Ryan Trecartin

So where do we sit with this? The younger reviewer is more reactionary than the old conservative in their response to Ryan Trecartin, who is being resistant and who is being duped? I didn't know he was a part of the Rhode Island Paperrad scene and it makes a lot of sense, but he brings up good points about how its like youth and internet culture for old people and very retro.

http://seanrocha.com/2011/07/19/ryan-trecartin-at-ps1/

Amy Whitaker

'In the winter and spring of 2011, she will be teaching economics as a fine art studio course at the Rhode Island School of Design.'

http://www.cca.edu/academics/faculty/awhitaker

Stop Blaming Neo-Liberalism for Everything

For what do you think about this counter-explanation for the riots? Welfare dependency and invasive government intervention has created a enfeebled working class...

[http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10989/]

post-internet

So a lot of the internet based work I see in gallery shows, online, seems to be using the parameters of internet aesthetics eg. cut and paste, bad feathering, arbitrary juxtaposition of disparate imagery, 'slicing' etc. and then translating it into traditional media like sculpture or painting-eg. the current trajectory of AIDS 3d , et al.'s work suitable for the gallery and commercial environments. Internet art is gonna be huge, I think its at a tipping point in New York and I can imagine critics very soon, if they are not already waxing lyrical about the way these artists have used the aesthetics of the internet to rejuvinate and bring back seduction and sensuality to contemporary art.
I can't really pretend to know very much about internet stuff, but I think the Andrew Wilson stuff is great and exactly what internet art needs to be.

"This understanding of the ecologies that our personal computing takes part in is crucial if artists explicitly engaging the internet are to have an impact on broader cultural planes."

The networking piece he did really hit the nail on the head in that it references something Zizek critiques about the celebrators of cyberspace and the idea of the freedom and democratization of knowledge in cloud computing, that the cloud is materially owned and controlled by corporations with an accompanying system and structure of labour relations that don't necessarily transcend the Fordist production models. Take for example this article [http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201181881418513391.html] about the emerging rare earth economies on which the information technologies software and hardware markets are dependent on which seem to hark back to earlier 19th century trade wars and the material exploitation of (neo)colonial natural resources.

"Embodiment no longer coincides with the limits of flesh; disembodiment initially experienced on the internet opens the possibility for collective re-embodiment through new technologies."

From the description of the Avatar 4D exhibition on JstChillin
See there seems to be a tone of self-celebratory post-humanism, and we both know that post-humanism is just ideology spouted by corporations to distract us from the very human toil, in a 'bare life' sense, that it takes to produce the physical technological infrastructure to create post-human avatars for white nerds with high speed access to the net living in the developed world.

More interesting for me would be work about internet exclusion, global uneven internet speed distributions and the impacts thereof and the interface between developing countries and technology, basically if someone were the artistic equivalent of what Ethan Zuckerman covers. Intrestingly enough, I don't know how informed they are but AIDS 3D inadvertently reference Danny Millers work in Jamaica vis a vis the internet and culture when they quote the wiki on virtual continuums in their 'Free Internet' pdf. So basically my position is that I really like internet art when it doest self-consciously draw attention to itself as internet art and become what I was saying, regressively Modernist foregrounding the conditions of the medium itself rather than exploring the social/political/economic issues that the medium raises.
________________________________________________________________________

Ok I get it now. Internet aesthetics are actually a form of hauntology. So as a repository of information and images, of lost data and dead links and millions of geocities sites exisiting in some kind of cyber limbo Parker Ito and the chick call it a 'ruin' and a kind of neo-gothic, thus the proliferation of naked, vectorized lawnmower men in internet art. What it is is 90's retro, maybe a little in the same way Tim and Eric are and all clip art and online stock photo imagery is but its coming back to us repackaged in the wrapper of web 2.0, youtube video loops and IM screen caps and those single page scrolling image blogs. And thus it resonates with our generation who came of age in the 90's and appeals to our latent nostalgia for a lapsarian as well as political/historical idyll perhaps.

McKenzie Wark: 'The Logic of Riots'

 

 

Sent to you by gav via Google Reader:

 

 

McKenzie Wark: 'The Logic of Riots'

via Versobooks.com by Mc Kenzie Wark on 16/08/11

Riots have their own logic. Both those who celebrate and decry them tend to think of riots as irrational outbursts, which can be channeled back towards order either by offering a few concessions or by sending in more police. There is invariably some moralizing that goes along with all this, none of it terribly helpful for understanding why riots are a constant of modern urban life rather than some inexplicable exception.

There's a short text that always does the rounds whenever riots occur again. It was written by Guy Debord, legendary co-founder of the Situationist International, and bearing the jargon-heavy title of 'The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.' These days you don't have to hunt around for the photocopies passed from hand to hand, it can be easily googled. Its subject is the Watts riots of 1965. Its leading provocation, and the reason for its underground popularity, is this: "But who has defended the rioters of Watts in the terms they deserve?

"The Los Angeles revolt was a revolt against the commodity," Debord said. It was at least partly so. "The flames of Watts consumed consumption." In the spectacle of consumer society advertises a life in which all that is good appears on television and all that appears on television is good. This constant circulation of images of the consumer lifestyle, which came into its own in the sixties, could but be a cruel reminder for African Americans in particular of the inequities underlying such images.

The spectacle of consumable life ranks goods in order of their desirability. The fancy brands are so much better than generic knock-offs. But this is also an order that ranks its subjects. To be Black in the sixties is to be at the bottom of the visible order. Just as the ranking of which are the better brands changes over time, so too does the league table of desirable kinds of people. You have your Kate Middletons, and then you have your chavs.

The Watts riot was a moment when African Americans saw through this hierarchy of images. As Debord says: "they demand the egalitarian realization of the American spectacle of everyday life." This is a constant of the modern riot. Those who are told, at one and the same time, that these and the things they should desire, but that they themselves are not desirable, will periodically get the message, and respond in kind. Like the Watts rioters, they see the swag on offer - and loot it.

The signature Situationist concept for such - recurring - events is potlatch. Where Marx compared the transformation of the object of labor into a commodity to a transubstantiation, the Situationists were interested in a kind of reverse miracle, by which the thing lost its status as commodity and became the gift. The looted object is no longer a commodity. But the perversity of the gesture is that its seizure does not break the spell of exchange and return to things their value. Rather, looting takes the spectacle at its word. In the spectacle, what is good appears and what appears is good. The looter jumps the gap between desire and the commodity. The looter takes desires for necessity, and necessity for their desires, but freeing the commodity from exchange does not expunge exchange from the commodity.

The riot contains a quite contrary movement as well - arson. The arsonist is not quite the same as the looter. The arsonist's is a negative relation to what appears, particularly to the built environment. The arsonist's actions are marked by the refusal of spectacular form. Enormous energy is being withdrawn from the labor process and it finds no other outlet than in aggression prompted by dissatisfaction. In the riot, that aggression turns against two of its sources: against the time of the commodity form; against an alienating urban space.

Looting and arson are recurring events within what the Situationists called the "overdeveloped world." They are the mark of overdevelopment, of the quantitative expansion of production outstripping the qualitative transformation of everyday life, of desires spinning their wheels, without traction in the elaboration of needs. The proximate causes may vary, and are usually to do with the thuggery of the police and the indifference of the state.

What the Situationists point to is the consistency and persistence of what follows, the twin forks of seize it all, or burn it down. Sometimes, the riot takes a different form, and passes toward rebellion, even toward revolution, or perhaps those in the middle of it think it does. This is why May '68 has a special place in not only the theory but also the mythology of the Situationists. It was more than a riot. It was the fabled general strike.

There is a lot that is missing from Debord's account of Watts: The thirty dead, the thousand injured, the four thousand arrests. Still, it might have interested him that later investigations upheld his hunch that while the riots were leaderless they were not without organization. Impromptu meetings in the park after dark coordinated movements, for example. Riots are neither irrational, spontaneous outbursts, nor the secret workings of some conspiracy or other.

They, are rather, the working out of an inner tension in commodified life. That tension is usually finessed through the fine idea that if everyone just knuckles under and does their best, all will be well. The yawning gap between the promise of the spectacle and its actuality can be narrowed with hard work and a bit of luck. When that carrot turns out to be a rotten promise, then there's nothing for it but the stick. The modern, spectacular society would prefer to be loved, but when push comes to shoved it will settle for being feared.

 

 

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Kleist

On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking

In the first of his larger essays, "On the gradual development of thoughts in the process of speaking", Kleist shows the conflict of thought and feeling in the soul of man, leading to unforeseeable results through incidents which in their turn provoke the inner forces of the soul to express themselves in a spontaneous flow of ideas and words, both stimulating one another to further development. Kleist's view of the hidden forces in the human soul and the quite instable and endangered position of the mind in their struggle can be compared to Freud's psychoanalytic model of the soul, especially to his notion of the "unconscious" and its hidden influences on the ego.

Kleist claims that most people are advised to speak only about what they already understand.^[3] Instead of talking about what you already know, Kleist admonishes his readers to speak to others with "the sensible intention of instructing yourself."^[3] Fostering a dialogue through the art of "skillful questioning" is the key behind achieving a rational or enlightened state of mind.^[3] And yet, Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity. It is not that easy though for Kleist. Man cannot simply guide himself into the future with a rational mind as his primary tool. Therefore, Kleist strongly advocates for the usefulness of reflection ex post facto or after the fact.^[4] In doing so, man will be able to mold his collective consciousness in a manner conducive to the principles of free will. By reflecting after the fact, man will avoid the seemingly detestable inhibitions offered in rational thought. In other words, the will to power has "its splendid source in the feelings," and thus, man must overcome his "struggle with Fate" with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion.^[4]

The metaphysical theory in and behind Kleist's first essay is that consciousness, man's ability to reflect, is the expression of a fall out of nature's harmony, which may either lead to disfunction, when the flow of feelings is interrupted or blocked by thought, or to the stimulation of ideas, when the flow of feelings is cooperating or struggling with thought. A state of total harmony, however, cannot be reached. Only in total harmony of thought and feeling life and consciousness would come to be identical through the total insight of the mind, an idea elaborated and ironically presented in Kleist's second essay "The Puppet Theatre" or "On the Marionette Theater" (Über das Marionettentheater).

commodification of language is another topic im interested in researching

[ http://hbr.org/2011/09/politics-and-the-english-language-in-the-21st-century/ar/1 ]

Mobile (phone) Rekodi Situdio

So now I have a bit more time, how about we put our minds to the mobile phone rekodi situdio project? Dais and I have tentative plans for Kenya in December.

andrew wilson

[ http://www.andrewnormanwilson.com/portfolios/63221-powerpoint ]

non philosophy

[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Laruelle ]

Google riot

London

 

Ongoing Topic: Success through Failure - KAFKA

Yamagata Tweakster: Seoul's Finest

Ron should be like this live. Just a lonely Asian boy dancing by himself on stage.

Nomads on Vacation: a musical in seven parts

wooden bikes

[ http://www.woodenbikes.com/ ]

beyonce

[ http://www.racialicious.com/2011/06/02/who-runs-the-world-on-beyonce-sampling-race-and-power/ ]

social entrepeneurship

..and social art

 

discuss

 

[ http://www.sse.org.au ]

Unlimited Detail Real-Time Rendering Technology Preview 2011

i suspect that in the near future the uncanny valley will apply to real life and not virtual life.

(Deleuzian) Schizo-linguistics

[http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/27/making-word-ryan-trecartin-poet/]

 

Trecartin shows where we are with the commodification of language in the google-era. But Lil B shows where we are going with the full schizoid position, in which language becomes material object and can be hurled like primordial muck. Every word of Lil B is designed towards google search, meaning is quantitative, signification has departed.