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off to spain again, this time for some really interesting performances with Nettle and to follow DJ-NRON
March 25 Sevilla with Nettle for the zemos festival at the fundacion tres culturas
March 29 Barcelona for the Reboot party to check out DJ N-RON
March 30 Gijon for the conference and opening at laboral centro de arte
if you’re around, please feel free to drop a line!
I was exposed to Baudrillard when I was 20. I hated him. Which is to say, I fought him again and again. How could he be so stubborn! Perhaps it was because I learned more about why he wrote, or perhaps it was because he changed, but his theories of simulation became increasingly more difficult to difuse and began to become a powerful if not overpowering, foil in my work.
There will be much written about his writings from the 70’s and early 80’s. Instead, I think that what I will choose to evoke is the (anti-)Political Badrillard of 2001 and the cultural critic of 1998. Both are writings on the USA as a hegemony, and I would say both speak truth to power.
The following is a an excerpt from a translation from Le Monde from September 11, 2001
When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals
with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic
machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensee unique), what other
way is there, than a terrorist reversal of the situation?
It is the system itself that has created the objective
conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself,
it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are
ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of
power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive
act that is also unanswerable. Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible
singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether
species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the
setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged
today by this terrorist situational transfer.
Terror against terror - there is no more ideology behind all that. We are
now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an
Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. It (energy)
does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its
time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize
(the world) through force.
From Baudrillard’s America
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvellous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen.
When I was trying to come up with a good reason to not explode in frustration with the state of the contemporary art market in New York, as exemplified by last week’s art fairs (armory, scope etc.), I realized something rather minor.
When I was younger, there were very few ways of getting good books. I grew up in a small town with a good library, provided by the university. But, as a mere resident, I wasn’t allowed to check them out, except with the help of my father’s ID card…a risky affair given his beard and silver hair. Short of our noses and fast talking, it was hard to pull off the 30+ years he had on me.
After 1996, certain things changed. Whether one wants to attribute the internet to a general notion of progress, or explode in a luddite-like rage, certain aspects of the tcp/ip protocol, as well as the emergence of low-cost internet access, have provided real opportunities for real change.
I was asked what I think are good digital communities recently. I came up with a short list in no particular order:
1. art of the cities, art of the fields
they say: “arbitrary” topography based on project of the free and multilingual encyclopaedia that each one can improve on line WikiProject on the contemporary art and the movements or artistic proclamations indexed until there, of the Sixties at our day.
2. Socialight
Map cities with your voice, photos and txts from J2me app on yer cell phone. Stickies on streetcorners. Simple, smart and works.
3. Worldcat
World’s largest network of library content and services. this site inspired this blog entry i am writing and you might be reading.
4. future me
email yourself up to 30 years in advance. be social with yourself…dream for a second.
The future is the attention economy. Spy on your internet habits just google! Let your friends spy on you! And spy on your friends. Great data viz from stamen, and, hell I helped build it, so it must be good!
6. slifeshare
Like sharing absolutely all your freakin’ computer life? Want everyone to know what a slacker you are/n’t? Share your life. Slifeshare. For mac only, app is pretty intense and free way to share all your habits with everyone. Attention economy on speed…
7. emusic
For those of you who don’t already use it, use it. For those of you who do, props. DRM free, and I didn’t know, but u can download over and over once you have bought it. Nice.
8. bloglines
RSS aggregator of choice by yours truly. If you look at blogs, or the news, or like the idea of looking at blogs and the news, but can’t keep up, this brings it all home. Slack, and it’ll just keep feedin’ ya and feedin’ ya. Sure, there are others, but bloglines has always been there for me, like a nice pair of dungarees.
9. Eyespot
Screw youtube. Mix yer own vids. Jumpcut does the trick, but eyespot seems to still be independent (yahoo bought jumpcut). Anyway, mix and match, edit and socialize video. Online. for free.
10. Video Comments
Hey! If video is the future of the net (?!) then the future of video is video commenting. And the future is now! And now just happened! Ok, no winning there. But you can’t lose with a wordpress plugin for realtime and recorded video commenting designed by ITP folks.
Ok, again, this is just a list, and numbers were used so that I felt some sense of order. Now back to trying to create a little more disorder in this rather overly ordered NY. Stay warm!