Objects

Reality as a message

The problem of reality is in how it is traditionally thought about, as something tangible, as a given - something that is there simply because it’s there. With the development of means of communication throughout the history we should not really speak of the ‘real’ without regard to the ‘communicated’ - as H.Lefebvre formulates it in Production of Space, “(social) space is a (social) product” - in which light the production of reality can be looked at in a broader sense from within the social space, as a notion encompassing all the communication elements, such as facts, ideas, messages, narratives or conditions.

1. Reality is a message. As anything you see, hear or otherwise sense is a story (fabrication). In line with the general theory of communication (S.Hall), the ‘real’ has to become a narrative, a ’communicative event’ before it can be encoded for transmission and decoded later by the audience.

2. Further, reality is interactive - not only it is fabricated by producers for receivers, but it can also be manipulated by the end users. Thus, it no longer a static product subject to receiver’s interpretation, but comes with the instruments that allow users shape it prior to final recognition.

3. Reality includes feedback. The feedback loop includes the flow of user data back to the producers, allowing the producers to analyse the user behaviour for future coding of messages and interactions.

4. Reality is augmented towards the capital. When we say ‘augmented reality’, which direction does this augmentation happen? It is done by producers, for the receivers, but it is fundamentally grounded in the capital. Therefore, it is the user who the reality is targeted to, with the purpose of getting the feedbacks, behaviours and other data, but it is the client who the reality is ultimately shaped around.

- > Where does art step in? How does art resist globalisation in the new, hybrid reality?…

Why is it necessary to do the Bandung walk backwards?

1) 1955 moment has happened, is happening and is going to happen: walking backwards means turning towards the past, which in this case is important in order to make a link with the present and the future.

2) We spend your life walking backwards because you can see the past but not the future—that’s why we trip: Walking backwards is a good way to concentrate on the walking as a process, on the physicality of it.

3) Be kind rewind: each step of Bandung walk is meant to symbolize the change that the conference would bring about -  by performing the walk backwards we create the cavity in deep time, and the possibility/necessity for the walk to 'happen' again, to fill in the gap, thus provoking the deep time to bounce back.

I left my pdf in Bandung

Notes for Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway

- Ironic political myth
- Cyborg as a metaphor - negative connotation (in an ironical way - because she’s actually promoting the cyborg)
- Cyborg = other; Hybrid : organism+machine
- Third party, like medicine at war - machine bridges the gaps, it is keeping people alive. War = cyborg orgy.
- World without gender (Haraway doesn’t like the idea of male vs. female;
- Cyborg doesn’t have genesis, doesn’t remember cosmos.
- Promoting cyborg.

————————————————————
- Haraway breaks down the boundaries:
    ~ Animal/human (from beginning of XX century);
    ~ Organism/machine (she’s writing it in 1985);
    ~ Physical/non-physical (example of light as both physical and non=physical (TV) - you can see it, but cannot touch);
    ~ Dualisms (cyborg ignores the dualism; one is too few, but two is too many);
————————————————————

- Haraway is a non-specific determinist.
    Determinism (wikipedia) - philosophical position stating that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could happen.
- Fractured identities (we all have multiple identities).
- Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message"
- Cyborg has to have a great deal of power (political identity in writing);
- We are cyborgs (it’s our ontology). It means that we’re building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships.

- Feminism:
    ~ Women are not superior to men (they have just as many flaws as tractions);
    ~ Haraway: I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.

Notes: The Idiot Paradigm, Matthew Poole

Source: RMA

[Idiotes] deliberately withdrew from the status of metropolitan citizen to become cosmopolitan-figures without familiar topological or spatiotemporal grounds, or at least figures t~at presented the illusion of and allusion to such groundlessness.

P. 207 - It is important to note that all idiotae, self-declared or not, are apolitical figures without agency to engage in politics, without a polis, and specifically without a civic connection.

Three concepts of rhetoric: "logos" = rational appeal, "pathos" = emotional appeal, and "ethos" = ethical appeal

Townley Vase, 1773 - the idiotes is a heroic fool representing chaotic, irrational, random action intended to break the conventions of the polis.

p.210 - Most significantly of all, the idiotes is the archetypal puer aeternus, the eternal child. So the idiotes is half-devil/half-savior, the threat of destruction and the promise of creation held synthesised within it. The idiotes is fundamentally immature, incompatible with the public sphere as it can never be pubes, adult.

P. 211 - Such a state [of an eternal child] characterizes contemporary art today, which is distinguished by the paradigm of paradigm-less-ness, or a paradigm that permits the endless proliferation of disconnected paradigms.

p.212 - In order to challenge this apolitical hegemony, a non-idealist materialist critique of the quasi-syntagmatic ethico-economic conditions of art needs to supersede the self-limiting and confining illusions/allusions of freedom that are both the principal currency and the constraining embodied web like structures of art today.

Robin Mackay: The Barker Topos

p.268 - Polymath scientist Dr Daniel Barker, ejected from NASA under dubious circumstances,
is called out of retirement to assemble a crack team of specialists
(mathematician, cryptographer, cartographer, psychoanalyst, environmental
chemist) after an apparently commonplace homicide investigation opens
up wider and deeper complicities—firstly with the financial meshwork that,
beneath the everyday surface of capitalism, grotesquely binds together coltan
mines, art auctions, pork futures, and arms deals; and subsequently with the
history of modernity and its petroleum-lubricated time-travelling relationship
to the physical history of the planet, the sun, and the universe beyond. These
genre devices give the work a performative relation to the complex concept of
‘plot’—as a narrative thread and as a tract of space separated for a specific
work, but which retains unknown complicities with its original matrix.


The investigators’ forensic analyses take them back and forth across the
surface of the earth, to interrogate protagonists and suspects not limited to
human beings but also including built structures and synthetic objects which
must be coaxed into ‘speaking’.

Us at DAI, April 2015

Image caption: DAI, May 2015 ( Kristin, Katia, Michelle, Sarah, Jan and others)
Image courtesy: DAI
Source:http://dutchartinstitute.eu/bulletins