In Istanbul and Karlsruhe

Two ancient capitals, one burning and teeming with life, the other sedate, wealthy and provincial are the sites for the installations of two projects through which I express my Gratitude for Technology: iMine and le Laboratoire de Deberlinisation.

iMine, the experimental art-app in a new Turkish version  is presented as a site-specific installation using tape, posters, video, and found objects, at ISEA2011 Istanbul in the back court yard and ground floor of the NURU_ZIYA lounge  in Tophane from September 14th until September 21st, 2011.

Le Laboratoire de Deberlinisation is presented and performed as part of the Global Art & the Musem (GAM) show opened Friday at ZKM in Karlsruhe. I made the videos, the 'speculative geography' maps of Africa, most of the other work is collaboration between myself and Mansour Ciss  It will run until February 5th, 2012.

Baisser la Garde!!

Baisser la Garde!

towards a true demilitarization of art

(an artist talk for the exhibition DIENST, May 1st, 2010)

an art without violence

an art without oppression

an art without tyranny

an aesthetics of tedium?

Violence, oppression, tyranny, not in our daily lives please except in our art. We enjoy, desire being oppressed by art, controlled by art, manipulated by artists. Art is an excuse to take a vacation from civic responsibilities and to submit ourselves to a higher power.

And any excuse will do, we know, we do not enjoy true freedom. We enjoy freedom only within strict systems of rules. And even more so, we only enjoy freedom when we can be free not to be free if we choose to, to delegate responsibility, to allow others to make most of the decisions for us.

99% of the time we do not want democracy, we want democracy only the 1% of the time when we want it, otherwise we would prefer not to be bothered with the functioning of the state, informed perhaps, yes, but not compelled to act democratically.

But we must be free to exercise our democratic powers during that 1% of the time we may so desire, whenever we so desire. A society that allows us to decide when we would like to exercise our freedom is what we call democratic.

photo © 2009 Dorothee Robrecht

Yet we believe that art can be free and that art makes us free. Though all freedom is contingent on structures which are not free In this installation we have the soldiers which guard the place of free expression of art, even of the anti-social statement, which can only pretend to be antisocial in the meta-social context of a hegemonically protected space which allows for the exercise of anti-sociabilitiy as a generator of culture.

Avant Garde, the term, is from the frontlines of the battle.
Garde, to guard, to protect, and to forge ahead. The Avant Garde is by definition the colonizing juggernaut of our Humanist agenda: invading all corners of the world, disrupting and de-legitimizing traditional or alien structures, infiltrating everything with our notion of right and wrong, our values.

The avant-garde defines the freedom of the future hegemony of our culture's dominion, it is not fundamentally challenging our culture's values, it is innovating and renovating them. The avant-garde in Western art is the colonial agenda of what today we call Globalism.

The media art work displayed here is not avant-garde. This is more of a challenge than may seem since 99% of media art exists to sell more computers, screens, cables, memory, electricity, etc. the whole automated way of life of the extended mind we have come to expect in the developed world, the so called 'state of the art'. It is not that this work of digital media purports to be against new media, that would be folly, however it is a work which is specifically designed as a productive deceleration of the techno-globalist juggernaut.

Baisser la garde, lower the garde carefully, extremely slowly allowing us to experience all the tiny eruptions and chain reactions of of future undefined pleasures and potential interpersonal connection, which could be afforded by carving out for ourselves a tiny decelerated space, wherein the pleasure of the present, incoherent, may be be accessed.

Ranciere describes modernism in Politics of Aesthetics "trying to make clear-cut distinctions in the complex configuration of the aesthetic regime of the arts."(p.25) The digital age brings about not-post-post-modernism, but hyper-modernism, an intensification of modernism's categorizing agenda. The apparent cross-disciplinarity of digital media only reveals the primacy of the state of the art over ancient artistic practice. The split-second calculation and correlation of minutely categorized facets of any phenomena, results in the illustion of cross-disciplinarity, it is, in fact, hyperdisciplinarity.

The state of the art is the military avant garde applied equally to foreign adversaries and civil society alike. Baisser la Garde, by introducing the figure of the soldier, human manifestation of the hegemonic structure of the state, asserting it's centrality to the creation of art, aims to bring in to relationship the schizophrenia of the contemporary state which wages unjust wars to promote humanist values. It is an acknowledgement of the mutual dependence, organic symbiosis of military and police hegemony in the service of protecting a space for the Humanist principles of the emancipation and flourishing of the individual to be performed. It is the manifestation of the given, assumed, and almost unspeakable unfree military precondition and ingredient of any cultural activity produced within its protective shell.

Baisser la Garde is also not about conventions of arts, it is not conservative, it is not guarding conservative traditions and values, it is incrementally, not too fast, almost imperceptibly, lowering the guard, it is exposing the weakness of the discourse, it is clogging the computer processor core with too much relevant information.

Geert Lovink asked "How to Undermine the Instant Globalization of Fear? Close our Eyes and Ears? Overcome Realtime Media? Dismantle the Collective Armors?" I answered "DDoS", but instead of the insistant repetitive message of conventional DDoS, I advocate to overload CPUs of society with relevant information.

The problem with information today is that it is increasingly digital, brute force, simplistic, goal-oriented, i.e. hypermodernist). What is relevant for the computation of society must be more broadly defined (if it must be defined at all). My artistic position is to strive for a luxurious information economy of inefficiencies, of frictions, collisions and encounters.

In this installation, the extraneous essential is factored in as a necessary precursor to the art work created in Germany today. We need protection here we need the hard shell, just as we need the hard strict rules of structural mechanics to hold up the walls around this space of freedom.

The exquisiteness of art depends on strict rules and on the freedom constrained by these. But 99% of the time, one is not straining, one is resting, preparing. This work suggests to redistribute our interest and appreciation for culture a little more evenly over the story of production. That the overblown colonial renommé given to that culture which purports to wish to destroy the constraints on the citizen, be appreciated on the level of that which emerges from within it. It is an aesthetics which accommodates tedium and surrender as being as necessary as the rarefying execution of hegemonic dominion.

The landscape painting on a canvas frame was once Avant Garde, then through modernism's rarefactions and abstractions we have an Avant Garde art of market systems. In world which promises a culture of creativity, every possible marginal identity: queer and transsexuals, Islam, Favella chic is quickly made Avant Garde. The Avant Garde is all about claiming new territory to be settled - in this way, Israel is very Avant Garde, training its army with the most advanced French (liberation) philosophy.

The Avant Garde creates a world on alert. The Avant Garde says "we forge ahead until the whole world is ours" only at the point of the complete domination of the world will this notion of Avant Garde become inactive, since the Avant Garde is an externally directed cultural policy. Thus the altruism on the Avant Garde agenda: they fight in order to become unnecessary. And this altruism is so central the need to become unnecessary is so urgent that the Avant Garde cannot but be perfunctory.

It is a double bind which, at the same time casts aspersions on the stated benevolence of the campaign. If the object is to colonize the world with our superior moral system, shouldn't this be accomplished with the maximum of certainty and care, if need be, at the expense of speed?

The reason that deceleraration of technological progress is a taboo subject is primarily an economic one. We must have economic growth at all costs because our economies are leveraged on debts which always threaten us to crush us under insurmountable accumulated interest.

Perfunctory avant gardes create shocks, disruptions in the society which are enormously profitable. Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism reveals the fundemantally economic motivations for the overzealous Avant Garde: "disrumpere et impero!".

We smirk and wink and needle the troops of hipster minions, cheeks flushed with youthful exuberance at their noble calling as they head out from the art schools into the airports and tv studios. The Avant Garde clears the way for a conventional life, so why must the Avant Garde claim to be so antithetical to convention? Conventional society and the Avant Garde are two parts of the same organism, symbiotic and sympathetic.

Though I share some of the agenda of the avant garde, (and with quantum computing, perhaps the inefficient computation I advocate above will produce the most mesmerizing and stultifying media ever) I wish to engage the denial of hegemonic necessity at its core, that which pretends to have no relation with the state or culture which it serves.

Our age is still one where cultures respect each other only when they confront each other with all weapons raised. This denial of hegemonic necessity allows every state to wage war in the name of its art. We need an integral model of an advanced society where the military/police regimented and instrumental hegemony and the freedom of the artist are elaborated in symbiosis.

As the sirens ring across the city today, the punks shout 'fuck the police', though the police are just as Avant Garde as they. The police are the Avant Garde of the life they live when they eat as opposed to that which they live when they think. il faudra Baisser la Garde!! If we are looking for a world of understanding and collaboration, it is enough Garde!! Baissons peu à peu, très minutieusement la garde!

The exhibition is still on at WOHNLABOR until May 15th, there will be two more artist talks there, next Saturday, the 8th and the following Saturday, the 15th each starting at 6pm.

All New Media is Political

An introduction to my installation "DIENST" at Wohnlabor Berlin March 20th- May 15th



All New Media is Political.

All politics is fundamentally economics. If all people were satisfied with their position in the economy in which they exist, there would be no politics as we know it today.

All new media is political, regardless of what appears on the screen or of what rings from the speaker membranes, digital media subsumes, integrates globalized prerequisites which form and inter-penetrate everything we may aesthetically perceive. These globalized prerequisites are international manufacturing standards, global raw materials transportation and refinement chains, international trade agreements; in short: the corporate world as administered through
local, national and super-national politics.

Therefore, Art made with New Media is a realm of globalized economics and thus a realm of politics, and this should surprise and disturb no-one.

The familiar figure of this realm is that of the woman or man in uniform of the military or of the police. These uniforms subordinate these citizens’ civil individuality as they become an anonymous embodiment, the physical manifestation of the Law. The language of the Law provides the structure of the society which is the context of the creative new media artist. National or super-national, there is no new media art without soldiers, just as there is no language without grammar.

My work and this talk attempt to elucidate a symbiosis of artistic freedom and of political (military/police) order in the concept of avant garde. The expression 'avant-garde', of course, emerged from military parlance, the soldiers of the front lines, often sacrificed in order to make the enemy reveal itself. The avant garde is posthumously crowned with glory for having sacrificed themselves in the service of the nation. Thus are avant garde artists in all their
desperate critical intensity, zealots in the service of the hegemonies which foster them.

One who searches for radical alternatives to contemporary industrialized culture's overweening dependence on hegemonies, the violence of the internal and external politics, had better leave the 'avant-garde' and explore an aesthetics of 'baisser la garde' (die Garde herunternehmen?/to lower the guard).



This exhibition is a materialization in the public space of an attempt to model a working microcosm of the state of contemporary symbiosis between the forces of order and those of the spontaneous creativity of the artist. It is a three dimensional, "wissenschäftliche Vergegenwärtung" (Philosophical Concretisation) of the theory stated above, using the techniques of New Media.

Theory will be Applied!

Yes. This is just a short announcement of my solo concept exhibition in Berlin at Wohnlabor in Friedrichshain. The installation integrates one screen of conventional DVD video, one screen of generative database video, generative database recombinant soundtrack, watercolours in frames, and some 'Raumgestaltung' using elastic bands, repurposed steel and some wooden objects (depends how many I get finished by Friday). Opening is Saturday, March 20th at 19hoo the show goes on until May 15th.

The work explores many of the themes dealt with here, and, I suppose, most of all, what kind of art can be made using high technology instruments which are also weapons.

more information on my website

monitoring processual art

[this is the slightly redacted text of my presentation at a panel on processual art, moderated by Susanna Jaschko on the 4th of February 2010, at the transmediale10].

Many people speak today of a global crisis. But it is not so much a global crisis as a crisis of globalism itself. Brasil, India, Korea, many developing countries in Africa are doing quite well. What has happened is not a global crisis, but apocalypse, in it's original sense of uncovering, revealing the crisis that was, is and always will be.

The Cold War provided for us in the 'developed world', as Susanna Jaschko said today "the illusion of stability". It is well known that the Cold War was very hot in many locations where proxies of the two dominant systems of the time (called ,we remember still, communism and capitalism) battled for the exotic and scarce materials which would provide the coming technological age.

After the end of the Cold War we are going though a period of apocalypse, where the true complexity and unresolvable chaos, crisis and conflict of our common lives on this planet are no longer deniable. Processual art provides many approaches for traversing the endless volumes of data flow produced by and in our increasingly real-time consciousness of this state of endless crisis.

I will attempt to provide certain Begriffe (1) and certain systemic metaphors which may serve useful in our discussions and in our contemplation of processual art.

With the ever-present spectrality engulfing us, the ghost which remind of our own mortality, our culture's response is to tell us to visit the doctor regularly, repeatedly to monitor our health.

And if the body is perceived to be in crisis it is immediately surrounded by monitors. The monitors, now form part of the cyborg medial attention, monitoring the health of the patient.

Monitor is derived from the Latin verb monere which means originally "to admonish, warn, advise". Lev Manovich in his landmark book: Language of New Media, described the first tele-vision, the first real-time monitor which was the radar screen. Here, the connotation of warning is obvious.

On the screens and monitors are visualizations of what are considered the 'Vital Signs' of the patient. By reading these signs, even the uninitiated can imagine what is going on inside the patient.

Nowadays, as society is stripped bare of its traditional, unifying beliefs & faiths, and the citizen is particle-ized by personalized and variegated media experience-spaces, we have a growing sense of the complexity of the globalized system in which we exist, and of which we are inextricably, a part.

So here, the metaphor is that, with the monitors, we are monitoring (can one say the health of) the body of society, or even that of our civilisation, such as it can be conceived to be, for signs of various kinds.

We get warnings, but we also get information we need or want or like, but most of all, the screens tell us that the body of society is still alive and being monitored.

But more significantly, there is a stand in, an avatar for the body of society and that is the electrical and, increasingly, the communications grid, the condition of which the monitors display.

This is why computer-generative art is so appropriate for public screens, it is public notice of the health of the system. The health of the infrastructure part is verified at the refresh rate of 50 or 60 times a second (the oscillation rate of electrical current), but also and implicitly, the ongoing process of civilization's complex social and economic systems, which are always incomplete and ongoing are monitored. A comforting illusion of social constancy is also thus generated.

Failing other, earlier notions of faith, monitor screens promise us we are making technological process. What appears on the monitor screen is a kind of elaborate progress bar by which we monitor trends to fruition, the anticipation of which may be just as enjoyable as is their brief consumption.

Two examples of the implementation of processual art on public media facades.
- Korea: the progress of modernity/modernization, technologies of fairness overwhelming the creeping mustiness associated with old beliefs. Fairness = equanimity. The line between art and design and social engineering is almost non-existent
- Europe: technological progress is also monitored but also our ethical and moral progress in the traditional function of art

Processual art provides visions, visualisations of civilization as an incomplete fragmented process, going on in myriad directions at once, a glorious 4-dimensional filigree of causeways of various breadths.

But underneath, and fundamental to these real-time patterns and figures on the screens, is a kind of urgency which makes this kind of processual work so compelling and also so exhausting.

It is the diminishing wegsehbarkeit (2) of the injustice on which our civilisation, and even more, of the technology of our glorified society monitoring systems are predicated.

These are unfair relations of labour, here at home, and elsewhere, the persistence of slavery & indentured labour (the Yes Men do a nice take on this), and, especially the lack of parity in the league of nations, in living standards, and, most importantly for me, this is not just in words, it is in the materials of technology itself.

Jaromil excellently described some of the problematic deep material relations of high technology utopias in a presentation at last transmediale, in the so-called conflict minerals trade.

We must acknowledge the hardware beholdenness of all our technological art. That this hard ware is produced through hard facts: where and when the materials which become the technology must be (have been) extracted from the earth somewhere before they can be refined into these exquisite processual instruments.

This extraction from the earth of metals and minerals and other necessary ingredients for high technology must be brought out of the earth by particular individuals at particular locations at particular stages of their particular lives.

At the mine head where the Bauxite comes from for the aluminum, essential for all the finest technology in this room, there are hundreds of men with parents and families doing another day's work for peanuts right now.

They have no choice. Some even work at gunpoint. Their government, in many cases has been completely bought out by ours, because we cannot and will not do without aluminum.

Dadis Camera, former president of Guinea (central to the Bauxite trade) castigates the German Ambassador
von Nzwamba

Camara was a controversial leader. Usually not my favorite type of leader, a throwback to old-school African nationalists from the early 'independence' period. For the purposes of this post, he did one thing that really got the high-tech producing countries angry, he re-evaluated all of his countries mining contracts signed by the previous west-friendly governments, for which he would suffer greatly.


I have a phrase for this "Absolute corruption corrupts absolutely."

This is why we must monitor the consequences of our abstract, hardly articulate faith in the noble cause of technological progress and its incipient industry.

The men standing around the mine from which the materials are abstracted from the earth, with their personal individual histories and needs are at work right now perpetually inside these monitoring screens.

The screen, you may, know, etymologically comes from the old French escran "écran" which was originally the wire mesh which was placed before the warming fire - to block the sparks which could set the house on fire.

So we watch this processual art like a warming fire, glorious patterns of immolation from which we derive a pleasant angenehm (3) warmth.
Standing around the ancient campfire, it is a scene reminiscent of our tribal past, a previous, pre-literate time Flusser often described where human consciousness was dominated by images and the magicians who understood and channeled their power.

Flusser described two future societal modes possibly generated from technical images: a totalitarian techno-magical consciousness dominated by techno-magicians, or a new form of literacy in the constitutive codes of technical images, a textual interpretability he might call techno-historical. Flusser would concede of course that these two consciousnesses would probably co-exist antagonistically.

To conclude, I would like to recall another etymological sense of 'monitor: "to admonish". The monitor is there to keep us in line, as a society, as a civilization. To keep us on the course. The monitor on which we enjoy (angenehm) processual art, you see, has its own agenda.

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(1) We don't have quite the right translation of the German word 'Begriff'. In English, we use the word 'term' which has it's roots in 'termination' i.e. 'definition'. But, Begriff is built on the word Griff which in English would be 'grip' or 'handle'. So, unlike terminating a concept in a definition, we can, in German, get a handle on the concept while it is still alive.

(2) I made up this word, which doesn't exist in English either, the closest would be 'look-away-ableness' or 'disregardability'.

(3) this is best translated as 'pleasant' but angenehm also has the connotation of acceptance 'an-nehmen', to take on.