it we still have the antithetic image of the animal to wage the war
against – that is the unrestricted and unconstrained want as the opposite of
intelligence. This animal sensuality still bears the sign of a perilous abyss
for mankind and perhaps this is the main motor driving all contemporary disciplines
– to unarm that sensuality; to make its existence possible without threatening
the ongoing project, perhaps with inventing some new prosthesis to relegate the
intelligence on them (to back up the intelligence). And how can this strive for
creating Artificial Intelligence be perceived if not precisely as a sign and
symptom of this anxiety?
My current work is based on the hypothesis that (perhaps because
of hyper state of implosion mentioned at the beginning) social communication as
a practice totally overwhelming our activity is also entering (or is forced into) a
state of rigidness and irrelevance towards human participation, thus it is
gradually relegated to the various algorithms within the social network.
4
The treadmill runner
What could be vainer than all this
running for the sake of exercising the faculty of running? And still they run …[15]
J. Baudrillard.
Description
The treadmill runner is an interactive work that has been
implemented in two parts, respectively for offline and online public spaces.
The offline version is a staged interactive
installation-performance in a public space. The treadmill with the running
artist on it will be exposed to public interaction in one of the central
squares of Weimar. The interaction will be established by digital means and
algorithmic scripts: the microcontroller attached to the treadmill will detect
the clapping coming from the viewer, trace the frequency produced by the
clappers and synchronize the speed of treadmill according to this frequency (the
higher the frequency, the faster the treadmill), thus leaving the performer no
possibilities to control the treadmill but only to obey the rhythmical norms
dictated by the public through the means of applause. It gives the viewer full
possibility to control the action of the treadmill runner by simply clapping in
consent rhythm, thus determining the speed of the installed treadmill by
intensity and speed of clapping and in this manner forcing performer to run in
accordance to the produced rhythm.
By placing the performer
(whose movement is conditioned by the treadmill’s acceleration) in a vulnerable
position towards the public and giving the viewer access of controlling the
performer (perhaps neglecting or considering the artist's physical conditions)
the project also challenges the conditions of private-public relations by
exploring the individual's capacity for reliance on the public as well as the
public’s liability towards those individuals.
The online part of the work is an interactive video, where the
projected runner vitiates the speed of running, from a slow walking to a fast
run, so that the rhythm of footsteps is according to the clapping frequency
produced by viewers (or internet users) before the screen.
The duality of the work offers me the possible investigation of
the role of the human body in the context of a digitalising environment. On one
side we have the live human being, the artist exposed to the public and
examined by it; on the other side the digital representation, simulacrum excluding
the human aspect from it, thus refining the work to pure entertainment. Whereas
the offline version is saturated with all kinds of human and natural agents
(fear, anxiety, compassion, weather, environmental distraction, etc.)
influencing the artist, as well as the viewer, the online version provides the safe and
sterile version of the same action. In the online one, the artist is absent
thus leaving his digital replica with the same capacity for communication. The viewer is exposed here to two deferent experiences. We
can say that with this duality the audience becomes the one who is exhibited as
the active agent, animator and essential part of the work. It is the viewer who
is at stake here and through which the work is constituted. And the artist – the
artist is just supposed to react.
Conceptualization
As social creatures our actions seem to be fully charged and
motivated by an encouragement from other social units. Constant stimulation
from other people, that is the essence of every activity or creativity, is
perhaps the basic phenomenon that coheirs every society and powers it for
further development. The act of clapping by a huge group of people, perhaps as
a result of a successfully staged action, is probably the main hallmark of
conventional viewer-actor contribution that can be presumed as an encouraging
and edifying behaviour toward the actor. To explore this collaboration which is
a significant part of social communications I’ll focus on the above-mentioned
act elaborating it within a different context by transforming it to the object
of artistic research.
Art, as an utterly artificial practice is fully based on
subject-object coloration. It is only conceptualized by our presence and
constituted by viewer-actor interconnection that places it aside from other
human activities. As Nicola Bourriaud puts it: “The concept of art itself is
nothing else than artificial reality between subject and object.”[16]
He quotes Marcel Duchamp that “it's the beholder who make pictures”. It is this
action-reaction based collaboration between viewer and actor that makes art
possible. Exclusion of the viewer from this field would place the artistic
practice among other private and self-edification practices of the individual.
Exclusion of the artist also seems inappropriate - leaving the spectator
without a spectacle.
Art is probably the most intimate form of communication between
individual and community which is based on energy exchange. Art is dialogue
between artist and viewer, a practice where causality seems to be obscured by
an exchange economy. An “unhindered flood” - to recontextualize Jean
Baudrillards viewpoint – where “energy may be looked upon as a cause which
produces effects, but it is also an effect which is self-reproducing, and can
thus cease to obey any law of causality.”[17]
Indeed, it’s impossible to define which is cause and which effect in this
bilateral enterprise: like in dance, both sides are just effects of the rhythm
created during the intercourse.
Art is coloration that presupposes equality of both sides, but
this perception became explicit only though the history. In ancient philosophy
the artist is mostly viewed as an entity having some external connections
outside the artist-spectator coloration: access to some divine world or
obscured truth behind represented objects. They were possessing some
inspirational sources inaccessible to the rest of society, and transmitting the
gained experience to the spectators who were just supposed to be effected by
that. But to refer to the divine as the source of artists activity today sounds
to our ears almost like a joke. On the contemporary scene art seems to have
only political existence articulating within the common sources and communal actualities.
On this shared ground it’s even hard to separate the viewer from the artist;
today we can claim together with Joseph Beuys that "every human being is
an artist, a freedom being, called to participate
in transforming and reshaping the conditions”[18].
It seems to be undermining to the concept of art quoted above from Nicola
Bourriaud’s lecture, but we can say that every artist is also a human being,
thus constituted by his or her social participation and subject-object
coloration.
Digital impact
In
the project, the performance with the subjected performer seems to be an effect
of the viewers' action. Deprived from free choice
the artist is compelled to act according to dictated norms: his behaviour
consists of compulsory movements subjected by the interface that connects him
with the viewer. Spectators here appear to be the total legislators, but on
some level their action is also reactionary insight by the submission of the
artist to their control.
Action-reaction
based collaboration between viewer and an actor is rooted to the geneses of the
spectacle and attractive sights of any kind. Performing and applauding
practices are conjunct in a symbiosis that forms the conventional body of the
art. In this case it is impossible to say which is the cause here and which
effect - they are circulating within the close economy of energy exchange,
inciting each other, feeding each other, like a self-contented rolling wheel,
like a perpetual machine.
..sounds like an utopia without a friction. But let’s imagine
the perfect social interface dissolving any kind of friction to the zero point.
Coincidently, or (most likely) consequently to alienation perhaps brought about
by "the landscape where human relationships are not the main element any
more”[19],
the emergence of all kinds of digital and algorithmic prosthesis constituting
that landscape seem to be quite handy, giving new possibilities for
experimenting and exploring new types of connections and communications.
The interface between the viewer and the artist that is used for
the work is attained by those new possibilities and it aims on segregation of
the performative form of the viewer-actor communication, repelling the
conceptual content, thus concentrating on the very form of implementation. Or
to speak in Baudrillard's words, providing the “vacuousness of the action’s
content”, thus leaving for communication “no more reason to come to an end”;
…to cause the Operational Paradox that he describes in his essay 'The
Transparency of Evil': “it's better to have nothing to say if one seeks to
communicate... good communication — the foundation, today, of a good society —
implies the annihilation of its own content.” This connection between viewer
and performer is established here through digital means and animated by
impulses of algorithm. Its ambivalence (obscurity in the respect of cause and
effect) is reflected (thus reversed) in the mirror of digital contemporaneity.
Communication is transformed into an unsubstantial and weightless object,
script launched into the public realm.
The task of the artist seems a bit obscure: to navigate through
the mist of objects dissolved and pulverized by the analog/digital friction; to
create connections where everything is already externalised in some algorithmic
forms. But indeed, do we need to strive any more for those new connections when
we are already besieged with this network of interactive prosthesis and backed
up communications? The only task that remains is perhaps learning to dance with
all those prosthesis.
[1] paraphrase
from the "Traktors". Film by Igor and Gleb Aleinikov. http://www.ubu.com/film/aleinikov_traktora.html
[2] Beatriz
Preciado. Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in
the Pharmacopornographic Era. Pornpower.
translated by Bruce Benderson. 271.
[3] Jean
Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil.
Translated by James Benedict. 12
[4] Gregory
G. Sholette. Dark matter, activist art
and the counter-public sphere. http://www.joaap.org/new3/sholette.html
[5]
Boris Groys. Going Public. Politics of
Installation. 56
[6]
Søren Kierkegaard. Either/Or. Diapsalmata.
Edited by Victor Eremita. Translated by Alastair Hannay. 43.
[7]
Gilles Deleuze. Desert Islands and Other
Texts.
[8] Friedrich
Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols with The
Antichrist and Ecce Homo. Translated by Antony M. Ludovici. Kindle edition.
101.
[9]
Boris Groys. Going Public. Politics of
Installation. 59.
[10]
Boris Groys. Going Public. Politics of
Installation. 60.
[11]
Plato. Phaedrus. 27d - 275c, trans.
1871
[12]
Jacques Derrida. Dissemination.
125-6.
[13]
Bernard Stiegler. Relational Ecology and
the Digital Pharmakon.
[15]
Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of
Evil. Translated by James Benedict. 48.
[16] Nicolas
Bourriaud. Politics of the Anthropocene.
Humans, Things and Reification in Contemporary Art. Lecture given at the Modern Art Museum of
Fort Worth. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UOa2MS2Dw
[17] “Energy
may be looked upon as a cause which produces effects, but it is also an effect
which is self-reproducing, and can thus cease to obey any law of causality. The
paradox of energy is that it implies a revolution on the level of causes and a
revolution on the level of effects — each, practically speaking, independent of
the other. It thus becomes the locus not only of a chain of causes but also of
an unhindered flood of effects.” Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil.
Translated by James Benedict. 101-102.
[18] Joseph
Beuys. Jeder Mensch ein Künstler. Auf
dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus. 23 March 1978'. Audio
recording.
[19]
Nicolas Bourriaud. Politics of the
Anthropocene. Humans, Things and Reification in Contemporary Art. Lecture given at the Modern Art Museum of
Fort Worth. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_UOa2MS2Dw
