This presentation begins with the idea of international exchange without journeys, residency without residence, studio spaces within studio spaces, work happening on and through the screen, and moving photons not people as part of a planetary strategy for a sustainable and survivable future.
technoscience
Paul Virilio, son of Nantes, introduces his theme in The Information Bomb by making a connection between “the establishment of the space of virtual reality” and contemporary sciences that “are engaging, a contrario, in the eclipsing of the real, in the aesthetics of scientific disappearance” (Virilio 2005 p3). Chapter 1 begins with a question “The civilianization or militarization of science?” (Virilio 2005 p1) and even before that in the front papers he uses a quote from Werner Heisenberg to set the tone “No one can say what will be ‘real’ for people when the wars that are now beginning come to an end.”
For Virilio, the virtual is one of the products of an “extreme science”, which is in a way reminiscent of Nietzsche’s challenge to science. For Nietzsche science as an “absolute value”, as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake makes as little sense as the pursuit of goodness for its own sake, and can become just as harmful. If we ask “goodness for what purpose?”, so we must also insist on knowledge for what purpose?
As the tragic phenomenon of a knowledge which has suddenly become cybernetic, this techno-science becomes then, as mass techno-culture, the agent not, as in the past, of the acceleration of history, but of the dizzying whirl of the acceleration of reality – and that to the detriment of all verisimilitude. (Virilio 2005 p3)It is optics, and what Virilio calls electro-optics, that have contributed to this speeding up of “the various means for the representation of the world”. The choice, he says, is between a “science of verisimilitude, of the plausible, still attached to the discovery of a relative truth? Or, a science of implausibility, committed today to the research of a heightened virtual reality. (Virilio 2005 p3-4)
Heightened in what way? In what sense?
The world of visual appearances, or the world of the non-visible?
the audible?
the tactile?
the texture and feel of word-music?
Maybe this technoculture is actually running at another speed, the speed of everyday life, cognitive activities, nervous systems, where the richness of texture is experienced best when everything slows down to an extended time in multiple spaces. Perhaps this proposal is counter-intuitive to the time space compression Virilio is so anxious to critique, but it is where this paper chooses to begin.
slow travel
Slow Travel is an evolving movement. The beginnings of contemporary slow culture may well go back to a resistance to fast food but it has also taken its inspiration from nineteenth-century European travel writers, such as Théophile Gautier, who reacted against the cult of speed, prompting some modern analysts to ask "If we have slow food and slow cities, then why not slow travel?". Equally: "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)
Manifestos of slow travel argue that all too often the potential pleasure of the journey is lost by too eager anticipation of arrival. Slow travel allows travellers to engage with the actualities along their routes, going to places valued by local residents rather than merely following guidebooks. So, slow travel shares some of the principles of so called ecotourism, including looking for low-impact travel styles, including not flying. A new book series launched in May 2010 by Bradt Travel Guides explicitly espouses slow travel ideas with volumes that focus very much on local communities within a tightly defined area, often advocating the use of public transport along the way. Perhaps this contemporary phenomenon may guide us in the design of international exchange processes and activities?
slow consciousness
The texture of consciousness and the concept of space-time compression are linked somewhere in the environment that is the space of video-streaming and e-dialogue. This environment 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, it runs through continuity breaks, holds attention in front of fuzzy images, and as we strain to listen, de-code etc, we are profoundly engaged.
Is this a problem? In a way this is a context of maximum sensory involvement in making out the "other" in this situation, 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. Consciousness is embodied, and the dance of thought itself cannot be separated from the whirlygig of perceptions of the place you are in, or move through, or scan, or touch and smell. The geographer David Harvey when he used the term space-time compression in The Condition of Postmodernity recognizes the processes that revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time, so how are we adjusting to, or resisting this most recent episode now? The flaneur's pace is slow, in order to observe and be observed. The pace of e-dialogue between artist and artist, or artist and audience, or artist and participant observer, or actor and observant participant, is necessarily slow in this pixellated space, this space of translation, and of endless coding, de-coding and en-coding, as rhythmic in its way as the in and out of breathing.
the commonplace
The everyday context of the experiments we are undertaking is, technically, commonplace. Politically and culturally though, this context of human communication is of crucial importance. In a phrase, the wider significance of these activities rests on the fact that this context is potentially "open to everyone". This idea relates to the modern sense of the use of the word banal, including associated meanings such as "hackneyed", "ordinary', and leading to "trite" and "petty". An alternative meaning originates in the meaning of the old French banel (13c.) is that it describes the communal, from ban "decree; legal control; announcement; authorization; payment for use of a communal oven, mill, etc." The communal oven was known as the four banal was a common municipal institution in medieval France.
These ovens were owned by the feudal lord and operated by an ovenmaster or fournier; personal ovens were outlawed, requiring users of the communal oven to pay a fee to the fournier to cook their food. the design of these ovens originated on the Roman plan, stone buildings (fireproof) large enough to hold an entire community's ration of bread. So, bread, a staple necessity, is produced in a controlled communality.
The internet, likewise, is produced capitalistically, rather than in a feudal network, engineering a controlled communality. However, whilst ownership and control issues may in the near future become a serious concern for the users of a shared electronic information environment, there is the example of common land in English law.
Cattle grazing on Basing Common.
A common (or common land) is a piece of land owned by one person, but over which other people can exercise certain traditional rights, such as allowing their livestock to graze upon it. The older texts use the word "common" to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name "common" for the land over which the rights are exercised. By extension, the term "commons" has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. (Wikipedia)Using digital virtual spaces, using blogs and skype and so on, makes us commoners of this particular type of newly created common territory. Rights and privileges also apply, and so it becomes a political as well as economic space.
The newness of spaces, perceptions and understandings is not new (especially in an industrial society), but when new dimensions burst on to the scene, then it is both exciting and alarming. In a word - Modernity. According to Svetlana Alpers, in her book on Dutch art in the 17th century called The Art of Describing, she connects the new lens based optical technologies of both microscope and telescope to a significant shift in an understanding of scale and measure when it comes to sight and seeing.
An immediate and devastating result of the possibility of bringing to men's eyes the minutest of living things (the organism viewed in the microscopic lens), or the farthest and largest (the heavenly bodies viewed through the telescopic lens), was the calling into question of any fixed sense of scale and proportion. (Alpers p 18)
The juxtaposition of a tiny crevice and huge town gate, or the expansion of the degree into a panoramic view brings to mind characteristic features of Dutch art. Paulus Potter's famous Young Bull looms against a dwarfed church tower and sports a tiny fly on its extensive flank. (Alpers pp 18-19)
The way I am seeing it is that; the territory we inhabit on this blog, and our exchanges on skype, the thinking about elsewhere, and the thinking about the here and now, are part of a big shift in the species of consciousness that is the body electric. The body electric arrives in a poem by Walt Whitman from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass. Its original publication, like the other poems in Leaves of Grass, did not have a title. In fact, the line "I sing the body electric" was not added until the 1867 edition. At the time, "electric" was not yet a commonly used term, but the electric telegraph had already inaugurated the age of electric communication over the previous two decades. The 1840's saw the philosopher Kierkegaard publish major works that include critiques of Hegel and form a basis for existential psychology. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Stages on Life's Way include observations about existential choices and their consequences, and what religious life can mean for a modern individual. No wonder, when it was possible, due to the telegraph, to know, simultaneously, the barometric pressures at a number of geographical locations, the space that God's consciousness inhabits had been substituted by a new species of human consciousness in the form of the daily telegraph and the weather report. This particular sense of dread at this substitution and abolition of space is no longer with us. What we need to guard against is feeling too comfortable with the way things are at this relatively early phase of this new electric communication structure. The new commons will need to be established through occupation and use. This is why open source is so crucial.
Narcissus is mentioned, a reminder to us as to the fate of the self-absorbed. As an artist, and therefore spending time in the company of artists, I know about the difficulties of working as one of the self-absorbed. It is partly this long tendency that inspires necessary thoughts of escape, to some kind of anti-environment. In July 2008 whilst standing on the corner of two streets in the modern centre of Damascus with my laptop and using video streaming to connect to an audience at the Bluecoat in Liverpool for the launch of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, ad to show them the drummers accompanying the bride and bridegroom to their reception in the hotel on this particular corner of Damascus, someone in the Liverpool crowd said, “what’s so special? I use skype all the time”, “but” said Peter Hagerty, “we are using it here!”
So yes, using skype is commonplace, relatively speaking, open source and accessible to many, as are many of the domains among the echolands of the internet. The particular use of this technology in this and other projects is significant in relation to the particular contexts involved in the instigation of the live video-streamed link, that is neither specifically “work” related or social network related, but somehow containing some elements of both of these commonplace situations in a “public” space that is the result of collapsing one space and another into the same space and time.
There is another sort of differentiation that I would like to identify here, and that is very obvious, and that has to do with an interest in the socially transformative power of communication technologies, specifically electric/digital technology. Right up there are the web based SNS, social network services the online services, platforms, or sites that focus on building and reflecting social networks among people who share interests and/or activities. All essentially consist of some sort of representation of the network user, their social links, and a variety of additional services such as e-mail and instant messaging. Although online community services are sometimes considered as a social network service SNS usually means an individual orientated service.
So Facebook, Twitter widely used worldwide;
MySpace and LinkedIn being the most widely used in North America;
Nexopia (mostly in Canada);
Bebo, Hi5, Hyves (mostly in The Netherlands),
StudiVZ (mostly in Germany),
iWiW (mostly in Hungary),
Tuenti (mostly in Spain),
Nasza-Klasa (mostly in Poland),
Decayenne, Tagged, XING, Badoo and Skyrock in parts of Europe;
Orkut and Hi5 in South America, India and Central America;
Friendster, Mixi, Multiply, Orkut, Wretch, renren and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands and Twitter, Orkut and Facebook in India:
each a domain of profiles, representations and mis-representations, securely and not so securely bound to the personal and private. There have been attempts to standardize these services to avoid the need to duplicate entries of friends and interests (see the FOAF standard and the Open Source Initiative), but essentially this is a galaxy of in-crowds.
So, going back to the Roman idea of a res publica, SNS networks do not apply. As begins his Richard Sennett says in his Fall of Public Man in Chapter 1; The Public Domain:
A res publica stands in general for those bonds of association and mutual commitment which exist between people who are not joined together by ties of family or intimate association; it is the bond of a crowd, of a "people", of a polity, rather than the bonds of family or friends. As in Roman times, participation in the res publica today is most often a matter of going along, and the forums for this public life, like the city, are in a state of decay. (Sennett, 1986 pp3-4)The potential of an "art situation" to function as a forum of this kind, to intervene, will always exist. The fact that these days this potential is only tapped occasionally, in the "one off", is a sign of the times. The silence that reigns in the gallery, during a performance, at the cinema is part of the Narcissus situation, locked into a closed system, transfixed, absorbed in the repeated reflected mirror image as the "other". This is not self-love, Narcissus does not recognize the reflection as an extended image of the self, so this infinite duration of silence cannot be broken, despite the efforts of the nymph Echo to break into the system with repeated fragments of Narcissus' voice.
speech is a sign.
In echoland we might say to a stranger, “speak! That I may see you!” Silence in the gallery, silence during the performance, is an aspect of the way the arts have been moved from diverse kinds of public space to “inside” each of the individuated bodies that the comprise the audience. This is a private experience, bound to the spectacle and its duration through a passive but intense observation, the outward persona (no longer the mask that identifies a character) is reserved, the emotional vortex within (if present) is obscured, hidden by the exterior surfaces of outward appearances. There is no revealing, no self-exposure, the investment in meaning is invisible and becomes un-shareable to the rest of the group. The climax of the modern drama, according to Brecht, may indeed take place among the individuals making up an audience, as opposed to on the stage with the actors, but in the early 18th century privileges for audience included occupying seating on the stage, at an extra cost, and provide such audience members with the proximity and opportunity to spontaneously require actors to make their “point”, and sometimes repeatedly, as an “encore”!
Thinking about spaces and the publicness we are seeking to instigate, one of the significant aspects of the public dimension of the activities we are consciously fostering are the kinds of place we have ended up choosing, or the opportunities and logistics that determine where they have taken place. These include the Out of the Bluecoat retail premises functioning as temporary venues, side rooms of museums, a conference room, gallery spaces with or without exhibition, lobby spaces, street café, street kiosk, and expo pavilion. Using the available technology is part of the determinate context, but there is also a sense in which these places are locations that have a quality of being on the street, in-between the street and some other connected space, at least in our thinking and conversation, that is more formally identified as a place of cultural meaning, for instance a performance space, a cinema, a gallery, a theatre or concert hall. Where WIFI operates creates a pool of communication potentials, in some ways reminiscent of the 18th century coffeehouses in London and Paris.
In his The Fall of Public Man Sennett discusses examples of what he identifies as "speech as a sign" in a section of Chapter 4; "Public Roles". His view of the London coffeehouse is that they were part of the bridge that this system of speech allowed between stage and street:
in and out? private and public?
The social networking sites play on the narcissism of in-crowd dynamics, so, in the contrasting scope of other possibilities, operating in real places, actual and virtual geographies, opens up into the dynamics of a “maybe” out-crowd.
Thinking about spaces and the publicness we are seeking to instigate, one of the significant aspects of the public dimension of the activities we are consciously fostering are the kinds of place we have ended up choosing, or the opportunities and logistics that determine where they have taken place. These include the Out of the Bluecoat retail premises functioning as temporary venues, side rooms of museums, a conference room, gallery spaces with or without exhibition, lobby spaces, street café, street kiosk, and expo pavilion. Using the available technology is part of the determinate context, but there is also a sense in which these places are locations that have a quality of being on the street, in-between the street and some other connected space, at least in our thinking and conversation, that is more formally identified as a place of cultural meaning, for instance a performance space, a cinema, a gallery, a theatre or concert hall. Where WIFI operates creates a pool of communication potentials, in some ways reminiscent of the 18th century coffeehouses in London and Paris.
In his The Fall of Public Man Sennett discusses examples of what he identifies as "speech as a sign" in a section of Chapter 4; "Public Roles". His view of the London coffeehouse is that they were part of the bridge that this system of speech allowed between stage and street:
The urban institution in which this system of spoken signs ruled was the coffeehouse of the early 18th Century. (Sennett 1986 p 80)They were, he says “the prime information centres in both cities at this time.” Not only were these places used for reading the newspapers, they published newspapers, became centres of information sensitive business activities, as in Lloyds of London insurance, and as such “were places in which speech flourished”.
and the talk was governed by a cardinal rule in order for information to be as full as possible, distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffeehouse had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. (Sennett 1986 p 81)This was essentially a fictional space, a place where it was possible to pretend that social divisions were surmountable, in order that information could flow freely. The clubs of the later 18th century, where like minds associated, were closed cliques that eroded this open source environment, and where conversation became dull by comparison.
in and out? private and public?
The social networking sites play on the narcissism of in-crowd dynamics, so, in the contrasting scope of other possibilities, operating in real places, actual and virtual geographies, opens up into the dynamics of a “maybe” out-crowd.
Returning to the discussion of social networking sites and services is relevant because not only are they different in fundamental qualities from the potentials we are trying to identify, but it is necessary to recognize that they are part of the context we are working with, and in terms of scale and influence, they are of immense importance. The psyche of art and artist are part of and implicated in this domain, even perhaps establishing a prime model of this force that blasts away an alternative and public domain. Sennett's organizing idea in The Fall of Public Man is this:
We have tried to make the fact of being in private, alone with ourselves and with family and intimate friends, an end in itself.Facebook is now employed by the self-absorbed parents of an internet generation making a brave new world, to monitor their drunken escapades whilst at college and university. How un-cool is facebook? Now is the time to look for what is happening in terms of resistance through countering tactics. The monitors pranked!
Each person's self has become his principal burden; to know oneself has become an end, instead of a means through which one knows the world. And precisely because we are so self-absorbed, it is extremely difficult for us to arrive at a private principle, to give a clear account to ourselves or to others of what our personalities are. The reason is that, the more privatized the psyche, the less it is stimulated, and the more difficult it is for us to feel or express feeling.
The obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations is like a filter which discolors our rational understanding of society; it obscures the continuing importance of class in advanced industrial society; it leads us to believe community is an act of mutual self-disclosure and to undervalue the community relations of strangers, particularly those which occur in cities. (Sennett 1986 p 4)
travel not books
The experience of travel includes effort, adaptation to local conditions, navigation, guesswork, culture shock etc. In short, a "wake up" situation. The experience of international exchange, residencies and so on in the context of an international art network, or educational institutions, includes all of the above, and therefore should be understood as part of a process of pushing through the envelope, even bursting the bubble of assumptions, psychological projections, cultural and ideological projections, and so on, and so potentially leading to the gaining of new perceptions, new knowledge, including a sense of what we do not know. This experience is vital to the understanding of contemporary art. On the other hand, especially in Europe and North America, we have also learned how to be tourists, and tourism includes complaining about transportation, the lack of hot running water, heating or air conditioning, palatable food etc. In short, more a state of somnambulism than being awake! Artists and designers are just as likely to succumb to the syndrome of the self-absorbed tourist as anybody. By comparison the discipline of travel is a discipline indeed, a way to gaining knowledge that allows for connecting into local knowledges rather than the smoothed out global versions.
In his lecture series of 1976 at the College de France, Michel Foucault (published in English translation as Society Must be Defended, 2004) talks about using the research tools of the ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ at a local level, but in order to do this, he says the theoretical unity of their discourse needs to be ‘suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatised, theatricalized and so on (Foucault 2004 p. 6) This forms the local character of the critique, a critique that resembles;
a sort of autonomous and non-centralized theoretical production, or in other words, a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity. (Foucault 2004 p. 6)What makes his notion of the critique possible is what he calls the ‘returns of knowledge’. Beneath the whole thematic of ‘life, not knowledge’, ‘the real, not erudition’, ‘travel not books’, he says; ‘through it and even within it we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, M. 2004 p. 7). Using this term he refers to the historical contents that have been buried or masked in the formal systematizations of knowledge, but have provided him with the wherewithal for his research;
quite simply because historical contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask. (Foucault 2004 p. 7)The critique was then able to reveal these ‘blocks of historical knowledges’ by using the tools of scholarship, but it is ‘the re-appearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible’ (Foucault 2004 p. 8).
The local, therefore, is itself the potential site of resistance to the ‘world system’. As artists interested in the way places in transition focus people’s attention on the issues of the local, and the global, the art process generates material, visual material, verbal material, mapping material and video that can be seen as equivalent to Foucault’s “the returns of knowledge”. However, this is an ongoing and ‘live’ thing, making or taking pictures, writing or speaking, making statements, drawing diagrams, editing or not editing video, making live video-streaming links and conversations, using art and everyday practices to find out about how to come back to the Earth!
Getting out more is great, but there is also this radical question that faces those of us thinking about how to come back to Earth, that Mcluhan posited back in 1968, what is the artistic function in society?
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 blunt and thought provoking statement:
Electronic Man (well 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. (McLuhan, Parker 1968 p 7)local local
Following on from considering just what is the artistic function in society, it is apposite to mention that in ANT, actor-network theory, it is equally relevant to consider the question of society, this long established and basic component of multiple discourses. As Bruno Latour writes in his introduction to Reassembling the Social, which is suggestively headlined; How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations:
What I want to do in the present work is to show why the social cannot be construed as a kind of material or domain and to dispute the project of providing a 'social explanation' of some other state of affairs. (Latour 2005 p 1)The local to local situation is obviously embedded in the situation of connecting people and places using video streaming technology, and Latour has some powerful ways of re-working seeing how the local actually is. In Part II of this introduction to actor-network theory called First Move: Localizing the Global he writes:
An actor-network is traced whenever, in the course of a study, the decision is made to replace actors of whatever size by local and connected sites instead of ranking them into micro and macro. The two parts are essential, hence the hyphen. The first part (the actor) reveals the narrow space in which all of the grandiose ingredients of the world begin to be hatched; the second part (the network) may explain through which vehicles, which traces, which traits, which types of information, the world is being brought inside those places and then, after having been transformed there, are being pumped back out of its narrow walls. This is why the hyphenated 'network' is not there as a surreptitious presence of the Context, but remains what connects the actors together. Instead of being like Context, another dimension giving volume to a too narrow and flat description, it allows the relations to remain flat and to pay in full the bill for the 'transaction costs'. It's not that there are a macro-sociology and a micro-sociology, but that there two different ways of envisaging the macro-micro relationship: the first one builds a series of Russian Matryoshka dolls - the small is being enclosed, the big is enclosing; and the second deploys connections - the small is being unconnected, the big one is to be attached. (Latour 2005 pp179-180)So, here we are! Experience tends to indicate that the relations in connecting people and places do tend to remain flat whenever we connect, and there has always been a sense of wonder or curiosity about the other place that is perhaps connected to the equal relationship that is present in this shifting connectivity between cafe and a museum, a street corner and a studio, a pub and an apartment, a small gallery space and a lobby in the Academy. This wonder/curiosity leads to mapping, file sharing, moving a laptop into adjacent spaces inside and outside to show what's round the corner. Sometimes it leads to work, a collective activity, interactive work between people based on questions that come out of the imaginings about the other locality, whilst the side by side 'thereness' and 'hereness' of these spaces already suggests a two way traffic, a dialogue. Links can also involve actors who in the one local context are figures of national or international repute, power or influence, and hobnobbing with actors with a non-institutional grounding in the other locality. The various and diverse situations involved in these appositions is also an intriguing element that perhaps relates to this point that Latour makes in the same chapter quoted above:
As we saw in the earlier part of the book, it is not the sociologist's job to decide in the actors stead what groups are making up the world and which agencies are making them act. Her job is to build the artificial experiment - a report, a story, a narrative, an account -where this diversity might be deployed to the full. (Latour 2005 p184)In the activity of making connections it is interesting to see how spontaneously participants engage with the link between nodes and the traffic between the nodes with running commentaries, that become fragments that are assembled to sound like stories, part of a narrative and an account produced by the sequence of elements, where to every story belongs another, in a flow that runs on and on, infinite connections creating more links, reminiscent of the archetype as explored in McLuhan and Watson's From Cliché to Archetype (1970) and of course the links of this hypertext. Latour continues:
Even though it seems so odd at first, the same is true of scale: it is not the sociologist's business to decide whether any given interaction is 'micro' while some other one would be 'middle range' or 'macro'. Too much investment, ingenuity and energy is expended by participants into modifying the relative scale of all the other participants into modifying the relative scale of all the other participants for sociologists to decide on a fixed standard. (Latour 2005 p184)And on the next page he writes; 'Scale is the actor's own achievement.'
local global
“The time of the finite world is coming to an end” says Paul Virilio (2000 p 8) “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”. (Virilio 2000 p 9) 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”. (Virilio 2000 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 latest 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.” (Virilio 2000 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. (Virilio 2000 p10)inside and outside
Wandering about with a laptop connected to the internet, video-streaming, listening, talking, showing and pointing using a webcam, is hard on the arm muscles, but a fantastic way of mapping, much more than a version of a virtual fly through, laying down a memory based and spatially specific cognitive map. Connecting spaces in this attitude of mobility and inclusion really does render our everyday assumptions about inside and outside wondrously akin to the conundrums of Lewis Carroll. Thanks to the work of Martin Gardner's annotated Hunting of the Snark we have the juxtaposition of two fascinating mapping concepts from Carroll's work.
I suggest that this challenge to inside-outside is equivalent to the mapping discrepancy in Lewis Carroll's Bruno and Sylvie Concluded; where in Chapter 11; the German Professor explains how his country's cartographers experimented with larger and larger maps until they finally made one with a scale of a mile to the mile. 'It has has never been spread out, yet,' he says. 'The farmers objected; they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.on and through
Looking glass geometry is also worth exploring in tandem with the screen environment.
The screen environment and the concepts of in and out, on and through, remain an intriguing dimension of what we are doing in this spatial, technical and communication context.
The screen as the global, the space local, is a reverse of the usual geographic assumption of going out into the world. The image made of pigment, ink and emulsion, is de-coded to produce the light of art, photography, whilst film is light projected onto a screen and we learn to focus on a plane that hovers invisibly in front of that screen to achieve the maximum illusion of a window onto a cinematic set of spaces and times. The telly, the computer screen is illuminated from within, this is a spatial relation akin to the architecture of glass in the medieval cathedral, not an architecture of light, a system of illumination where the human subject performs the role of a screen capable of absorbing this quite different sort of light, a sort of sculptural light, if that is possible! Texture! Or "the bairdboard bombardment screen" in the "charge of the light barricade" [349.9,11] as Joyce has it in the Wake! Enlightenment! The computer is an extension of the nervous system and the screen is as much brain information as the light your brain makes in your head when looking at the world, including all this newfangled tackle.
hybrid spaces
Space and spaces in this interface behave in new ways, as do those who inhabit, use and work these spaces. One way of expressing these qualities is to describe the hybridity these spaces often present. For example, take this example that relates to the techniques that generate the experience of a pictorial space. In byzantine art and in medieval art, where connectedness in meaning always takes precedence over verisimilitude, the gold "background" in a work is not actually a background at all, it is a "no space" full of value, a golden value, ultimate value when considering the relationships between spiritual and earthly powers. The painting by Altdorfer of the Crucifixion is a northern European 'renaissance' work that has this dual spatial quality found in many during a transitional period of swapping between representational programmes that meant the new pictorial techniques were not always used to block this connectedness in meaning so fundamentally rooted in the purposes of representation. The angel in Altdorfer's crucifixion floats in a space that has no depth, but equally has the capacity to suggest the infinite development of a non-directional space, the kind of space that contemporary cosmological theory uses to place every individual, wherever situated, at the centre of a universe where there is no centre.
Taking in the whole work the hybridity is clearly, breathtakingly obvious and yet peculiar. Bodies occupy space, they operate in spatial relationships, and together they create a space with depth and a depth that allows for the existence of a drama, an interaction, but set forth in a "no space" of a golden dimension that is essentially a flat surface, but suggests a "fullness" of space, a presence.
This picturing of space is just that "a picturing", and what we are exploring is partly to do with representing back to ourselves the encounter with new types of space where cognitive behaviours require new mapping techniques. The example above is apposite in that the pictorial space depicted is not so bound to the perspectival systematic view of "looking through a window", because, as with the pictorial space of many northern European artists of this era, the "new space" was more in keeping with Kepler's ideas of picturing, an activity that occurs in a space, rather than Alberti's idea of looking into a space, from a point of view removed from the space represented (Alpers). Presenting rather than representing?
public spaces
The point of connection, in our case the video link, produces a heightened sense of the specific locality in which it takes place. In this instance it is the new campus for art and design at John Moores University, Liverpool, where the proximity to the Metropolitan Cathedral connects the space to a landmark in the city, a point of orientation for the project, a point of reference that is included, and shared in the e-dialogue. Mapping these points of reference contributes to the formation of a shared cognitive map, a picture of what we think we know, and, as Donald Rumsfeld puts it, and very succinctly:
Cognitive maps are always adaptable and adjustable, but never in an additive way. Any "new" bit of information means the whole pattern shifts, has to be "re-jigged', as we might say, using the terminology of the tool maker. Projecting from the known territory into the unknown territory represents a huge leap of faith as well as imagination, because we know it is only an approximate sort of exploration. But the questions that come in the re-jigging are going to be well worth the risks that are to be taken."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."
The event takes place inside, in the lobby of the Art and Design Academy building. This is a place where people enter the building and pass by, whilst the participants settle down and prepare the material for a process of exchange and sharing. However it is worth mentioning that part of the "magic" of this type of locale is that for those who are in the "other place", seeing on their screen(s) what is, and what is going on behind us, like the weather, changing light and so on, adds a huge amount of context and presence, qualities of a "happening". Skyping to Shanghai in our morning means we see their evening. Looking beyond the space to a window that shows the spaces of the city we see the evening fall. The liminal qualities of this part of the day/night frames the event in an intriguing way.
An analogy we could make with non-Euclidian geometry is useful precisely because of the difference to a Euclidean geometry where parallel lines will never meet, as the concept of spatial relations rests on the notion of things existing in a context of flat planes. Now everything is curved parallel lines will meet because in elliptic geometry the lines "curve toward" each other and eventually intersect, whilst in hyperbolic geometry they "curve away" from each other, increasing in distance as one moves further from the points of intersection with the common perpendicular; these lines are often called ultraparallels. Our intentions therefore are, one might say, "elliptical", because we are looking for parallel lines intersecting, so we need curved spaces!
new protocols
The meetings and introductions that take place underscore the spontaneous emergence of new protocols, and something that we can take to be more than "good manners". Similarly, in an environment full of risk, as in the ancient Hellenic world, Xenia (ξενία xenía), hospitality, was an extremely important practice, an almost ritualized friendship formed between host and guest, who would have momentarily encountered each other at first as strangers. So, risk is put aside, just as when we shake hands using our sword hands. In the Odyssey the eponymous hero survives because of the kindness of strangers, as much as by his intelligence and guile. So to in the very commonplace situation we analyze here, we find the kindness of strangers.
Are artists, designers, architects and students of art, design and architecture more inclined or predisposed to adopt this type of protocol because something of mutual value is being shared, even though in the sharing there is a significant risk of re-interpretation or fundamental misreading? The kindness of strangers becomes very quickly host/guest and guest/host, a collapsing of social boundaries, temporarily, but a highly functional suspension of boundaries as barriers when it comes to maximizing the value in a communication oriented environment. Just like the coffeehouses of old London town!
Patience is a virtue, especially when the acting and exchange is interrupted by flow of information and data fluctuations. There is only grief in getting anxious, so the effective behaviours are ones that roll with the rhythms of the flow, that accommodate breaks as breathing spaces and chat between participants in the locales can update the input. It just seems natural.
Translation is a gift that has its own time/space effects. These effects are changes of form rather than changes of state, and therefore likely to include a certain amount of death to existing meanings that, if registered, could be somewhat alarming, but also fertile ground for new ideas. Umberto Eco's book Mouse or Rat (2004) is subtitled "translation as negotiation". He writes:
Humboldt suggests that translating means not only leading the reader to understand the language and culture of the original but also enriching one's own language. We can thus say for Joyce the Italian and French translations of Finnegans Wake were conceived in order to lead the French and the Italians to express what they were unable to express before (just as Joyce did with English). (2004 p. 74)activities and transactions
Building up a sense of contexts, local to local involves sharing, file sharing, collaborative editing, two different posters advertising the same event with two different styles and messages that are then also shared. Already there is information enough to e-voke and to pro-voke thoughts and speech, and as quoted from Sennett earlier: "Speech is a sign." (Sennett 1986) It is probably useful to make a distinction at this point in the post between activities and processes when exploring the nature of the transactions that do take place, and looking ahead to the possibility of new types of transaction in the context of creating new knowledge out of a cross cultural exchange.
Actors and activities go together, and consciousness and thinking is probably more like a mental dance, where breathing and movement are in tune with the flux of performance. Meeting, wondering, listening to voices, reading tonalities, inter-acting, translating, looking and reading faces, is like dancing around and between things, adapting to the spaces, avoiding bumps, and reaching out to make contact, and, maybe to hold on to something for support in what feels like a balancing act. Aristotle makes this distinction in the context of a way of sorting Potentiality and Actuality. Actuality, is often used to translate both energeia and entelecheia (sometimes rendered in English as "entelechy"). "Actuality" comes from Latin actualitas and is a traditional translation, but its normal meaning in Latin is "anything which is currently happening". Energeia is a word based upon ergon, meaning "work", but it is difficult to translate Aristotle's use of energeia. Joe Sachs renders it with the phrase "being–at–work" and says that "we might construct the word is-at-work-ness from Anglo-Saxon roots to translate energeia into English". Entelechy, in Greek entelécheia, was coined by Aristotle and transliterated in Latin as entelechia. According to Sachs (1995), p. 245: into English with consistency.
Aristotle invents the word by combining entelēs (complete, full-grown) with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (persistence) by inserting telos (completion). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle's thinking, including the definition of motion. (Sachs, 1995), Aristotle's physics: a guided studyThis way of actually exploring what process and activity are, including the idea of completion with the effort of holding on as a movement could be a way to develop new mapping techniques in this kind of spatial situation.
gifting
Gifting is performance, a dramatized exchange, usually signifying the arrival at a nodal point in the duration of an activity where the spectre of social obligation begins to take shape, and actions are necessary to equalize the field of relations between host/guests and guest/hosts. Gifting is referenced in the page on this blog Gifting where inspiration is acknowledged from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, in the chapter called Some Food We Could not Eat, where he writes about the circular motion of gifts, quoting an example described by Bronislaw Malinowski of the ceremonial exchange of the Massim peoples who occupy the South Sea islands near the eastern tip of New Guinea.
A person who participates in the Kula has gift partners in neighbouring tribes. If we imagine him facing the centre of the circle with partners on his left and right, he will be receiving armshells from his partner to the left and giving them to the man on the right. The necklaces flow the other way. Of course, these objects are not actually passed hand to hand: they are carried by canoe from island to island in journeys that require great preparation and cover hundreds of miles. The two Kula gifts are exchanged for each other. If a man brings me a necklace, I may give him in return some armshells of equivalent value. I may do this right away, or I may wait as long as a year (though if I wait that long I will give him a few smaller gifts in the interim to show my good faith). As a rule it takes between two and ten years for each article in the Kula to make a full round of the islands. (p13)misunderstandings produce new ideas
It is one of the occasional blessings of the practice of e-dialogue that bursts of laughter mark the moments of the realization that an understanding has not been exchanged, but that a mis-understanding has. In the context of the increasing "internationalizing" of fine art, it is increasingly the case that assumption about how we are reading, interpreting and seeing art from somewhere else is just about OK, and that we might even form judgements about what it is we are looking at and its place in a global context. This is a pity, because we are missing out. Going back to local-local, maybe considering the differences in the kind of local backgrounds that those involved in dialogue and collaborative activity, exploring how what we are unconsciously connected to, suddenly becomes visible when these moments of misunderstanding register.
Local-local begins to build an anti-environment to the local-global internationalization of art as a set of ideas and objects that are exchangeable commodities, partly because they have been disconnected from the connectedness in meaning that is at the heart of the purposes involved in their making. Perhaps there is, as e-space colleague Peter Hagerty suggests, potential to shift the dialogue and the exploration back to the roots and origins of artistic practices, to look at art as a regional phenomenon, with regional dimensions in respect of language, culture, history and social formation. What is it like to be an English artist? What is English about making art in England? How does tradition operate? Does it exist? Do practices themselves have regional characteristics?
What do we share with our Shanghai based colleagues? Metropolitan cultural contexts? Perhaps? But what about the situation of being a contemporary artist in a learning context where traditional methods inscribe particular conceptual approaches, or include aspects of cultural identity that is regional? Some of the event participants in Shanghai were not from Shanghai but from Germany and Turkey. The Kiosk project was discussed in the link, a project that works with metropolitan spaces in Shanghai, Koln and Liverpool, cities where many citizens carry the local in their lives when they use the local dialect. Explorations of these differences is the art. This kind of art is actually a space for testing out how the new ideas can maybe become the basis for new work. It is equivalent to looking at a studio space as a a work in its own right, a space for acting!
The interesting difference is that if we ask what is it to be a Chinese artist? Or, what is Chinese about making art in China or in the wider world as a Chinese artist? Or, how does tradition inform contemporary practice? Then there are intelligible answers, even given that the internationalism of a neo-liberal cultural agenda can often operate as a cloaking device for a "not so deconstructed as we might like to believe colonial attitude", and an agenda that empties meaning in the interests of the institutions of an international market of objects and ideas.
When dialogue begins, propaganda ends!
An art that aims for dialogue, as it turns out, is an art that is a post-autonomous art (see previous post). In the article Dirty work: art beyond ‘autonomy’ by Mary Anne Francis she reviews some recent developments in art practice amongst mainland European quarters. The article abstract sets out the approach as follows:
Across Europe there are signs that art's relationship to work is changing in a way that calls for new analytic categories. The era of art's autonomy is on the wane as artists increasingly pursue practices involving work in the world, where not so long ago they favoured doing art's own work. This article establishes the grounds for those claims. First, it looks at art's ‘autonomy’ (via recent theory from Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Michael Lingner) in order to assess the nature of the work done by much of twentieth century Western art. Then, taking the work of the Danish (art) collective, Superflex, as typical of these new practices, it analyses how autonomy is being rejected. Deciding that Michael Lingner's concept of ‘post-autonomy’ is helpful in describing and thinking about such work, it concludes by referring uses of that term to the notion of ‘relative autonomy’.So e-space lab is working alongside many of those who travel on this different pathway. What is important to note from our recent experience is how well this notion of practice translates to somewhere like Shanghai, where our partners fully respond to the value of dialogue, process, defined activity, and so on, as a core of the recent series of video streamed e-dialogues that we have co-instigated with Shanghai University College of Fine Art. Whilst the translation happens, other notions, local notions of creative practice, sit happily alongside this new model, in what for us on this European off-shore island, turns out to be a radically different kind of project, and in some ways potentially more disturbing.
potentialities and actualities
The history of the relationship between modern art and telecommunications is itself a fascinating mix of the blind application of totally new communication forms and techniques to already existing modes of activity, the usual "rear view mirror" approach, and a determination to preserve several conflicting and contradictory historically defined roles of the artist. Two examples will serve as a reminder that technology is also an actor in the arts, and to apply technology without re-considering the artistic function in society leaves artistic practices the poorer.
For our first example let us cite Louis Kaplan’s text The Telephone Paintings: Hanging Up Moholy which deals with one of the inaugural events in the telematic timeline, the telephone paintings. The text includes this quotation from the artist Moholy Nagy's own reflections on his artistic practice:
‘In 1922, I ordered by telephone from a sign factory 5 paintings in porcelain enamel. I had the factory's color chart before me and I sketched my paintings on graph paper. At the other end of the telephone, the factory supervisor had the same kind of paper, divided into squares. He took down the dictated shapes in the correct position. (It was like playing chess by correspondence.). Thus, these pictures did not have the virtue of the "individual touch," but my action was directed exactly against this overemphasis. I often hear the criticism that because of this want of the individual touch, my pictures are "intellectual".’It turns out that this account is probably mythological post rationalization, but as Kaplan writes:
But this difficulty in tracing the call will not have been made in service of meaning. Telephone becoming, to cite a phrase, takes away from authorial intentions-- puts meaning on hold--only through an anonymous handwriting, the "I" that is written and rewritten. It produces every autobiographical statement in an anonymous hand, unnaming it with an anonymous hand.
With these reflections, Moholy returns yet again to the metaphor of the telephone--to the super-syncretistic science of "synchronous multiplex telegraphy"--as the meanings to describe contemporary literary and artistic production, to describe the telegraphic writings and practices that sent him and his voice through the wires. At that juncture and with that device, in the space of "literary expression," where the history of ideas gets tangled up in the materials and materiality of writing, this crisscrossing and zigzagging of thought—its currents and messages that put the term "intellectual" in a marked form, in the intertwining of the lines, the patterns of interference, the static of that dispatch network, the systematic overloads of the coaxial cable system, this long drawn-out death sentence, the telephone rings, sounding the death knell of the author.So, the artist recognizes the metaphorical potential but will not respond to the challenge of the actuality, and refuses to hear any kind of knell, fatal or non-fatal. The totality of this new aural landscape, where the texture of sound and bodily gesture combine in the phatic communication that is telephony, is not recognized. Any possible scope for interactivity is reduced to a one way channel and the dictating of instructions. This suggests the existence of a fundamental problem at the heart of the idea of art making and the role of the artist. We could loop back at this point to the question of shifting our energies to considering what actually is the artistic function in society, but let's hold back a while to consider another example first.
The dictating of instructions is found as a structural element in our second example. Still tracing the telematic timeline to the Art by Telephone exhibition (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1969) admits an historic precedent in the Moholy Nagy, but the author is still hanging in there, the death knell indefinitely delayed, the triple by-pass a great holding operation, and still “dictating”.
In October 13 - December 19, 2008 in an exhibition Specific Object presented the continuous playing of an original, 44 minute, 33-1/3 RPM vinyl LP record which was produced as the exhibition catalogue for the show Art by Telephone, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, November 1 - December 14, 1969. The following information shows how fundamental power relations are maintained within the structure of artistic practice, even at this moment when "conceptual art" challenges the materiality of art-making:
On the LP the Museum's director, Jan van der Marck, interviews, by long-distance telephone, artists Siah Armajani, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Iain Baxter, Mel Bochner, Geoge Brecht, Jack Burnham, James Lee Byars, Robert H. Cumming, Francoise Dallegret, Jan Dibbets, John Giorno, Robert Grosvenor, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Dick Higgins, Davi Det Hompson, Robert Huot, Alani Jacquet, Ed Kienholz, Joseph Kosuth, Les Levine, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Guenther Uecker, Stan Van Der Beek, Bernar Venet, Frank Lincoln Viner, Wolf Vostell, William Wegman, and William T. Wiley, each discussing with van der Marck how to execute an artwork for inclusion in the show to be fabricated by in Chicago strictly by the artist's verbal instructions.The overview quoted below points to this being a seminal moment in ways of thinking about the future productions of art:
While the 1969 curatorial effort was conceived as an economic means to produce a large-scale exhibition, many of the artists included within the show produced succinct conceptual works that were the among the first such works to be presented in an American museum.Intellectual premises over visual result? Certainly, but the instructional, one-way channel maintains a framework of power relations that even ordinary everyday dialogue is capable of interrupting, and toppling even. So, playing a game, but making sure it is a "solitaire" performance, a spectacle of authorship, holds the line. The avant-garde retreats back to the line and the line becomes the new "front". A different model that connects with this apparently seminal moment, but that allows for a context for multi-channel exchanges in the production of a new idea, or ideas was the instigation in 1968 of the Scratch Orchestra by Cornelius Cardew whilst teaching an experimental music class at London's Morley College. Cardew, along with Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons formed this large experimental ensemble, initially for the purposes of interpreting Cardew's The Great Learning. The Scratch Orchestra gave performances throughout Britain and elsewhere until its demise in 1972, partly as a result of questions about the politics of avant-garde music making in a fetid climate of Maoist cultural debate, and, where in particular:
Conceptual art as documented, recorded, manufactured or preformed in "Art by Telephone" is a further step toward the syncretism of the literary, plastic and performing arts which characterizes the 1960s. The term generally applies to those new forms art which seem to favor intellectual premises over visual result. Those artists who have responded to the challenge to this exhibition share certain basic premises despite divergence in expression. They want to get away form the interpretation of art as specific, handcrafted, precious object. They value process over product and experience over possession... -- Jan van der Marck from the exhibition catalogue / LP jacket
the question of art from whom was hotly debated within the context of the Orchestra, which Cardew came to see as elitist despite its numerous attempts to make socially accessible music.Nevertheless, as a member of this highly fluid ensemble, the capacity of this entity to transform audience into performers in a public performance was revelatory, quite apart from the intensely public music that occurred sporadically during performances where an actor as observant participant making music with another (Chelsea School of Art 1970, toy piano - Christopher Hobbs; sawn-off recorder - Philip Courtenay to cello - Cornelius Cardew; and then back again), strips time and space down to the flat and equal level of inter-active nervous systems.
It is in the exchanges that acknowledge differences between performers that new music happens. The potential for such a rich experience of making new ideas happen is amplified in the inter-national, inter-cultural and inter-active context. The present situation of international art exchange involving contemporary practices in the visual and performative arts is definitively shaped by discourses that overlap and that share the premises of a conceptual approach to art-making and con-versation. The fact that they are often very different initial premises means that, whilst arguments of a constructive and critical type fall away quickly, the common and shared notion that the art-making is conceptually driven, means that dialogue leads to sharing learning, helping making errors equal to new ideas in a new context of awareness; that language and concepts are the field where, as we push through the bubble membrane of the known knowns into the spaces of known unknowns, we may bump into unknown unknowns, and as mentioned before in the context of translation, this is a potential means whereby we may learn to express what we were unable to express before. Resonance comes through difference! Difference attracts and activates the dialogic. Sameness encourages the supposition we are in familiar territory, whereas difference helps us to return to the knowns, see them in a new way, recover them from the inevitable slippage into the habitual and invisible totality of our particular reality bubble.
coming home
It turns out that, potentially, the ultimate value of the travel experience is coming home, or, rather than just returning to the familiar environment, having something to say about what you find in the familiar but transformed by the experience of different situations, anti-environments that are like-but-not-like home, full of edge, frisson, a process of re-finding as well as re-searching.
In Alper's book The Art of Describing the term chorography is mentioned in relation to one of the main themes for her study of Dutch painting in the 17th century, what she calls the "mapping impulse". Chorography (from χῶρος khōros; "place" + γράφειν graphein, "writing") is a term deriving from the writings of the ancient geographer Ptolemy. In his text of the Geographia Ptolemy writes that geography is the study of the entire world or large sections or countries of it, while chorography is the study of its smaller parts—provinces, regions, cities, or ports, in other words the local - local. Coming home presents us with the challenge to map our own experience, to share our own knowledge. "Ptolemy would include the making of images, views (not simply maps of small regions) in this category, since he claims that chorography requires the skills of a draftsman or artist rather than those of a scientist, which are needed for the practice of geography". Now it seems that the skills of a scientist need to be available to the artist in order to present a useful picture of the world to anyone interested. Wikipedia says that the "term chorography fell out of use after the Renaissance as city views and city maps became more and more sophisticated and demanded a set of skills that required not only skilled draftsmanship but also some knowledge of scientific surveying." However, Alpers work ably shows how artists took on and adapted this type of knowledge to the representation of spaces within spaces represented. Vermeer to eternity! Now, let us acknowledge that the capabilities of those involved in creative practices today are likely to prove as effectual as the work of human geographers when it comes to the construction and presentation of city views, and maybe a new type of artistic surveying capable of providing a complementary toolkit to the skills of the scientist.
Chorography, a writing about place, is also related to Chorology (from Greek χῶρος, khōros, "place, space"; and -λογία, -logia) a term used to describe the study of the causal relations between geographical phenomena occurring within a particular region. Significant in the historical use of this term was the German geographer Alfred Hettner (1859-1941);
a pupil of Richthofen and Ratzel. According to him, geography is a chorological science or it is a study of regions. Hettner rejected the view that geography could be either general or regional. Geography like other fields of learning,must deal in both the unique things (regional geography) and with universal (general geography), but the study of regions is the main field of geography.The term was used by Strabo (Στράβων; 63/64 BC – ca. AD 24) in his 17-volume work Geographica, which presented a descriptive history of people and places from different regions of the world known to his era. So, we find ourselves returning to regionalism, art and human geography. Surely the active research and presentation by artists located in places and discovering and describing their own territories rather than exercising the projecting of unconscious needs and expressions of power relations onto other places is a possible answer to the question of just what is the artistic function in societies amongst the different regions of the world. As Hettner says and is quoted:
The goal of the chorological point of view is to know the character of regions and places through comprehension of the existence together and interrelations among different realms of reality and their varied manifestations, and to comprehend the earth surface as a whole in its actual arrangement in continents, larger and smaller regions, and places.Coming home, virtually/actually, is about expressing out of knowledge the most difficult of things, our own characteristics. What kind of artists are we? What kind of art? The world is a verb and the surface of the earth a life's work of discovery.
in praise of weak theory
Art and human geography seem to converge in this presentation. This is entirely appropriate.
