post-autonomous art?

Meeting with new colleagues, especially in research environments, a question that comes up a lot is along the lines of “what is your form?”

On one occasion when struggling to explain that the originality of the activities and work, as in the earlier use of the term “original”, has to do with where it originates, in this context, social engagement as a way to finding out more about the world, and how to become more human, I was interrupted by my e-space lab colleague Jonathan Kearney. This is what you are doing and this is your form, he said, and linking to a Wikipedia Page on Post-autonomous art. The status of this page is fugitive. Just as it began to be relevant, and whilst pointing others towards it for common reference, it was gone. What remains are some equally interesting echoes, and maybe the beginning of conversations and dialogue.

This is a para from that original page:

The German Conceptual artist Michael Lingner proposed the notion of Post Autonomy in the 1990s. The aim of postautonomous artistic production is not (or not primarily) to create objects (electronic or physical) or to document the traces of the productive process. Rather, it is to support and embody a political transformation whereby the human participants subscribe to an open ended mutual learning process and define and activate a productive space outside capitalism and its competitive mode of production.

sustainable digital communities

One of the key features of our weak attempts to devise a conscious and and tactical programme to establish and maintain our digital communities, is to think about the role of certain types of art, including post-autonomous art, and what we are doing in e-space lab, is to see how we can make everyday life visible. This includes artists amongst the everyday life of people everywhere. The Wikipedia page on The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau explains how in this work "he examines the ways in which people individualise mass culture, altering things, from utilitarian objects to street plans to rituals, laws and language, in order to make them their own." It also points out that his crucial observation is that;

While social science possesses the ability to study the traditions, language, symbols, art and articles of exchange that make up a culture, it lacks a formal means by which to examine the ways in which people reappropriate them in everyday situations.

This is a dangerous omission, Certeau argues, because in the activity of re-use lies an abundance of opportunities for ordinary people to subvert the rituals and representations that institutions seek to impose upon them.

With no clear understanding of such activity, social science is bound to create nothing other than a picture of people who are non-artists (meaning non-creators and non-producers), passive and heavily subject to received culture. Indeed, such a misinterpretation is borne out in the term "consumer". In the book, the word "user" is offered instead; the concept of "consumption" is expanded in the phrase "procedures of consumption" which then further transforms to "tactics of consumption".

The artist describing, mapping, representing and, with us, presenting aspects of life now, explores the capability of new spaces through noticing or deliberately constructing juxtapositions, electric shocks, that help us wake up to the world as it is.

Photography, when it entered the social and cultural communication field was accepted, or rejected, as a new way to represent reality, but in fact photography substitutes itself for reality. And now, as TV blurs into the digital screen environment, we will encounter, and work with, new forms of substituted reality.

New forms of communication afford us opportunities to discover and/or represent realities, as well as providing us with new ways of experiencing and approaching these realities. Affirmation in this context is integral to discovering how to see things as we find them. This “yes” is not necessarily celebratory, because the primary aim is to support the effort and achievement of finding out what is actually happening in the world, especially at the local level, the level of place.

Place is heterogeneous, and the task of representing the heterogeneous is always a creative challenge. It is about taking on the difficulty, and a sense of the ‘lack’ in representing the way things are, even where the process of documentation is handled creatively and reflectively. The material generated by this process will have qualities that need constant evaluation. So, e-space lab, as a research project, proposes to explore how it is that an art process becomes a viable research process, generating content in a particular and productive way.

Actor-network theory also informs of us the necessity to look to the fact that the way the heterogeneous reality that the world is, can be understood as a series of acts of 'heterogenous engineering', by which is meant that the world is made up of diverse networks of association which are constituted by that association - by the links rather than the nodes of the network and, more than this, by the traffic through the links.

the role of slowtime

Low def

The whole context of video-streaming e-dialogue is soaked in low-definition information. Pixels, chunks, lumps of colour, texture, make me think of sculpture more than film. The sound space is the thread, through continuity breaks, fuzzy images, as we strain to listen, de-code etc.

Is this a problem? In a way this is a context of maximum sensory involvement in making out the "other" in this, reading and interpreting with high intensity the nuances of body language etc.

Strangers meeting, instinctively behave in ways that correspond to the codes of conduct so necessary in a dangerous world. As we leave home on this type of electric journey we depend on the kindness of strangers. The mutually experienced x-ray revelation through the screen (not a looking glass) requires a large measure of hospitality, and that, as the measure is fulfilled, creates a space of engagement, listening, and above all this climate of tolerance.

So, slow communication generates texture, phatic gestures, looking after each other as guest/hosts, valuing this alternative pace.

In Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us – The Art of Everyday Living, he writes in the Chaper called Thinking:

It was the fact that words were read at increasing speed – a speed far greater than that possible in oral delivery – which troubled Joyce and other moderns. The flaneurs languid gait on the boulevards was an attempt to decelerate the modern world, by reducing quick walking to a slow crawl. (Kiberd 2009 p 75)

Joyce worried that his own book might just be another of those possibilities discarded by a glib, throw-away culture: ‘Who anywhere will read these written words?’ The reader, even more than the characters, must become the true and only hero, not by modelling a self on that of Odysseus, Jesus, Dante or Hamlet, but by seeking to become more fully a reader than anyone had before in the history of literature. It is the reader, as much as Dedalus, who must learn to decode the signatures of all things, to recognise the traces left by all the varied kinds of life that have passed though the world. And it is the reader who must summon the heroism of a thinker brave and intrepid enough to enter the abyss of the self.

(Kiberd 2009 p 76)

just what is the role of the artist and art these days?

In Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker's Through the Vanishing Point section called Sensory Modes, just before the main section Toward a Spatial Dialogue has this amazing statement:

Electronic Man (it was first published in 1968!) approaches the condition in which it is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art. This presents no solution to the previous problem of decorating the environment. Quite the contrary. The new possibility demands total understanding of the artistic function in society. It will no longer be possible merely to add art to the environment.

Non-representational theory & actor network theory

Activity and activities is what this international use of video streaming and in the context of visual art and design practices is all about. It is fascinating to see how theory coming from human geography is just so obviously helpful in thinking about these spaces, territories and the mapping techniques that we seem to be involved with in the events of the past seven years.

In particular I would like to reference the work of Nigel Thrift and Non-representational theory.

This is a theory developed in human geography, largely through the work of Nigel Thrift that challenges those using social theory and conducting geographical research to go beyond representation. Instead of studying and representing social relationships, non-representational theory focuses upon practices - how human and nonhuman formations are enacted or performed - not simply on what is produced. This is a post-structuralist theory drawing in part from the works of Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and phenomenonologists such as Martin Heidegger, but also weaving in the perspectives of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour and Michel Serres, and more recently from political science (including ideas developed in radical democracy) and anthropological discussions of the material dimensions of human life. Non-representational theory's focus upon hybrid formations parallels the conception of 'hybrid geographies' developed by Sarah Whatmore.

Actor-network theory is clearly relevant to this context especially the current iteration of sustainability. Everything we are doing is clearly weak, especially in terms of the notion that it is the pathways of repeated and then again, repeated exchange and movement, migration and journeying that influence the patterns of flow, along rivers, roads and co-axial cable.

Looking at how actor-network theory might help get our heads round what it is we are actually doing here is very useful, because of the in the work of the French philosopher of science, Michel Serres, and the French engineer, Bruno Latour, we come across;
an attempt to write the world anew, by starting from first principles; its aim is nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the 'constitution' of western knowledge.

Blackwell’s The Dictionary of Human Geography has a chapter on this.
To quote and paraphrase the very succinct account of this theory by the afore mentioned Nigel Thrift in Blackwell’s The Dictionary of Human Geography, actor-network theory is the study of heterogeneous engineering:

'heterogeneous' because it is concerned with a vision of the world as a multiplicity of different connections (translations, associations, mediations); and 'engineering' because it sees these connections as fabricated out of a diverse range of materials.

The new constitution proposed by actor-network theory is based on four main principles.

1. The first is that all the usual boundaries from which and with which western knowledge is constituted - between humans and things, nature and culture, tradition and modernity, inside and outside - must be put aside. These divides have made it impossible to see the world for what it really is: a collection of heterogeneous activities which are constantly in formation.
2. The second is that the world is a series of acts of 'heterogenous engineering', by which is meant that the world is made up of diverse networks of association which are constituted by that association - by the links rather than the nodes of the network and, more than this, by the traffic through the links.
3. Thirdly: Because the existence of actor-networks depends so heavily on circulation, their continuation relies on a whole series of 'immutable mobiles' - devices, types of people, animals, money, and so on, which can be transported from one location to another without changing form - which allow those networks to become durable: 'technology is society made durable' as Latour (1991) would have it. These immutable mobiles harden and anneal the networks, making it possible for them to last.
4. The fourth principle is a result of the previous three: the stress laid on mediaries and intermediaries. Taking a leaf from the work of Michel Serres (1995, 1996), the most important elements of the world are counted as the messengers which do the work of keeping networks connected and folding networks into each other. These most prominent performers of association stitch the world together.

I think that is where we are, in a specific and self-conscious art context that is essentially performative, and where there is an awareness of the fact that we are stitching bits of the world together in new ways.

This theory is helpful in that it:
problematizes the act of representation; representation becomes a kaleidoscope of different representational modes which can only be briefly stabilized and constantly interfere with each other.
Also,
it provides a means of understanding space as an order of partial connection and in doing so suggests new means of understanding space and place as folds in constantly evolving topologies since 'time and space are the consequences of the way in which bodies relate to one another' (Latour, 1997, p. 174).  

Move photons! Not people!

Peter Hagerty of e-space lab has come up with this one!

This post introduces a particular e-space lab streaming video link in the lobby of John Moores University Arts and Design Academy, Liverpool and a group of artists and designers in am space, a gallery in Shanghai run by Lam and Jam.

Thanks to Sean Harvey for the design of this invite and mobilizing fellow students

The presentation for the upcoming International Disciplines ELIA Nantes Conference, will offer a brief analysis and commentary of the situation exemplified by this bit of video documentation. The intention is to offer a few clues as to how this type of context can provide learners in art education with a new type of public space where the travel not books! (Foucault) injunction can be juxtaposed with the move photons not people! appeal to a digital community to please save our planet!

Thanks to Xu Zhifeng (Shaw) for the design of this flyer

Watch live streaming video from espacelab at livestream.com

The presentation intends to raise a number of questions.

These questions will be posed over the next few weeks in posts that will invite comments and discussion.

The agenda will include; 

• the value of actor network theory in thinking about new possible roles for art in this digital international exchange environment;
• the problem of international re-adjustments in the moving target of just what is the role of the artist and art these days?;
• the role of time, slowtime, in the interactivity of e-dialogue; 
• sustainability and digital communities;
• a discussion of the Wikipedia page on Post-autonomous art, now it is not there anymore.

Getting out more

LODE & LODE Artliner 1992
Philip Courtenay with The Yellow House, Frontier Film, Sound on Video by Keith Stutter
Bluecoat & Hull Time Based Arts performance commission with support from the Hull Festival, International Initiatives (ACGB), Gateway Europe (Humberside)

espacelab on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

LODE
5 mins of silent Super 8
Buenaventura, Colombia
Hartley Quay, Albert Dock, Liverpool
Bluecoat, Liverpool
Loading the "Audrey" at Goole

LODE Artliner
5 mins video with sound and commentary by In House Video, Hull
On the "Audrey" sailing down the Humber
The Marina, Hull
Artliner Container
The Ferens Art Gallery, Hull


The idea of an art project attempting to create a space for the withdrawal of the psychological projections that are associated with the constructs of stereotyping, of exoticism, and orientalism, was also the starting point for exploring the world along a line that links the quayside in Liverpool with the quayside in Hull. 

"travel not books"  
says Michel Foucault in a lecture, part of his lecture series of 1976 at the College de France.


The LODE Artliner project involved a lot of travel governed by a pretty random system of navigation but along this line that was plotted using the great circle that connected these two quaysides. The geographical journeys began in Hull following the line EAST across the North Sea, across northern Germany and across the border into Poland. The line was then joined in India, Indonesia, Australia, Colombia and Eire, and then arriving in Liverpool.

Lode comes from Old English 'lad' meaning way, journey, or leading, guidance, or the lodestone, literally 'waystone' from the use of the magnetic stone in guiding mariners, and something that attracts. The word 'load' also is from the Old English 'lad', including the act of loading as well as that which is to be carried.


At 22 locations along this invisible line 22 cargoes were prepared. Each of these locations related to an historical, political and/or geographical way of seeing and understanding each place. Each cargo was prepared and assembled from household bowls, some floating matter and a magnetic strip of metal, forming a simple and primitive compass. This compass was used to orientate the filming (Super 8) of the direction of the line as it curved over the horizon back to Hull and on to Liverpool. The material involved in each assembling activity were then wrapped in the sheets of a newspaper published on that day.

This cargo, boxed in 22 crates, was unloaded on Harley Quay by The Yellow House, Liverpool, and then installed, opened, unwrapped, and re-constructed, de-constructed, used by participants and audience in the Bluecoat Gallery. The cargo wrapping provided an information context that was alarmingly coherent, given the randomized approach, following a line, finding out more about the world, and maybe withdrawing projections concerning the way we form a view of the world, thinking that we know and so neglecting to ask the really important, and sometimes obvious, questions. 

So, the LODE leaflet was full of questions.

The idea for a cargo of questions, that was also a cargo of potential compasses, comes in its inspiration from Edward Said in the text he uses to set out his methodolgy in Orientalism. Having mentioned how he finds Foucault's concept of discourses highly functional, he goes on to set up an analogy for the process of building knowledge as a dynamic rather than additive process. Imagine a table with a number of magnetic compasses arranged side by side. Where do the needles point? One may indeed point northwards, but in this configuration the needles are actually all lined up along the curves in the shape of the complex magnetic field they signify and constitute. So the needles point along the lines of the magnetic flow, which is not a flow but a pattern of relationships. Bring another compass to the table and set it down in the field. All the needles tremble, and as they do so reveal a new pattern corresponding to the invisible magnetic field. The bringing of another element of knowledge into the field means that;
what we have already known will not be the same when we know more! the entire field of knowledge is configured into a new pattern!

The planned and sustained consequences for those involved in the project included 10 years of working together to experience more than the knowledge changing results of getting out more in the world and seeing what is actually going on that we don't have a clue that it is happening. 

Under the banner art creating society the model for practice shifted to the notion that making something together with strangers, either at home or away, was a brilliant way of really finding out what we did not know. A version of Socrates' technique of questioning and finding out what you know and what you don't know.

A modern Socrates in the Pentagon

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know." 

 Donald Rumsfeld

He is definitely onto something!
A definition of modern knowledge perhaps?

The point is we have all got get out of our bubbles a lot more than we do to get any inkling of the things we do not know we don’t know.

In 2002 Loop-pool was devised to create some kind of public connection to the activities The Yellow House and art creating society had been engaged in over the previous 10 years. What was missing was something already imagined 10 years before, live video connections, rather than the video loops that, nevertheless, engaged our audience at the Pier Head in Liverpool.


e-space lab and ITRDU 
In 2003 one of the great moments for the start of this project at the University of the Arts London, was meeting the team at ITRDU, in particular David Rowsell and Sam Kennedy. Philip Courtenay and Peter Hatton, instigators of the e-space lab research environment whilst colleagues in the Design and Public Art BA programme at Chelsea College of Art & Design, were exploring ways and means of establishing an international video-streaming link between The Yellow House on Merseyside and the Nikolas Copernicus High School opposite the gates of the old Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. Using flash Sam Kennedy designed a brilliant AV tool screen environment with a small video image and mutually editable text box.

The twin hubs of the project were The Solidarity Museum in Gdansk, where this project was seen as a new way to transform the museum environment, and ICDC, based then just below the Anglican Cathedral in the conference room looking out across the Mersey. Internet connections were relatively straightforward in Liverpool, but getting a connection from The Solidarity Museum required setting up a radio transmitter pointing at a mast on top of what we call the "green tower".

View from the Green Tower

This was a steam version of skype, but brilliant, maybe better?

Watch live streaming video from espacelab at livestream.com

Folding the Inside to the Outside

e-space lab

The e-space lab project has multiple aims. Common interests lie in collaborative work, and work that has a concern with people, places, spaces, identity, history and change, and we are focusing our research on the potential of streaming video and other virtual spatial situations, seen as an aspect of a performative art process. This includes exploring new types of space for new forms of public art in a sort of hybrid territory where the electronic and virtual aspects of the art event modulate a view of “real” spaces.

The e-space lab operates as a “place” for the creation of work and also looking at the role of the visual in the exploration of urban and social fabrics (Liverpool-Shanghai-Gdansk-Damascus), at the moment considering these places as places of change. Part of our work therefore is about opening up a virtual laboratory to artists, to individuals, groups and institutions, in order to create work around the questions that arise in the context of ongoing change, and using international exchange as way to help see what is happening at local levels in a global context. The project also allows us to experiment with how a trans-national model of practice might grow. So, e-space lab is first and foremost a research environment for artists exploring how new electronic and digital forms generate new perceptions of specific localities.

Past projects, future projects and current projects are best understood as works in progress, with each event, or phase, consciously and methodically set up as an experiment within a programme that looks as far ahead as possible. The laboratory is the space we make available for the interaction of art makers in different places. The places and spaces we work with, are regarded as real, especially including the virtual spaces that are created in the project.

Many of the ideas of Paul Virilio have been a constant irritant in the theoretical struggles that are part of these activities. Obviously this of great benefit to spaces devoted to activities of mapping, of dialogue and debate.

“The time of the finite world is coming to an end” says Virilio (p 8) in The Information Bomb.

“How are we to conceive the change wrought by computerization if we remain tied to an ideological approach”, 
the ideology of globalization, that is, 
“when the urgent need is in fact for a new geostrategic approach to discover the scale of the phenomenon that is upon us?” 

We need to “come back to the Earth”, 
he says, 
“to its dimensions and to the coming loss of those dimensions in the acceleration not now of history (which, with the loss of local time, has just lost its concrete foundations), but of reality itself, with the new-found importance of this world time, a time whose instantaneity definitively cancels the reality of distances – the reality of those geographical intervals which only yesterday still organized the politics of nations “. (p8) 
 
The abolition or dissolution of the geophysical space by a quasi-instantaneous global communication system means the continents themselves have been supplanted by tele-continents. In the context of this meta-geophysics, national frontiers dissolve, or are snatched away, as is the history of societies previously separated by 
“communications distances and time-lags”. (p9)

This meta-geophysical phenomenon is, he says, is of 
“transpolitical importance”. 

We are not seeing 
‘an end of history’, 

he says, but we are seeing the end of geography, and we are also witnessing a strange reversal in the meaning of the global and the local.

He refers to the view the Pentagon developed in the 1990’s that 
“geostrategy is turning the globe inside out like a glove”. (p10) 
According to this weird military perspective 
the global is the interior of a finite world, and the local is the exterior “the periphery, if not indeed the ‘outer suburbs’ of the world”. 

Perhaps an example of this inside-out world is found in Virilio’s book, City of Panic, where the mayor of Philadelphia is quoted as saying, following the USA’s urban riots of the 1960’s, 
“From now on, a state’s borders run inside the cities.” (p15)

 
“There lies the great globalitarian transformation, the transformation which extraverts localness – all localness – and which does not now deport persons, or entire populations, as in the past, but deports their living space, the place where they subsist economically. A global de-localization which affects the very nature not merely of ‘national’, but of ‘social’ identity, throwing into question not so much the nation-state, but the city, the geopolitics of nations.”

“The real city, which is situated in a precise place and which gave its name to the politics of nations, is giving way to the virtual city”, the site of “metropolitics.” (Virilio,1998, p10-11). The Meta-city.

With globalization, Virilio thinks that the city “is foregrounded once more”, and it is probably the case that the intensity of the city as experienced through its visible fabric is more pronounced now than ever. Half a century ago McLuhan pointed to the contemporary experience of great cities in terms of the electronic communication environment that surrounds them and functions as an all encompassing medium, whilst the cities themselves are merely the content of this medium.

Local to Local

Local to local is what this blog is about.

In a context of international exchange between artists, and other actors, livestreaming video has become more than a part of the everyday life of skypeworld in a series of projects involving skyped encounters. This blog is about exploring, probing, trying to find out about how this tool is shaping space in the context of making art, and how this activity brings about a radical questioning, a possible re-thinking of what is really important in the arts now!

It is also about the local and the global, but with the proviso that for this blog space local > < global as a navigational frame looks a bit worn out, a cliche perhaps? and certainly very abstract; a geometry that lacks the stretch of a body, of a limb, of a muscle, perhaps in the act of reaching out, or across a space.

For the ancient Greeks geometry and space had that certain tactile quality that comes from the experience of space and so is essentially inseparable from the sense we have of space defined by the movements of limbs that carry bodies through spaces, or for the reaching for things, or the formation of gesture.
This kind of geometry is concrete! 

Proprioception is relevant here. The term is coined from the Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, used to refer to the sense we all share  of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body. Unlike the exteroceptive senses by which we perceive the outside world, and interoceptive senses, that have to do with pain and movement of internal organs, proprioception is a third distinct sensory modality. It provides feedback solely on the status of the body internally. It is the sense that indicates whether the body is moving with required effort, as well as where the various parts of the body are located in relation to each other.

Global, and globalization are terms that seem to increasingly belong to the conditions that tend toward an abstraction of space, an abstract geometry for the abstraction of information, a blank container for the free-floating, infinitely translatable stuff of actually existing capitalism. 
This kind of geometry is the geometry of the colonial spirit!

Since the publication of Apollo 8's revelatory image of the blue planet rising above the Moon's horizon, the shocking realization of our cosmic condition has softened somewhat, has become absorbed into the everyday, the ordinary.  
The poetry of the image, even the terror and anxiety of the existential essence of the image remains immanent, in potential, but it has become a cliche!

Looking at earthspace from space dissolves boundaries! Marshall McLuhan chose a fuzzy scanned image of the earth viewed from a satellite in the pre-NASA Apollo mission years, and uses it with a portentous warning quote from the philosopher A. N. Whitehead in the last pages of his book;

There is a tendency, an assumption to think of boundaries in space as necessarily visual in their character, just as we think about space itself as defined in visual terms. Actual boundaries may, however, include in-visible edges, limits, horizons, with liminal properties ranging from the ultra permeable to the hermetic.

An Inventory of Effects is as good a way as any of exploring how spaces are diversely configured in multiple dimensions!

This Apollo mission photo of Earth shows the interactive vortexes of atmospheric layers. Predicting, or seeing how dynamic weather systems behave only became possible in the middle of the 19th century (1849) with the use of the newly invented electric telegraphy, and the beginnings of our present electronic environmental and global envelope.

The Smithsonian Institution began collecting atmospheric information from an observation network across the United States, with 150 observers via telegraph, under the leadership of Joseph Henry in 1849.

In 1860 Robert Fitzroy, erstwhile Captain of the Beagle and founder of the Met Office, started using the new telegraph system to gather daily observations from across England and produced the first synoptic charts. He also coined the term "weather forecast" and his were the first ever daily weather forecasts to be published in this same year. By then 500 U.S. telegraph stations were involved in making weather observations and submitting them back to the Smithsonian.

The whole point of the use of this technology was being able to correlate information from multiple points on the Earth's surface simultaneously. Only then is it possible to map the barometric contours and "see" what is going on.