Us at DAI, April 2015

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

Notes on Artie Vierkant: The Image Object Post-Internet, 2010

Artie Vierkant is an artist active on the Internet and in physical space. His work can be seen at artievierkant.com and in the UbuWeb Film / Video

Archive, ubu.com/film/vierkant.html

p.3

"Post-Internet Art" is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by Gene McHugh Post-Internet is distinct from New Media Art and Conceptualism

Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favor of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction.

Art is a social object.

p.4

Characteristics of art nowadays: 1) Nothing is in a fixed state: i.e., everything is anything else.Post-medium condition (Rosalind Krauss, Lev Manovich). - Art object's lack of fixity in representational strategy (multiple variations of the same object: Oliver Laric, Seth Price).

p.5

In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author. .. stratagem of ... taking an object to be represented ... as another type of object entirely, without reference to the “original.” For objects after the Internet there can be no “original copy.”

• ...if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance ... of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies.

Information aesthetics: Its fault is in its attempt to encapsulate large amounts of data—practical information, experience—into an aesthetic and understandable shorthand. In other words, information aesthetics provides in one object both a representation and the components which make up its source in an attempt to illustrate or arrive at knowledge.

2) Second aspect: the nature of reception and social presence of art. Attention has always been a currency: now it has become diverged/split between those who wishes to seek it.

"They" idiom: alienation from production, a continuous deferral to action (“They should release this on another platform”). It does not allow, though, for a new fundamentally changed abilities of culture and language: - free available to all image-making tools; - instruments for image dissemination; - free access to majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning.

p.7

While art may no longer have to contend with an idea of “mass media” as a fixed, monolithic system, instead it must now deal with both itself and culture at large as a constellation of diverging communities, each fixated on propagating and preserving itself.

Ironically, the most radical and “progressive” movements of the Post-Internet period would be those who either pass by either largely unnoticed due to a decision to opt out of any easily-accessible distribution networks, or else would be composed of a community of people producing cultural objects not intended as artistic propositions and not applying themselves with the label of artist.

p.8

Boris Groys, On the New (2002): The successful... mass cultural image production of our age concerns itself with attacks by aliens... but once in while one would like to be able to contemplate and enjoy something normal, something ordinary... In life, only the extraordinary is presented to us as a possible object of our admiration.

Any sorting of images or aspects of culture, applied with a declaration or narrative gesture, becomes not dissimilar to our experience of everyday life... What matters is that in the presentation they have created a proposition towards an alternate conception of cultural objects.

P.9

If, in Post-Internet culture, artistic production must deal with arrangements and representations of images and objects taken from any cultural context, how do we conceive of sorting the artists themselves?

Language in most average internet use is limited to search keywords, tags - a simple but nevertheless grossly limiting architecture.

P.10 ... denigration of objects and our relationship to space: if an object before us in a gallery is only one of an infinite multitude of possible forms that object could take, its value to the viewer becomes little more than a curiosity.

The strategy: create projects which move seamlessly from physical representation to Internet representation. Central focus is the image (an object in itself).

Notes on Joseph Beuys: I am searching for field character, 1974

A social organism as a work of art: Beuys invokes a concept of 'direct democracy' in an essentially hierarchy-less social organism. We must probe (theory of knowledge) the moment of origin of free individual productive potency (creativity). Every human bing is an artist - total artwork of hte future social order.

Free democratic socialism: self-administration and decentralization (three-fold stucture). Communication occurs in reciprocity: it must never be a one-way flow from the teacher to the taught. The organization for direct democracy through referendum.

Source: Institutions and Objections, pp. 929-930

Notes on A Theory of Networks by Galloway and Thacker

The Exploit. A Theory of Networks. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. UMP 2013

Coda: Bits and Atoms

p. 149 Networks are always exceptional, in the sense that they are always related, however ambiguously, to sovereignty. Hardt and Negri: multitude = "multiplicity of singularities"

p.150 People (one) -> <- multitude (not unified, a set of singularities) Dominant tradition of political philosophy: people can rule as a sovereign power and multitude cannot.

Paolo Virno: "the multitude does not clash with the One; rather, it redefines it. Even the many need a form of unity, of being a One. But here's the point: this unity is no longer the State; rather, it is language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise."

p. 151 Strenghth of multitude is in its decentralization. 'Multitude' - Hardt and Negri, Virno (left) -> <- 'Netwar' - Arquilla and Ronfeldt (right)

Netwar: 'refers to an emerging mode of conflict (and crime) at societal levels, short of traditional military warfare, in which the protagonists use network forms...attuned to the information age'. Five levels of netwar: technological, doctrinal, ideological, narratological, social.

Political effects: Hardt and Negri - one must examine the content of any distributed network to determine its political effects. The network form is not tied to any necessary political position, progressive/reactionary. Both the forces of the multitude and the counterforces of empire organize themselves around the topology of the distributed network.

p. 153 What is missing form both: vision of new future of asymmetry (resistance). networks - ><- networks; empire -><- multitude; what is the shape of the new revolutinary threat?

One must critique the logics of distributed networks themselves.

Multitude, networks and netwars may exhibit inhuman as well as human characteristics - is the basic unit of multitude always an individual human subject?

Properties of networks: 1) Operate at a global level from sets of local interactions; 2) Redefine "control" in the Deleuzian sense.

=> gap b/w autonomous, causal, human agency.

p. 154

If no single human entity controls the network in any total way, then can we assume that a network is not controlled by humans in any total way? If humans are only a part of a network, then how can we assume that

the ultimate aim of the network is a set of human-centered goals?

... the very idea of "the total" is both promised and yet continually deferred in the "inhumanity" of networks, netwars and even the multitude.

p. 155 we propose...to bring our understanding of networks to the level of bits and atoms.. to a level that shows us the unhuman in hte human (pre-Socratic understanding of networks).

Networks operate through ceaseless connections and disconnections, but at the same time, they continually posit a topology. They are forever incomplete but always take on a shape. + Networks are scalable and have fractal (repeating) pattern.

Networks are elemental, in the sense that their dynamics operate at levels "above" and "below" that of the human subject.

Conclusion: our understanding of networks is all-too-human. We think about them in terms of nodes and edges, which is an overly spatialized dichotomy.

Notes for Excerpt from Grant Kester: Conversation Pieces P. 104-1-7

Many of the cultural exchanges orchestrated by or on behalf of Western institutions ignore the specitivity and complexity of local art.. through an appeal to art as "universal language.

"Tomorrow is Another Day", an exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija (1996-97)

"Exchanging Thought", Koh, Chiang Mai, Thailand

Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: logos in legein: to lie with, to gather in, or to receive (opposes to "the assertive tradition of saying"). We are imbued with a logocentric culture in which the bearers of the word are predominately involved in speaking, molding, informing. We must begin to acknowledge the long-suppressed role of listening as a creative practice.

Koh: communication must begin with an attempt to understand as thoroughly as possible the specific conditions and nuances of a given site.... Western artists and institutions shoudl learn to begin by listening

Notes on Cinétract project

....cinema can be made through other means, not only through moving
images or sound but through photographs, music, voices, poetry, texts,
performances. And second, the format of the cinétract emerges from
filmmakers in Paris May'68, determined to create a public response or
statement to political crisis in the form of what they called a
cinétract. A cinétract is formulated through the montage of any kind
of visual material including graphics, handwriting, books, postcards,
found footage, quotes, archival documents, black screen. It is
produced with the minimal means post-production. It focuses on the
details or the overlooked margins of an event. It is distributed via
mass-media channels. It directly addresses the viewer and listener. It
is produced anonymously. It resembles a pamphlet. It is made with
no-budget. It is made with affordable or available technology. It is
not a news report. It reveals the position of the author. To make a
cinétract is to find a form that speaks to a sense of necessity. A
cinetract emerges from a concrete situation. It is an act of public
utterance that demands a questioning of the positions of the speaker,
the figure of the addressee, and the question of the right to speak
for whom?'

Source:http://dutchartinstitute.eu/page/6064/roaming-academy---doreen-mende-and-the-otolith-group-present--cinetracts-by-othe

Note from Dark Matter. Introduction: The Missing Mass

P.1 - Dark Matter - an invisible mass predicted by the big bang theory, which 96% of universe consists of. Creative dark matter: makes up the bulk of the artistic activity produced in our post-industrial society (amateurs, hobbyists, 'failed' artists, educators) P.4 - Illumination in self-organized dark matter, a part of a greater shift taking place within the broader cultural paradigm. p.5 - W.Benjamin, 'The Author as Producer': cultural workers to become producers transforming the very means of their artistic production. Groups: PAD (Political Art Documentation/Distribution), 1980-88; REPOhistory, 1989-2000 - both informally structured groups, marginal. P.6 - there is perhaps no current problem of greater importance to cultural radicals than that of 'dark matter'.

The oversupply of artistic labour is an inherent and commnplace feature of artistic production. ... there is no getting around the fact that an increasing number of individuals are choosing to become artists.

p.7 - Boris Groys: no one sits in the audience any longer, everyone is on stage.

P.9 - 'Other' archive of critical, surplus cultural activity ... a mark or bruise within the body of high art. The system must wear this mark of difference in order to legitimate its very dominance.

The 1990s - NYC mayor Rudolph Giuliani, REPOhistory: site-specific DIY public art projects.

P.11 - 'Temporary Services', Illinois-based artist collective, urban intervention. Tactical Media (TM): a form of interventionist cultural activism that typically borrows new media technology made accessible by global capitalism in order to turn it against state and corporaet authority (media pranks, culture jamming, digital swarming, hacking corporate websites, hit-and-run electronic guerilla tactics.

TM: Critical Art Ensemble, RTMark, The Yes Men, Institute for Applied Autonomy, Bureau of Inverse Technology, 0100101110101101.org

After WW2, Western state sought to legitimate its power by aligning itself with secular democratic society and even modern experimental forms of art. Adorno: such art is a sham.

P. 13 - New pedagogical structures: mock-institutionalism, architecture is discontinuous and contradictory, with elements of not-for-profit organizations, temporary commercial structures, semi-nomadic band or tribe.

P. 14 - Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe: anti-Marxist Leftists: any universal economic explanation of society is merely a fetish or myth dreamed up by Marx... A post-structuralist take on Antonio Gramsci's hegemony concept: 'social agents lack any essence'.

P.15 Collapse of Eastern Bloc -> market's final triumph -> raison d'etre of the Left is abandoned together with class conflict -> emergence of capitalism as the totalizing world system.

P. 16 - Now a new generation of intellectuals, media activists, and interventionist artists, spurred by 2008-9 financila adjustment, are beginning to re-examine the role of labor in the so-called creative economy.

P.19 - Capitalism has always secretly depended upon certian forms of production: women's non-wages chores or 'housework', sexual procreation that literally reproduces the workforce; semi-waged work of students, children and slaves. Brecht: who builds the digital networks?

Brian Holmes: art as the linchpin of hte workfare system, in the financialized era of image sign production.

P.20 - Berlin-based Kleines Postfordistisches Drama (KPD) P.22 - the missing mass is the 'revenge of the surplus' that will ultimately re-narrate politics in an age of enterprise culture.

Notes from Sharon MacDonald, Chapter 1. Exhibitions of Power and powers of exhibition

From: MacDonald, S. (2001). /The politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture/. Routledge: London

p.2 - ...[exhibitions are] unequivocal statements rather than the outcome of particular processes and contexts. ...objects are there to be gazed upon, admired, and understood only in relation to themselves. Research, however, must seek to move beyond this.

MUSEUMS, KNOWLEDGE AND POWER

Museums...not simply putting science on display; they are also creating particular kinds of science to the public... being science that an educated public ought to know about.

P.3 - Foucault: power and knowledge are thoroughly mutually implicated... power=construction of truths. knowledge = implications for power... The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge are always political in this sense.

Politics is... a matter of competing knowledges, intentions and interests.

P.4 - Who authors the exhibitions? - How much agency does an exhibition-maker have? - What state political or economic interests impinge? - How is the audience imagined? - Who is excluded? - To what extent do visitors to an exhibition define it in their own terms? - How do certain exhibitionary forms/techniques enable certain kinds of readings?

.. the nature of appeals to authority, in art museums may well be different from those in museums of science.

... morality and trustworthiness of those who speak about science;..

P. 5 - Roger Silverstone: how different media articulate time and space (1992).. thematic, poetic and rhetoric strategies (1989).

Poetics (aesthetics, pleasure) -><- rhetoric (mechanics, instruction)

A SCHEMATIC HISTORY OF MUSEUMS OF SCIENCE

Museums of science - cultural technologies which define (1) certain kinds of knowledge and (2) certain kinds of publics.

Periods: 1. Renaissance -> XVIIc. - Early modern museums of science; 2. XVIII-XIXc. -> Public Museums, World Fairs; 3. 1960s -> onwards - Change of Display, Growth of Industrial Heritage and Science Centres.

1. Curiosity Cabinets: material not accountable by the Bible. Foucault (1970): knowledge was based upon notions of /similitude/ and /resemblance/. XVIIc. - instead of those two, comes /comparison/: science of order. XVIIc. - beginnings of taxonomic knowledge, late XVIIIc. - 'opening up' museums to broader public.

2. Modern museums: 1) Formation of nation-states; 2) Colonialist expansion; 3) Development of scientific 'museological' ways of seeing the world.

      P. 9: Museum: site for diplaying the narratives of modern

developments + thechnology through which modernity is constituted. P. 10: - French Revolution -> public museums; - Crystal Palace 1851; - Musee d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 1793; - Academy of sciences, Petrograd, 1836; - Leiden (1837), Oxford (1885)

         P. 11 - John Pickstone (1994):
         - Classical science: explains deductively according to

particular natural philosophies (e.g. vitalism, mechanism); - New 'analytical' or 'museological' sciences: objects as /compounds/, analysable into /elements/, these elements are /domain specific/. - > explanation and prediction. P. 12 - Sophie Forgan: planning of the layout in XIXc. museums. Natural History Museum in London. Making exhibitions educative for and legible to, the new mass public.

                     Ideas of improvement and progress:
                     - Expansive level: progress of human kind;
                     - National level: country's self-betterment and

positive influence to the rest of the world; - Individual level: citizen's personal journey towards knowledge.

         P. 13. Continued specialization of scientific knowledge...

science has developed a mystique of being beyond lay understanding... XXc. moves away from the dominant XIXc. analogy of the museum as a library.

3. Contexts, interactivity and consumers. P.14 - 1960s, 'Cuture Wars', /Enola Gay/ episode, 'Science Wars', fierce debate over the epistemological status of science. P. 15 - Politics of industrial heritage and the extent to which presenting science as part of particular places, times and social relations may enable the public to better understand the importance and/or the dangers of science.

         Exploratorium, San Fransisco, 1969 (F. Oppenheimer): scant

commentary on their political motivations and effects. Also, Oppenheimer worked on the atomic bomb: public fear of the potential of science. Individual creative element of science rather than its social or political contexts.

         P. 17 - National cultural semantics: Britain

(individualized choice-making consumers and ative learners); France (citizenship, celebration of human-machine interrelations.

         XXc. museums:
         1) Past-focused industrial heritage;
         2) Forward-looking interactive and multimedia display

technologies; + 3) Relativization or questioning scientific authority; 4) Reflection on the process of exhibiting itself.

Notes from "9 Hans Haake (b.1936) Statement; Institutions and Objections

p. 930 - Products that are considered 'works of art' have been singled outas culturally significant objects by those who at any given time and social stratum wield the power to confer predicate 'work of art' unto them;....

State-funded and private museums.

Any public museum receiving private donations may find itself in a conflict of interests.

p. 931 - Bertold Brecht, /Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth/, 1934 'the courage to write the truth, although it is being suppressed; the intelligence to recognize it, although it is being covered up; the judgement to choose those in whose hands it becomes effective; the cunning to spread it among them.'

...'artist' and 'work of art' are predicates with evaluative connotations deriving their currency from the relative ideological frame of a given cultural power group.

They participate jointly in the maintenance and/or development of the ideological make-up of their society.

They work within that frame, set the frame and are being framed.

Notes from J. Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies. Chapter 9: Ideology and Meanings

p.164 - Meanings are produced in the interactions between text and audience. Meaning production is a dynamic act in which both elements contribute equally.

p. 165 - The reader and the text together produce the preferred meaning.... this is ideology at work.

p. 165 - Definitions of ideology by Raymond Williams (1977):

• A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group.
• A system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness - which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge.
• the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

p. 165 - Brockreide: 'attitudes have homes in ideologies'.

p. 165 - ... for Marxists, the social fact that determines ideology is class, the division of labour.

p. 166 - Intertextuality: the meanings generated by any one text are determined partly by the meanings of other texts to which it appears similar.

p.167 - the assumption that [ideological] values are so basic... so natural, that they do not need referring to is what Barthes (1973) calls 'exomination', and is ideology at work.

p.170 - Barthesian myth  ... [that] science is the human ability to understand and dominate nature. ... Counter-myth is amogst ecology/conservationist subculture.

Dominant ideology, history as progress is confronted by a myths that sees history as cyclical, not a progressive development (tradiition).

p. 171 - Signs give myths and values concrete form and in so doing both endorse them and make them public.

p.172 - Ideology in its third meaning is not a static set of values and ways of seeing, but a practice.

Science helps to maintain the current power structure: the highly-educated not only become the dominant class; they come from it, too.

p. 173 - According to Marx, the ideology of the bourgeoise kept the workers, or proletariat, in the state of false consciousness. They were led to understand their social experience by a set of ideas that were not theirs, were opposed to them.

p. 174 - Althusser (1971): ideology is much more effective than Marx gave it credit for because it works fro, within rather than without - it is deeply inscribed in the ways of thinking and ways of living of all classes (e.g., wearing of high heels by women).

p. 176 -  Communication is a social process and therefore be ideological; interpellation is a key part of its ideological practice.

p. 176 - Gramsci: hegemony, ideology as struggle.  Dominant ideology constantly meets resistances it has to overcome in order to win people's consent to the social order that it is promoting.

p 177 - 'Common sense': the common sense that criminality is a function of a wicked individual rather than the unfairsociety is .. a part of bourgeois ideology

All ideological theories agree that ideology works to maintain class dominationm their differences lie in the ways in which this domination is exercised, the degree of its effectiveness, and the extent of hte resistances it meets.

p. 178 - Gramsci's theory makes social change appear possible, Marx's makes it inevitable, and Althusse's improbable.

p. 181 - 'Displacement': a term that ideological theorists have borrowed from Freudian dream theory: when a topic or anxiety is repressed, either psychologically or ideologically, the concern for it can only be expressed by being displaced on to a legitimate, socially acceptavle topic.

Ideological analysis terms: incorporation ('0don't worry be hippie' - making alternaitve culture a part of mainstream ideology) and commodification (you need commodities produced by current ideology to overcome the troubles).

p. 182 - Capitalism is the system.. that produced commodities, so making commodities seem natural is at the heart of much ideological practice.

Women's bodies and their lives are constructed as a set of problems for which there are commodities to provide solutions.

p. 183 - Barthes' myth of femininity and family work: turning history and society into nature.

Girls 'naturally' become women who 'naturally' become housewives - ruling out the question what sort of women do they become and whose interests are served by this.

Women's magazines: by recognizing herself as the addressee, she is helping to win the consent of herself and other like her to a system that only middle-class men can benefit from in the long run.

p. 184 - Ideological analysis... focuses on the coherence of texts, whether they are telling the coherent story of white, patriarchal capitalism. The theory of hegemony, no the contrary, looks at the weaknesses in texts and argues that some traces of resistance will necessarily remain.

The 'no-make up' look is a strategy to incorporate the resistance of many young women to the ideological practice of painting their faces.

Wearing jeans: 1) symbol of hard work/hard leisure; 2) Symbol of American West - freedom, naturalness, ruggedness, informality, self-sufficiency, tradition; 3) Americanness and social consensus (they are US contribution to the international fashion scene).

Near Home office, Westminster

A4, paper cut, pencil