bitsmark edward grimm2008-04-09T08:28:37-06:00megrimmhttp://megrimm.net/bits.phpmeg156@columbia.edutag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bitsPivotCopyright (c) 2008, Authors of bitsNET.ART: Support A Random Artist2008-02-28T09:43:00-06:002008-02-28T09:43:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.7402.28.08
The 'supportarandomartist' project supports artists through networked economic exchanges filtered though online advertising networks.
The 'supportarandomartist' project supports artists through networked economic exchanges filtered though online advertising networks.SUPPORTARANDOMARTIST.COM
The 'supportarandomartist' project supports artists through networked economic exchanges filtered though online advertising networks. This donation based system works by users 'clicking' advertising links that get translated into monetary funds directly deposited into an artists banking account. Traditionally, artists have relied upon the selling of artworks or through donations. Street artists, for example, have used the 'tip jar' as a way to collect moneys for their artistic talents. Musicians have also relied upon such systems in the past. Commissions and grants often drive the artist toward the vision of the funding parties.
Supportarandomartist.com utilizes advertising networks as its primary funding institution. Those wishing to 'donate', donate to the artist through 'mouse clicks' rather than actual one-to-one money transactions. In this system the 'tip jar' is replaced with the computer interface opening the 'gift' system up to the full network potential of the globe. Patrons do not necessarily have to be 'wealthy' OR afford to purchase, commission, or fund what they deem as worthy artistic forms. Anyone with a computer can now click their way to donations for others.
In this way the artist can fund the artist. The musician can fund the musician. The theorist can fund the theorist. ALL without giving any of their own often meager earnings.
The randomization feature ensures that all participants in the 'supportarandomartist' program receive equal payouts that are not based on artistic prestige. Program participants are required to pass the 'curators' test that ensures that only 'artists' - those that create and destroy concepts - be admitted to participate.
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]]>markINTERVIEW: UNDECISIVE CONTEXTS An E-mail Conversation with Mark Edward Grimm2007-12-18T15:40:00-06:002007-12-18T15:38:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.7212.18.07
#006 Re: MAGAZINE / UNDECISIVE CONTEXTS
An E-mail Conversation with Mark Edward Grimm
#006 Re: MAGAZINE / UNDECISIVE CONTEXTS
An E-mail Conversation with Mark Edward Grimm----- ----- -----
The net establishes its significance as artistic medium no longer in specialized communities but has become dispersed more and more into contexts commonly assigned to the "classical" art business. As a logical consequence the coherence of these structures is broken up and infiltrated. Traditional processes have been running along the line: Production of an object-contextualisation as artwork-selling of it (eventually). For a few years now, however, the question has been raised if the "fetish object" as an artist's product is still acceptable. A basic principle of artistic analysis is the inclusion of a reality which does not necessarily mean descriptive realism but intellectual examination. Thus, can the examination of realities by means of an object be more than mere decoration? As a role model for a discursive medium, doesn't 'the net' need to replace the "progress" (meaning a linear progress of an operating process resulting in the manifestation with an object )?
In his works Mark E. Grimm covers different contexts which—evaluated by conventional criterias—could be considered as undecisive. The collaborative work in and outside the net, the study of the working processes and the transfer of net-related working methods into real life are all practices deliberately dealt with as artistic statements but rarely leave material-related marks. Perhaps we observe here the reversal of the 90' s Californian Ideology and its "Second Life": the reality is not subordinated to the net but the net turns with its constant use into a part of the reality. (Interview conducted by carlos katastrofsky in June 2007)
Re: MAGAZINE is an editorial project by CONT3XT.NET (Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl (a.k.a. carlos katstrofsky) and Franz Thalmair). This is a newsletter by CONT3XT.NET (ZVR: 999765999, Vienna/Austria). If you do not want to receive information anymore please reply with "NO newsletter".
The net establishes its significance as artistic medium no longer in specialized communities but has become dispersed more and more into contexts commonly assigned to the "classical" art business. As a logical consequence the coherence of these structures is broken up and infiltrated. Traditional processes have been running along the line: Production of an object - contextualisation as artwork - selling of it (eventually). For a few years now, however, the question has been raised if the "fetish object" as an artist's product is still acceptable. A basic principle of artistic analysis is the inclusion of a reality which does not necessarily mean descriptive realism but intellectual examination. Thus, can the examination of realities by means of an object be more than mere decoration? As a role model for a discursive medium, doesn't 'the net' need to replace the "progress" (meaning a linear progress of an operating process resulting in the manifestation with an object )?
In his works Mark E. Grimm covers different contexts which -- evaluated by conventional criterias -- could be considered as undecisive. The collaborative work in - and outside the net, the study of the working processes and the transfer of net - related working methods into real life are all practices deliberately dealt with as artistic statements but rarely leave material - related marks. Perhaps we observe here the reversal of the 90' s Californian Ideology and its "Second Life": the reality is not subordinated to the net but the net turns with its constant use into a part of the reality.
The following Interview was conducted by Carlos Katastrofsky for CONT3XT.NET.
CK: Mark, your collaborations with socialmediagroup.org, your solo works and your texts show very heterogeneous approaches to artistic expression. Having works in mind like "wars grind things to a halt" (1) - a more conceptual piece of media art, collaborative works like "Excavate: cohabit 02" (2) or your partly very personal but nonetheless substantiated writings (3) i always feel there is some connecting path between them. How would you personally contextualize your works?
MEG: Yes that is a very interesting question. First I think a little background history is appropriate.
My upbringing was a product of a very blue-collar, working class environment in central New York State. Artistic expression, cultural creation, intellectualism etc. was never really taken seriously throughout my education – always dominated by the practice of ‘business’ and sports. I had always done art as a child and as an adolescent I just never realized that it was ‘art’ as the artistic community (especially the international artistic community) see might recognize it now. Before being trained in the university as a formalist (painter/printmaker) I was an insistent ‘dabbler’ in almost anything. Any idea of ‘focus’ eluded me.
Tools were really an essential part of this early education. My father was a carpenter and so was my grandfather before him as well as a mechanic. My German ancestors that immigrated to the U.S.A. were also laypersons. Somehow generations of tools accumulated in my house (no one ever threw anything away or got rid of anything because to materialists ‘things are a valuable resource). We also had an old barn that was literally ‘full’ of tools, car parts, car paint (acrylic enamel from the heyday of 1960’s muscle cars) and pretty much anything you can think of. Also my grandfathers house (on my mother side) was very similar in content and material storage.
I spent my weekends as a kid experimenting and building with these materials, making weird shit, learning to use tools, building projects – basically whatever I could make. I never really realized I was making ‘art’ per se but now tat I look back these experiments really taught me about material which later translated into virtual material when I started learning and experimenting with computers at about age 15 or 16. One example might be the building of ‘bicycles’. In the neighborhood of Rochester, NY (which is basically an old industrial town economically built form the Eastman Kodak business) there would be ‘trash day’ every Wednesday in which people would put their trash on the curbside. We (either me and neighborhood kids or my grandfather and I) use to cruise around looking for old junk that we could make things out of. Our favorite was old bicycle parts in order to make these weird ‘monster bikes’. They were totally hideous, always painted different colors and made of parts that seemed to be just forced together. We once made an 3-wheel bicycle that we named the “Cow 900” that we outfitted with an old lawnmower engine. It was painted bright yellow and had these really long banana bars for steering. We had to put a 100 pound steel plate on the front because there was one speed either on OR off and when you started it there was such a strong torque that the bicycle would do a wheelie. Without the steel the thing would have just flipped over!
When I started really getting into making art I still wanted to retain what I always loved about art making – uninhibited experimentation. The problem I had in art school was that the institution was always trying to fit artists in little boxes almost as a ‘marketing’ strategy of sorts. This artist paints little pictures of birds; this artist paints abstract imagery etc. – totally modernist crap. It took me a while after I left art school to regain a sense of childhood ‘play’ that I always enjoyed in art – obviously though, I now became aware what I was doing was more serious than just ‘fucking around’.
To now answer your question, I just have these ideas in my head that I just cant resist. I basically use my personality (mark edward grimm and megrim.net) as an ‘online’ portfolio site to highlight any work I’m currently doing or completed. Unfortunately it is partially gear toward academia because I am currently (and sometimes desperately) looking for employment but I guess that is one of the regrettable consequences of being an artist – we are always looking for funding! And what is interesting is that this is also part of the artwork – if we consider these sort of ‘life-practices’ as culturally significant and as artwork.
‘Socialmediagroup’ (see http://socialmediagroup.org), on the other hand, materialized as a need for working as an artist collective with my wife Amy Cheatle (see http://happyhousewife.org/) and others who wanted to be involved – friends, collaborators, family etc. We were looking to create a self-funded, autonomous system of art where we could run a multimedia business as ‘socialmediagroup’ (see http://socialmediagroup.com) in order to fund our artistic endeavors. Many of the ideas come from Amy’s research into ecology and environmental systems. ‘socialmediagroup’ has really become the prime method for us for create large scale installations. Because there is a ton of work involved in these projects (especially CoHabit where we had to enlist people to disassemble an old fruit barn) we really needed a way to get many interested collaborators involved and socialmediagroup was a good semi-anonymous way to do this.
The writing I’m doing lately has been just another method for art creation. There are visual works that we can see as in a gallery but also written works that can have just as much of a cultural impact. In this area I was really influenced by the surrealist writer Andre Breton, the Situationist Guy Debord and of course the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. They showed me how writing can be just as much of an art form as anything else and just as legitimate as an artistic ‘piece’. It really took me a very long time to learn to write and it was something that I think I will always struggle with – especially to be actually coherent! I think visual thinkers tend to think in a very ‘non-linear’ manner; writing is such a linear process – there is always a ‘beginning’ and an ‘end’ at least in a traditional sense and not including recent literary endeavors that are taking place on the internet with hypertext.
To finish answering you question – yes, I do feel that there is something that ties everything I do together, even loosely. The computer has the potential to create a real gap between artists – those that work traditionally and those that work electronically. This is a real shame – contemporary art (cutting edge art) seems to be relying more and more on electronic environments. What I have always understood is the similarities between these materials that are looked at as very different – physical material and electronic materials. When I teach, I try to teach artists that have been grounded in traditional materials that there is really nothing but similarities! The computer (code, images, video, graphics) is just another material that can be manipulated in the same ways as physical materials can be manipulated. You have to know what you are looking to do, you have to know the tools you need to do what you want to do, and then you just have to do it! 1) It always has to start with a concept – no matter how simple that concept might be. 2) There is always an experimental aspect of realizing that concept where one discovers something that they did not know before through the intimate processes of working with something new (or old for that matter). 3) There is that act of completing these processes – at least in the idea that one takes a work as far as they are willing to take it. 4) And then those ideas that are learned and the created ‘piece’ that is generated emerges into new concepts and ideas that must be tackled.
Writing for me is a very similar process. What is seldom understood right away is how time-consuming it all is!
CK: So, to put your work in a tiny, little box again: would you say this aproach could be subsumed under the term 'hacking' ? And if so, is hacking an essential modus operandi for artists nowadays?
MEG: Yes. I do rather like the term ‘hacking’. I enjoy the ambiguity attached to it. Artists understand it in a positive light - to take what is available and ‘make it ones own’. BUT we cannot forget the subversive qualities attached to the term either! The term is twofold: it is at once the practice of alterations – to hack code, to hack education, to hack a material, to hack a social organization AND the knowledge that those alterations can have a potential cumulative effect that specifically targets the dominant organizational methods of top-down homogeny in favor of more heterogeneous elements.
I think artists really have the potential to interject using creative methods (hacks) in many other places and areas traditionally not associated with the ‘art world’, per se. This is a new quality of the contemporary artist because we are not as bound to the ‘image’ as we once were. Artist interjections OR ‘hacks’ become the artworks themselves and can now be documented via the digital image and text, subsequently displayed on the Internet. The gallery is pretty useless in this regard because it only give some final ‘results’ at an end-stage and seldom documents the processes that were involved (mental, physical) and the struggles that ensued (economics, social pressure, networks of collaborators etc) – which are all very important.
One of my recent works conceptually addresses this. It’s rather long title tentatively is: “For Demonstrating the Automated Targeting of Any Individual That Poses a Threat to the Security of Those With Authority OR For Use in Deceptive Action Against Security Forces Using Gunfire Simulations Based on Motion Tracking”. It is basically a small program patch written in PD (puredata) that tracks movement from a web-cam and simulates the firing of an AK-47 when any movement is detected. I imagined that it could have multiple uses such as any technology always does. Hypothetically I imagined it being used as a security demonstration at some security conference in Las Vegas: “Target the Intruder To Your Estate Before They Target You!” – a sort of pre-emptive weapons system for private property where parameter guns would be automated and would not distinguish friend from foe.
It could also be used by ‘insurgents’ OR criminals, subversives etc. as a real-world simulation. All they would need is a computer, web-cam and some speakers. When the police or military enters the property the motion detection would trigger the AK-47 gunfire. The police, marines etc. might think they were being fired upon and would give some time to the people in the house to make their escape OR just create an overall simulated illusion as a distraction/smoke-screen with computer synthesis.
Computer hacks are great. Taking a piece of code and altering to fit ones needs. BUT this teaches a lot about reality hacks too and how computers can enter into the picture. It’s fascinating to me that people/institutions discard all this old technology that they deem ‘useless’ and replace it with the ‘newest’ without really understanding the potential of what they just discarded. Artists have an interesting opportunity here because computers are being discarded at a very high rate and replaced with ‘the new’. Artists can take these old materials and do really amazing things with them other than create just ‘trendy’ visuals or sounds. They can replicate military technologies! OR become scientists and record environmental data! We all must now strive to hack ‘the real’ using the methods/pedagogy that we learned from hacking ‘the virtual’ – a call for a pedagogy of the hack. McKenzie Wark’s book “A Hacker Manifesto” is a good resource in this regard. It’s a kind of (to paraphrase in his words) a “Communist Manifesto 2.0” for the hacker practice, theory and aesthetic.
To finish your question - yes I do think that hacking is an “essential modus operandi for artists today”. I would love to teach a class on ‘Artist as Hacker’ in the university but I’m not sure how well that would really fly locally. The larger the organization the longer it takes to change and in the area that i live, art, unfortunately, is still considered in a traditional sense as something that is ‘made and displayed’ rather than the often complicated processes involved in even the most modest of alterations OR ‘hacks’.
I just wanted to add that I just saw the brilliant film by Martin Scorsese, “The Departed”. Pop-Hollywood sometimes produces great things. What was interesting about it is that it had no perspective as far as its characters were concerned. The characters were sort of neutral – they were neither good nor bad. Many times such films try to ‘demonize the other’, this film on the other hand was about the relationship between two contrasting views – the ‘state’ represented by the police organization and the ‘autonomous zone’ represented by the criminal organization. Both are fighting for the right to exist, both are corrupt, both are viral in that decisions transcend individuality, and both strive for their own peace.
‘Hacking’ is similar in that it comes with all this negativity – hacking mainframes, hacking into government organizations etc. but it is also a change in organization which is really threatening to those who are use to being in control of the hierarchy. The police organization is a top-down system that is dictated by the ‘chief’ OR ‘captain’ or whatever. ‘The mob’, al-Queida, hippy-communes, artist collectives are much more viral and in this sense posse a threat to more establish organizational systems. “The Departed” shows what happens when opposing organizational methods refuse to recognize ‘the others’ right to exist – huge shifts in perspectives begin to occur, wars ensue etc. We are in one of these massive organizational shifts right now brought on particularly by the side-effects of the technology of the computer. New forms of organization are occurring and beginning to emerge – established systems are not so happy about this.
As artists we must be participants in this new organization but also be educators in creating a new pedagogy that addresses these changes so that transitions from one organizational method to another doesn’t have such a dramatically frightful effect as it has been having on world populations as they are trying to cope with these swift changes. A pedagogy of the ‘art hack’, as an institutional method, is important in educating new artists (those that use the institution as a primary access point for learning) in the significance of everyday activity as artist methods for ‘life hacks’ and how cumulative effort can inject a new organizational shift into local, national and international systems that for the most part have historically privileged the wealthy and powerful.
CK: In this context I would like to quote from an essay by Mirko Schaefer(4): "A community, which we consider functioning as collective intelligence (Pierre Lévy), can be much more productive and innovative than a company's research and development department" (5) Speaking of institutional methods - can there ever be something like a "hacking class"? Isn't the structure of an institution completely different to the methodical organization of "hacking"?
MEG: Yes. I agree with you that there are particular problems associated with the juxtaposition of seemingly conflicting organizational methods such as “the institution” OR “hacking” in the same location/territory. Let me just clarify really quick that there are many variations of institutional organization. Educational institutions vary greatly as well as governmental organizations, corporate organizations and even community organizations: all have desirable as well as undesirable traits associated with how they function within the larger assemblage. Here I’m assuming we are really talking about education institutions of higher education.
When we talk about ‘hacking’ in terms of under or within these institutional structures we are really talking about emergent organizational methods at the micro level that have the inherent ability to modify top-down structures, even at very subtle intensities,
from the bottom-up – sort of like bubbles emerging from the bottom of carbonated beverages. This doesn’t mean that these ‘hacking’ methods don’t exist or shouldn’t exist within more traditional institutional structures such as ‘higher-education’, it just means that these emergent methods have been historically repressed in favor of a top-down structure for the last century or so.
We can already witness forms of ‘hacking’ that are - and have been available in education that are often overlooked. An example of ‘hacking’ classes that are already in existence, even at the primary and secondary levels, although obviously not defined as such, might be found in high schools across America. ‘Shop’ classes OR even ‘Home EC’ usually fit in this category. There have been some teachers of ‘shop’ for instance that are teaching students how to run diesel vehicles off of alternative fuels. This is definitely an engine ‘hack’ because it takes something that is available, something that was commercially produced, and creates something new from it – a car that can run off of alternative fuels that it was not specifically designed to run from. Through these processes of manipulations, students begin to learn acts of modification as well as the properties of energy and energy consumption – for me the ‘modification’ part being the most interesting. In ‘Home Ec’, for another example, students are taught how to create and cook food. They are learning properties of creation rather than those of consumption and they are also learning about energy transference – energy for creation, energy for consumption and energy renewal. These methods for learning are strategic in learning about micro-levels and the ability to retain autonomy over other areas of learning which prepare an individual for the larger ‘economy of scale’.
For the most part these subjects (or even anti-subjects) are looked down upon and are usually considered downright laughable comparatively to more ‘serious’ subjects and disciplines such as the math and sciences (cold war mentality still in existence?).
Obviously, there is the prevalence of memorization and regurgitation that these subjects so often really upon in their educational methods. They are dominant as legitimate forms of how one is educated. These methods are for the specific purpose of insertion within the larger assemblage that is for the most part hierarchically formed around economic interests.
I think art is also in a predicament that is indicated by this same problem. It may be a broad generalization but I always have this image, probably from my own experience in high school, of the high-school art teacher as some ‘foo-foo’, big hair with bad glasses and kinetic earrings that gets his/her students so play with paint and clay – it always feels like some joke to me and other students and teachers treat it as such. ‘Art’ is a joke subject – there is just no extended economic interest involved in its pursuit, at least as an interest for the ‘masses’. And I really have no hope at all for their to be a drastic methodological change in curriculum or legitimacy. That’s why a lot of these ‘new media’ departments that are popping up in colleges across America are so diverse in pedagogy.
Many are not associated with ‘studio art’ but are often grounded in Information Technology, Photography, Film, and Communications -very often placing the same constraints that their traditional counterparts did. The institution, as far as higher-education is concerned, is very slow in response to external technological and theoretical change.
I think what I’m trying to say is that there is and there should be a place for ‘hacking’ classes in the institution (there always has been and there always will be) but we can not have a specific hope that there will be some quick and drastic change in organization because of the slow response time that is inherent within these organizations. Any class in ‘hacking’ as such will always have to be called something else. I’m pretty prone to say that an ‘Art 101’ for non-art majors can be an interesting experiment because there is no ‘preconception’ in the student to what art OR ‘hacking’ actually is! BUT even within other subject there is opportunities to learning from the ‘hacking’ community. Hacking is experiments and experimental processes in creating something new out of something that is already in
existence. Right? Lets maybe make slow changes in how student can create and evolve materials and code through experimental processes rather than just simply studying what has already be learned and taking a test on it. Students need to be able to take something, a material (biological, chemical) OR a piece of code and change it just a little – alter it and make it their own. It think this approach has the ability to alter top-down hierarchical structures such as ‘the institution’ from within and from the bottom-up – through emergent processes at the micro-level and NOT through he economic interest of external sources.
Other than at institutional levels I think that you are right with your Levy quote in that ‘communities’ themselves have a lot of fluidity and ability for self-organizational and self-education. Obviously we cannot rule these out but we also have to make sure that the community and institution can have a proper relationship and that the artist can create interjections that allow these formations to evolve and new organizations and relationships between organizations to emerge.
CK: The concepts you are talking about seem to mix the ideas of 90ies relational aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud) and a post - millenium diy approach. What do they mean to your current development as an artist especially under the influence of the economic pressure emerging artists (and not only they) have to bear?
MEG: Yes - and we could also say that this is also a flash back to the 1960's also. Hippy commune culture, craft movements, punk-rock - these can all be traced as historical lines of flight that diverge and converge in various ways forming the exoskeleton of, as you say, the new "post-millenium DIY" aesthetic, hacker culture, etc. Yet there is a distinct difference I think in what this 'neo-diy' attempts to 'do' (and I stress 'do' as in Gilbert Ryles difference between 'knowing that' and 'doing that' (6))... it is much more material now comparatively to 'the '60's' which was for the most part very ideologically driven, at least in this country, with its 'drop out' cultural aesthetic and experimentation with individuality (LSD, psychedelics, etc.) rather than understanding social ecologies in terms of 'assemblages' such as Deleuze & Guitarri understand it (7) and more recently Manuel Delanda (see ‘A New Philosophy of Society) (8).
Punk moments had similarities in that they still retained a sense of ideology that was really grounded in cultural aesthetics (rock music, images, t-shirts, graffiti) but also brought in the political function of 'anarchism' rather than the politics of 'autonomatism' found in the ''60's". This was a kind of forceful action that had the properties of 'bleeding' into general populations (in a different way than '60's' 'counter cultural' trends) through a kind of 'viral' infection that was forced from the inside to the outside through radical acts - volume, violence, DIY, ripped jeans, whatever.... obviously I'm lacking complete detail here but we should have a 'vibe' of history before we can analyze the present.... to any extent.
What has emerged recently (post millenium? 9/11 is a pretty good political and social event reference point.) in philosophical and artistic thought that I think is new and very different than past movements – and I mean different in a sense that past movements were not ‘failures’ – but we have definitely learnd what works and what does not. Artworks do not necessarily have to be bound to any form of visual or cultural aesthetics (clothing, music) nor do they have to be territorial (clubs, galleries, public-markets) but instead can function at a distance, through distance in the form of networks – either temporary and short in duration to very long term. The teaching of children can be a long-term artwork for example – especially if the children are your own! Children are extensions of our-selfs and must learn to create through everything that they do rather than conform or submit to any type of pre-conceived ‘societal’ standard. Is the teaching of our children not a great artwork? Children will grow and ideas will eventually replicate themselves through new networks of social relationships. There are long term consequences - meaning an artwork continues to evolve through a system many years into the future – an artwork that is never completed but is continually in development. My question is -how is this (education) legitimized as an artwork? Does it need to be? How can we utilize research methods in order to document this form of art and create legitimacy for it? Does it really even need to be legitimized under some sort of institutional/academic pretense?
Actions can have aesthetic properties – although the aesthetics are projections (projectiles) that do not result in ‘an image’ necessarily - for example. What we must do as artists is shed the ideological constraints of some hidden ‘essence’ of an image OR ‘aura’ and begin to replace it with the aesthetics of material manipulations and processes. This does not necessarily mean the manipulation of just art materials as in an ‘installation’ OR ‘video’ BUT the manipulation of the materials of social bodies, the materials of nation-states, the materials of networks, the materials of culture, the material of electricity and energy, the materials of biology, genetics.
I think there is a lot more going on here than just ‘mapping’ (visually) these movements of materials OR even a traditional understanding of DIY because I think there is much more to it. Rather we are trying now to understand (conceptualize) the artist as having the ability to manipulate these materials in direct/indirect, conscious/unconscious ways that may or may-not have direct and immediate outcomes resulting in some ‘final moment’ – a painting on a wall, an installation.
I think economically the arts must sustain themselves but can do this by moving beyond the ‘institutionalized’ professions of art to explore the infinite amount of materials out there. Can an artist become a biologist? Can an artist become an economist? Can an artist infiltrate a foreign system (even slightly) from the outside to the inside? Can artists be politicians? Lawyers? Mercenaries (lets not pretend all artists are ‘good’)? Can artists become ‘the other’ as Nietzsche (9) might say? What keeps an artist in the discipline of “art”? Comfort? Friends? Common interests? Does border crossings from one discipline to the next make one any less of an artist?
Right now I am working in “Theater” with lights and sound. I have never done this before nor have I really had any exposure in theater other than going to see a bad Broadway musical once! I have had to learn a whole new language, aesthetics, collaboration, etc. in relatively a short amount of time. Granted I’m still in ‘the arts’ – but even comparatively to ‘fine arts’ this experience is very foreign to me. What now can my role be in this new field? Can I bring something new to the discourse indirectly and directly through my presence? What can I learn that might be utilized in another discipline and under different conditions?
I have also been studying mycology and would love to take a few classes in genetic engineering, micro-biology etc. – but I could only do this if I had a University job that allowed me to take classes for free obviously.
I think economically the ‘institution’ of art is too established, specific, and at times very impenetrable. For me, artists need to look for alternative economic systems to grasp onto, infiltrate and consequently redefine and alter. This may be a disciplinary change! – but I really mean that there are other systems for us to involve ourselves in and other mechanisms to creation and material manipulations that can eventually emerge to have extraordinary impacts – viral impacts that are much different I think than just the idea of ‘drop-out’ autonomy OR punk and/or ‘90’s DIY.
About Mark E. Grimm
Mark E. Grimm is an artist that works in and between New York City and Rochester, NY in the U.S. His work is primarily focused on new media art (interactive installations, video art and internet art) and conceptual works. In 2000 he became co-founder of the Social Media Group (http://socialmediagroup.org, http://socialmediagroup.com), recent works have become increasingly concerned with the intersection between the human, the ecological, and the technological. Heavily influenced by current philosophical theory such as post-modern and post-structural theory he uses environmental and social issues as hidden text veiled in a minimalist garb.
His professional experiences include teachings at Oswego State University of New York (NY), Kean University (NJ) and Teachers College at Columbia University (NY). Currently he is working on his PhD.
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(1) http://warsgrindthingstoahalt.megrimm.net/
(2) http://socialmediagroup.org/projects/entry_excavate_cohabit_02.php
(3) http://megrimm.net/writing.php
(4) http://mtschaefer.net/
(5) http://art.runme.org/1107805077-9249-0/schaefer.pdf , p.68
(6) Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press
(7) Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
(8) Delanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
(9) Nietzsche, F. (1956) The Birth of Tragedy & The Geneology of Morals. Anchor Books.__
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]]>markARTWORK: Project MetaMap vers. 0.12007-10-16T20:34:00-06:002007-10-16T16:37:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.7010.16.07
Participatory Group Project
MetaMap is best understood as a work-in-progress. Produced by an international network of collaborating artists working together exclusively across the internet.
Participatory Group Project
MetaMap is best understood as a work-in-progress. Produced by an international network of collaborating artists working together exclusively across the internet.MetaMap is best understood as a work-in-progress. Produced by an international network of collaborating artists working together exclusively across the internet. The artwork, as it was represented in the «stimulus/response» exhibition in Vienna (Oct. 2007), the work challenged this mode of long-distance collaboration in an application of [zhao]project research collaborative in networked arts research. Temporal and spatial distance was transformed by harmonized genio/cultural topography, composed through the documentation of real-life short trips made by the participating Artists. The resultant space drew those visited places into a singular fabricated location through which viewers were invited to take a journey through the landscape of the collaborating people.
Original translation from German by Sabine Hochrieser
Edited by Benjamin Bailey
Participating artists (in alphabetical order):
Montse Arbelo, “Qui Que?”, Mark E. Grimm, Carlos Katastrofsky, Stavroula Kounadea
For more Info about the stimulus/response Exhibition see:
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]]>markESSAY: Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part II Mullaya2007-10-01T11:52:00-06:002007-10-01T11:52:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.6910.01.07
Part two of an essay series based on the theatrical production of 'Nine Parts of Desire' by Heather Raffo.
Part two of an essay series based on the theatrical production of 'Nine Parts of Desire' by Heather Raffo.Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part II Mullaya
By
Mark Edward Grimm
Part II: Mullaya
In a scene form ‘Nine Parts of Desire” we see Mullaya, and old Iraqi woman standing on the banks of a river in Bagdad.
BAGDAD – “Without the river there would be no here, there would be no beginning.”
Is it the beginning that we long for? Isn’t there always the desire to return to the womb, to return back to the point of orgin? If we follow the ‘lines of flight’ back to the past, in our collective memories, navigating the machinic phylum and understanding its emergent properties then we find the intensity of our earliest memories are that of “eden”.
The river is the river of life, the root of civilization. “Qurna, Eridu, Ur. The garden of Eden was here” - the Garden of Eden was Baghdad. The Garden of Eden is Iraq (Babylon)– the dawn of civilization is the garden of civilization.
Lets quickly look then at the garden. What does it mean to be a garden? A garden bears many things. A garden bears fruits and vegetables and anything else that we can domesticate as a food source OR anything that naturally occurs as a source of food. A garden is also a place where plants, bushes and trees grow. It creates a shade on the earth. A garden is also a place where things rot – they die and then they are returned back to the soil later to be resurrected in the rejuvenation of new growth. A garden is also a place of ‘pests’ – at least a pest to us and to the garden – a place where external entities from outside penetrate the wealth of the garden because the garden is a living organism – a living ecology.
The pest, I think, is the most interesting aspect of this garden ecology because if we as humans are trying to tend to the garden and what the garden produces and offers us then we are always trying to get rid of these pests that are coming from the outside of our ‘perfect’ ecological systems in order to feed off our self-created system as a host. It is amazing that it is as if reality itself is trying to burst into our nice little harmonious systems in order to disrupt our ‘utopia’ and create chaos. If there were no such thing as a ‘garden’ would the ‘pest’ exist?
It would be kind of like saying that if an apartment OR house didn’t exist for us to live in would there be such thing as ‘dust’? We are always trying to push this thing called ‘dust’ out of the house only for it to eventually creep back in – on our pants on our shoes etc. This is like the void again – the void is always trying to push itself back into a place that is constantly trying to eradicate it. Rats in the sewers, roots and ‘weeds’ pushing themselves out of the concrete and pavement of the roads – parking lots. Is as if we are only interested in building an illusion of the world as our own perfect ‘garden’ – always trying to re-create this perfection of what we keep remembering in our collective memory. In America this is called ‘Disney World’ but in Baghdad this is called ‘The Garden of Eden’.
The ‘Garden of Eden’ stretches back in our collective conscience to when we were apes – when we evolved. BUT the more modern version – in ancient history – is the ‘Hanging Gardens of Babylon’ which was once in present day Al-Hillah in Iraq. As described by he Greek Historian Diodorus:
The Garden was 100 feet long by 100 wide and built up in tiers so that it resembled a theater. Vaults had been constructed under the ascending terraces which carried the entire weight of the planted garden; the uppermost vault, which was seventy-five feet high, was the highest part of the garden, which, at this point, was on the same level as the city walls. The roofs of the vaults which supported the garden were constructed of stone beams some sixteen feet long, and over these were laid first a layer of reeds set in thick tar, then two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and finally a covering of lead to prevent the moisture in the soil penetrating the roof. On top of this roof enough topsoil was heaped to allow the biggest trees to take root. The earth was leveled off and thickly panted with every kind of tree. And since the galleries projected one beyond the other, where they were sunlit, they contained conduits for the water which was raised by pumps in great abundance from the river, though no one outside could see it being done. (Wellard, 1972, pp. 156)
Like all present day gardens this was a controlled garden – a fabricated garden, a constructed garden. And like all present day constructions – especially constructions that have reached utopic proportions – it invited the pests at the outskirts of the city walls looking to feed on that same ‘utopic’ vision yet ‘destroying’ that vision in the process allowing a morphogenetic process to occur that was not in the initial intent. The naked, thus, must put on clothes again to shield the intrusions of the outside created through the specific conditions of the inside.
But unlike an invading force of populations, viruses or pests - the very earth that it rested on – through an earthquake it was destroyed in the first century B.C transforming this ‘garden’.
And again the ‘imaginary’ was rebuilt in a new form, the area of present day Al-Hillah emerged as the center of learning, education and technology in the Islamic world. A new garden of illusion created but also at the same time – again – creating its own vulnerabilities through our own concepts of perfection. From the outside – a sweeping void the ‘nothing’ again consumed in the form of the ‘nomadic method’.
As Mullaya said:
“When the son of Genghis khan burned all the books in Baghdad the river ran black with ink”.
In 1256 a ‘black death’ of ‘nomadic’ forces swept in and the Mongol empire – having no regard for the structure of the city. This was not a ‘misunderstanding of the city’ as many would argue (Deleuze & Guatarri 1987) but instead it is, on the contrary a misunderstanding of nomadic external forces and the power of a decentralized ‘war machine’ on a structured state.
The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize. It is not enough to affirm that the war machine is external to the apparatus. It is necessary to reach the point of conceiving the war machine as itself a pure form of exteriority we habitually take as a model, or according to which we are in the habit of thinking. (Ibid p. 354)
Because there are always going to be cracks in the milieu, especially a very homogenous plane - because it is much easier for something external (culture, social organization) to be ‘the other’ - that it sets the soil for easy penetration and replication. Once there are drastic homogenous conditions it is much easier for the potential of the reverse to emerge or transcend upon that same consistent plane. The radical shift from the ‘State’ to the ‘nomadic machine’ is even more extreme and to that end the ‘nomadic machine’, once it has transformed a space from an intensive ‘minor’ organizational schematic to an intensive ‘major’ system must then recondition this severe anxiety of the ‘conquered’ state into a new anxiety – a new void as a the return of a linear aristocracy.
The conquering of the Maya became an example of this extreme external, foreign force descending upon them. This was a ‘super void’ in the sense that the two cultures – Mayan & European ecologies, biology’s etc. had been completely separated for thousands of years – since the initial embarking on separate journeys from the “garden of eden”. While the European populations had exposure to intense civilization (dense urban environments, market economies), the Maya, being relatively new from emerging out of nomadic populations relatively, did not. This created a condition of sterilization that had openings for all these different external relations to exploit, develop and emerge as a dominant ‘majority’. Disease, religion, external substance (alcohol) easily found a vulnerable host to develop within. As McNeill (McNeil 1976, Delanda 1997) says of the Europeans, they contained within their own biology a “biological weapon urban conditions of life [had] implanted into the bloodstreams of civilized peoples.” (p.62, p. 131) So in a way, all they had to do was to show up – and biology took its course.
From then on it was all too easy – history could be wiped like a computer hard-drive. The bishop Diego de Landa “in one of histories worst acts of cultural vandalism, … burned all Maya manuscripts that he could locate in his effort to eliminate “paganism.” (Diamond p. 159) This was an easy result from, as Delanda (1997) says, “cultural material [that] flowed together with genes and biomass (not all human) across the Atlantic [creating] a whole complex mixture that triumphed” (p.133) over the Mayan populations. A ‘blank slate’ had been created and in this way an entire continent was “transformed into a supply region for all three spheres of the European economy: material life, markets, and anti-markets ” (Ibid).
Is the present day – 2007 – Iraq this same promise of a ‘blank slate’? Except here there is no ‘virgin’ ground for a new emergent becoming – this ground is too old, ancient. It is as though we are trying to get back to the garden that we left yet the garden is different – it has changed, mutated and morphed in unexpected ways. It is as Mullah says, the “great dark sea of desire”.
The variations in possibilities have been expended in a multitude of ways prior to even our slightest conception of the space, topologies and histories involved. In this sense the major (the nomadic) is too strong and the sedentary army cannot proceed against the smooth planed that has settled in, as Mullah says, “This land between two rivers”.
Obviously the old techniques were tried to an extent. When the American army invaded it protected the economic interests of the oil fields yet allowed the museum to be vandalized. Another erasure of history - is there a word for this? To control a society, to dominate a people we know for certain - their history must be erased. Yet as we also know – total recall is inevitable. Memories always resurge, bubbling and brewing from underneath the concrete, the parking lot that has tried so hard in vain to hold back the earth from doing what it wants to do – what it desires most to do – grow.
American slavery has shown this because out of this cultural elimination there is still a culture that is retained – the blues, jazz emerged from this great cultural repression – it could never leave, it was always there. By repression, homogenization - we breed super-culture. Like with the virus – by eliminating viruses we give rise and opportunities to super viruses. And ‘terrorism’ – whatever our subjective understanding subscribe the definition to be - the more we try to eradicate ‘terrorism’ we help to build new forms – super-terrorism.
“The Garden” is this great illusion and also paradox. The more we build and create this garden as an image of something that we think we lack – some vision of ‘good’ and ‘utopia’ – the more we are inviting what we don’t want from the outside – inside. When we try to build this garden anew – a creation of a new location – our garden will both spread and thrive OR the tenders of ‘the other’ garden, viewing our garden as an invading weed such as in an aesthetic war between greening states, will stop it.
So to return to the beginning, the question for me is not - why do we need the garden? The question instead is why does the garden need us? What do we do to this garden that it cannot do on its own? The difficulty is that our memories of this garden have all slowly changed through and within populations to the point that we do not know or recognize this ‘Garden of Eden’ when we see it anymore – too much time has past since parting ways long ago in the cradle of human evolution. The garden has ceased to need us because we have become so reliant on NOT needing the garden – precisely because we are looking for something that either already IS or a garden we can re-create (Disney World) in our own fantastic illusion of perfection – and the garden is bored of disingenuous relationships which means we are not necessary anymore to its survival.
Delanda, M. (1997) A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History. New York: Zone Books
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin
McNeil, W. (1976) Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, NJ: Anchor/Doubleday.
Wellard, James. 1972. Babylon. New York, NY. Saturday Review Press.
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]]>markRESPONSE: Response to Franks Shiffreens essay “Networks, Ecology, Germination”2007-07-19T09:16:00-06:002007-07-19T09:16:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.6807.12.07
Response to Franks Shiffreens essay “Networks, Ecology, Germination”
Response to Franks Shiffreens essay “Networks, Ecology, Germination”Response to Franks Shiffreens essay “Networks, Ecology, Germination”
By mark Edward grimm
Last month Frank Shiffreen wrote an essay about my work in the April newsletter/journal “interview” edited by Maria Hamilton. Instead of responding to the essay personally (directly to Frank), I felt it necessary to write a more formal response in order to keep the dialogue alive and to extend some of the very interesting thoughts and points that Frank so eloquently addressed. I also would like to call on others to participate in this sort of ‘essay’ dialogue in however one might see fit in order to contribute to our growing conversation.
In the first part of this essay, Frank referred to some of my work as work that utilized “systems concepts to generate technological and environmental art”. My first question is, what is a ‘systems concept’? My attempt to define this term in the context of Franks essay clearly brings me back to my readings of Deleuze and Guatarri, specifically Deleuzes concept of “The Fold”. For Deleuze systems are material and conceptual entities that can constantly be ‘unfolded’ to discover new patterns and possibilities of connections between various, seemingly unrelated parts. Deleuze exemplifies this by showing how a piece of paper (origami?) once folded, connects two once distant singular points. As the paper is folded more and more, the complexities and the generation of new planes begin to evolve. For Deleuze, systems are folds that must be continuously unfolded to unpack new concepts and ideas and make new connections between bits of information, materials, histories, etc.
I think a lot of artwork makes these complicated connections in various forms yet I feel sometimes that when we educate in the arts, and particularly in the fine arts (at least traditionally) we are so attached to the ‘art object’ that we miss the various ecological networks of relationships that these artworks contain – not only their conceptual histories such as the ‘history of art’ might dictate, but also the material, social, and environmental histories that artworks can and always do make connections with. I think the pedagogy of following these experimental paths, that may or may not relate to any pre-conceived history or notion of ‘art’, is what I find most interesting in what Frank is talking about. Frank thus points out that art is part of the “autonomous, uncensorable networks” of communications where artworks can relieve themselves of the visual to become a “social practice that is rooted in the whole being” rather than being defined by the “disembodied eye, as we are trained to believe”.
This terminology is very intriguing to me and I am wondering what exactly Frank meant by the “disembodied eye”. Is this the spectacle of ‘the image’? Does the ‘disembodied eye’ look toward ‘the image’ as a specialized aesthetic judge over the qualities of the ‘art objects’ clever manipulations and ‘unique’ qualities rather than its impact on organizational systems? The two ‘images’ of the last several years that have had the most impact on social organization are undoubtedly those of the disastrous events of September 11th and those of Abu Graib. As Paul Virilio has suggested, these ‘images’ are monumental as ‘artworks’ whose sole medium is that of the accident (Virilio 2006) reverberating throughout our media systems and electronic networks via the ‘mass media’. The impact of these events is undeniable due to the ‘speed’ of the information networks and created instant and immediate global shifts unlike any ‘image’ had previously done.
Certainly this is not advocating the blowing up of buildings by artists: instead it is an awareness test resulting in the education of the artist to become aware of larger materials that contain properties that allow for new manipulations to occur rather than always relying on localized, individualized mediums such as the traditional paint and brush allow. As Manual Delanda stated, thinking in ‘populations’ rather than totalities must be continuously addressed. Franks examples of the Gentoo Linux servers that were collaboratively built, masked and utilized under the umbrella of the institution, yet invisible to that same institution, show how as he stated it, one could “bypass the academic IT department with its computer system protectors – walls erected as safeguards for the interlocked computer systems of the institution” eventually becoming ‘absorbed’. Yet, is this just an absorption OR is it a synthesis of new concepts created from the juxtaposition of two seemingly opposing forces? OR is it a new type of seed that continues to grow inside an institutional womb that has potentialities for absorbing the larger, more dominant system such as a vine that absorbs an architectural structure after that structure falls into disuse as in the case of some structures surrounding the site at Chernobyl .
A few questions remain for me as I think about some of the issues that arise when reading Franks work. Frank notes that some of the artworks embody the time of the ‘1960’s’ in some ways. I am wondering then, what the difference is between ‘now’ and the 1960’s? What is the teaching function and how does the pedagogist respond to these growing questions and constant evolution of art – especially now that ‘art as image’ has been replaced with ‘systems theories’? What is the role of the museum/gallery and what does Frank mean when he says that these institutions tend to keep people out rather than let them in?
Art is marginalized when it is disconnected from life and human needs. As Frank suggested, we as educators must convey a pedagogy that moves “beyond the mode of disinterested contemplation to something that is more participatory and engaged” as opposed to that of the “disembodied eye”. “Artistic activity does not have an immutable essence but “evolves” according to social needs and context” as he suggested. I will be thinking and conversing on these questions in the coming months and I would like to thank Frank for the splendid essay on my work!
Refernces
Delanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
Virilio, P. (2006). City of Panic. Berg Publishrs.
ORIGINAL ESSAY
Networks, Ecology, Germination: The Artwork of Mark Grimm
Frank Shifreen (Arts and Education)
Mark Grimm is an artist creating works in various media, using systems concepts to generate technological and environmental art. He has produced an evolving body of work, often in collaboration with his wife, Amy Cheatle (see Newsletter # ). Mark and Amy are emerging artists who use art deliberately to reflect on social issues, using an unusual mix of materials and ideas. The work could be characterized as a combination of social activism, synergism, whole systems thinking, science, practicality, function driven technology, and biology -- with a strong aesthetic sensibility. The works have political content that is ecology minded -- "green,” situationist, even anarchic. The works have a poetry that is greater than the sum of the parts they are constructed with.
I first saw Mark's work as a painter. He exhibited a series of minimal canvasses, the only image being the light revolving around and reflecting from the shine of the surface. They were pristine, Apollonian and serene.
Mark has understanding, vision, and technical expertise in computer technology, creating networks, and composing music as well as visual art via high technology. He has mastered the complexities of various systems.
He is also concerned with issues of violence, power, and control, creating a series of video and performance works dealing with these issues. His subjects are antiwar demonstrations, the mechanics of guns, and socially embedded violence. His works are personal and social meditations on these themes. This series is much darker than his other works and has an aura of anxiety and anger. He is trying to locate pathmarks in the continuum of aggression that is pervasive in our society. I would hazard that before he can create a visionary society through action where he can share his positive regard, he must traverse a land whose geography is violence, repression and the toll it takes on us.
These works are a statement about what is, as opposed to his other works, which are about what can be. Bill Nichols (1988), in his update of Walter Benjamin’s article ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ discusses the hyper-masculinity that has tainted our culture. What can we say? Sept. 11th, the war, our relations with ourselves and nature, all refer to this continuing problem. The underlying attitudes have tainted our relations with everything . Mark has expressed this recently by showing the videos he has made in conjunction with lectures or installations. An overarching theme of his oeuvre is empowerment. What oppresses us and what empowers us?
As part of his art practice, while working in an instructional media lab in a university, Mark envisioned and constructed a server, a work he named ‘Gentoo Linux Server.’ This server by-passed the academic IT department with its computer system protectors --walls erected as a safeguard for the interlocked computer systems of the institution. While acceptable to most users this conventionally “safe” system was anathema to scholars and artists who wanted to produce alternative art and culture by experimenting with grassroots communication through autonomous, uncensorable networks. Here, Mark engaged a contemporary aesthetic paradigm that posits art as a bridge, a dialog, circumventing stifling protocols and formal procedures to foster the aims of non-mainstream creativity. Research has shown that it is often through networks that breakthroughs in science, art and culture are produced. This is a form of art the aesthetic philosophy of which differs from common standards, traditional materials, or "art for art’s sake.”
Art can also be a process that is not self-consciously an "art" object. The Gentoo Server was three discarded Mac G3 computers that were salvaged and cobbled together, to create a place where experiments in web communication could happen. Mark set up the system and colleague Daniel Rubin wrote the code that was needed. It is a complex operation. The server existed within the University system, hidden for a time, continued protected with certain restrictions after that , and then was absorbed within the system after an ultimatum by administrators. The server exists presently as a virtual machine within the larger servers of the school, part of an agreement to keep the experiment alive. It was a subversive act, and could have been a cause for disciplinary action for all concerned. It was an important experience for those involved as users, myself being one of them. Mark was able to finesse the political intrigue, with the assistance of John Broughton, a user and faculty advisor. The server was just three old blue computers, hidden in cabinets -- not much to look at visually. It allowed the many users to create, share, publish, and to explore the web. It was the creation of a temporary autonomous zone, as described under the name of Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson).
Mark helped many to conceptualize their needs and realize their goals. He provided a lot of help to me. As an example of how important this can be to an artist and cause, I cite my own experience with the server. I organized and curated an antiwar exhibition and web-based collection of art. Mark assisted me with web support and his helpful suggestions. Connections were made to artists and groups in America and throughout the world who sent work that could be displayed on the internet and also printed for wall display. Web-based and "real" exhibitions were held. Several venues were engendered in response to the Internet shows, culminating in an exhibition at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. All the work was sent to a server there, as files, and then they were printed on fabric as huge banners and placed throughout the City. Contrast earlier days, as I remember well, when all art was done through art magazines, or other standard media outlets, and it was very difficult to make contact with artists in other countries
Mark’s collaborations with Amy Cheatle are very different. They use various media, video, performance process, agriculture, ecology, personal history, iconography, and found objects to create works that are experiential, phenomenological, political and interactive. They are research driven ecological artists, using art to learn, practice, report and inform about their investigation and experiments in nature.
Thesse collaborative works recall the commune movement of the 60s and other disaffected and situationist work of the recent past, including my own . They hark back to the land movement and the utopian communities of the previous century. Much of their work embodies this time when art had a strong social, community and teaching function.
Artist and author Suzi Gablik (1998) has identified the aesthetic process in our culture, quoting Satish Kumar, from India, as one in which the desert of beauty features works of art isolated from the world in oases. Museums, galleries keep more people out than let them in. It is important to bring these ideas back to the white space. Art is marginalized when it disconnects from life and human needs. Arthur Danto has referred to this state of affairs as the “disenfranchisement”of art, because of the hidden constraints of a morally neutral, art-for-arts-sake-only program that does not allow art to play the a role in the community. There have been many attempts to create the context of this aesthetic in the past. Many artists including myself have created works and deeds that embodied ideals of personal or social action in critical areas. I first began to question these paradigms when I created exhibitions and actions in the 1980s.
"As many artists shift their work arena from the studio to the more public
contexts of political, social, and environmental life, we are all being called,
in our understanding of what art is, to move beyond the mode of disinterested
contemplation to something that is more participatory and engaged. Such art
may not hang on walls; it may not even be found in museums or beautiful
objects, but rather in some visible manifestation of what psychologist James
Hillman refers to as "the soul's desperate concerns." For such artists, vision
is not defined by the disembodied eye, as we have been trained to believe.
Vision is a social practice that is rooted in the whole of being."
In the Grimm-Cheatle exhibition Org: Reaping the White Walls at the Teachers College Macy Gallery (assisted by artist Jacob Roesch), the impetus was a longing for nature and natural food in the urban environment. Mark and Amy have young children. They created a garden subversively on the roof of TC, building large, rolling planting modules, in which they grew wheat, barley, and other plants. They then harvested the crop and baked bread and made beer from the grain. They exhibited the beer in racks, the bottled beer being presented as art.
A part of the exhibition in another room was an installation of mounded earth that was seeded with wheat. During the course of the exhibition the wheat grew rapidly, adding a natural presence to the gallery (see Newsletter # ). The work had aspects of process and performance art. The visual component -- the racks and wheat, with some images on the wall -- was clearly art with an intention of a visual art object. The reach was a greater and more meaningful vision than pure form. On opening night, they served their bread from the garden. The beauty and simplicity of life: seeds grow, even in a gallery. Life has such power to unfold. The process visible during an art exposition made it more mysterious and beautiful. The work was holistic, synergistic, biological.
I found a lot of resonance with Mark and Amy’s work in the “relational aesthetics” of French philosopher and curator Nicholas Bourriaud, a notion developed in a large exhibition he curated in 1996 called ‘Trafic.’ As defined by Bourriaud, relational art is "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space" – an idea much in tune with Gablik’s. Esthetique relationnel allows for an art that is not quite in the realm of most art practice; it can be transactional, performative, and situationist. Artistic activity does not have an immutable essence but evolves according to social needs and context. Modernity, the search for the new and startling forms of art, is a lost cause, devoid of meaning in our time. It is only a rallying cry for traditionalist art, as an antithesis.
A later Grimm-Cheatle collaboration was a further development of the issues presented in Org. It was titled CoHabit: Cooperative Networks and Ecologies, a complex installation combining different threads of structure and meaning. Each part of the piece had deep significance for the artists and communicated to participant onlookers. The piece started with a piece of land in Rochester, New York that had to be sold after Mark's father’s untimely death. The land had a barn on it that had been used for gardening and his father’s workshop, and it was going to be sold to a developer to pay family debts. The artists disassembled the barn and cut it up into blocks. (MARIA: ask Mark where online reader can view speeded up qwiktime video of destroying the barn?) In the show, fruit baskets from the barn were filled with earth and wheat and placed in the gallery. Earth, seeded with wheat was laid on the gallery floor and watered. The result was a landscape with topographical features in miniature. Visitors were asked to create structures with the blocks and baskets, to assemble or reassemble at will. There was also a video wall with imagery, and short pieces related to the project. The sum of the whole installation was a complete environment -- an ecosystem in miniature, including the human element of chance and interactivity. I enjoyed the opportunity to play and create structures. The various shapes of the wood helped create assemblages that were interesting objects in their own right that looked like sculptures, buildings, or models set in a landscape of hills and foliage. This show was the creation of an architecture and community that was poignant and beautifully expressed. Mark and Amy’s recent works in Rochester are continuing these investigations of agricultural nature and our relation to it.
Sidebar:
I hope I will be forgiven for egotistically mentioning that I have long championed such concepts. I organized and curated exhibitions in the 80s that were artist and community based. I was the director of the Gowanus Memorial Artyard, which was a dummy organization that I set up for my artistic ideas, similar to Mark’s situationist actions.
It had the aura of respectability. I organized a series of large exhibitions and created sculpture gardens on the banks of the Gowanus Canal – that site is now a superfund toxic waste dump. I called the series the Monumental Shows. The name referred to the monuments that are constructed to depict what should be remembered. I wanted artists to create a content-based art that celebrated other ideas (political, social, and environmental), since there was little community art at the time. There were books written by architects about their pieces, and other books on the Gowanus by artists in the show.
One part of these shows was a grassroots architectural competition that I created called the Gowanus Canal Redefined, to redesign and focalize one of the most polluted waterways in the nation. There were many entries. A book was written about one of them. Ideas ranged from actual sculptural architecture or utopian communities to plans for cleaning and sustaining the waterway. All I had was an impulse and did not know how to conceptualize what I was doing. I could not sustain the effort without an aesthetic supporting it.
The World as Organization Ernst Laszlo alexander laszlo
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]]>markESSAY: Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part I Layal2007-07-19T09:01:00-06:002007-07-19T09:01:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.6707.11.07
Part one of an essay series based on the theatrical production of 'Nine Parts of Desire' by Heather Raffo.
Part one of an essay series based on the theatrical production of 'Nine Parts of Desire' by Heather Raffo.Nine Parts of Nine Parts: Part I Layal
By
Amy C. Cheatle
Mark Edward Grimm
This essay is in nine parts. It is based loosely from the play “Nine Parts of Desire”.
Nine Parts of Desire is a work so compassionate, so heartbreaking, so soul-shatteringly human, that it promises to change forever the way you'll think about the women (indeed, the people) of the Mideast.
A portrait of the extraordinary — and ordinary — lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women, this solo work lifts the veil on exactly what it means to be a woman in the age-old war zone that is Iraq.
Each part of this writing is based on ideas presented by each of the nine women that the play represents. We do not wish to state a narrative or ‘review’ of any sort but to convey ideas that we feel necessary to address, ideas that need unpacking and contemplation in order to be properly grounded in new ideas that may spring forth.
Part I: Layal
“God Created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men.”
Ali ibn Abi Taleb, husband of Muhammad's daughter Fatima and fourth Caliph of the Islamic World after Muhammad. Revered as the first Leader of the Shi'a sect of Islam, his shrine is in Najaf, Iraq and is a major place of Shi'a pilgrimage.
And Layal states:
That is me. My phlosophy!
These stories are living inside of me
Each women I meet her or I hear about her and I cannot separate myself from them
I am so compassionate to them, so attached – la, la, it’s the opposite
Maybe I am separate, so separate from the women here
I am always trying to be part of them.
I feel I could have been anybody if I looked different.
We are all inseparable from each other yet also contain and retain our individualistic capacities. It is easier to feel pain that is close than to feel pain that is distant. We, across the Atlantic, are removed from direct contact with the territorial geography that is defined as ‘Iraq’.
To not only acknowledge the suffering of others, but to refuse to become subjugated by it.
To deny the voyeuristic nature (Sontag 2003) of consuming images of pain.
To deliver it to the rest of the world perhaps with the hope that by experiencing, for a moment, some portion of another’s suffering we might become transformed into creatures that actively oppose those who will instigate pain in others.
Some who experience these removed accounts of pain, loss, suffering, will become students of this conceptual pain, comrades of distant martyrs who were once just people like we are just people, involved with our day-to-day lives - understanding how art can have a greater effect on psyche than the photo documentation of a war… or just acknowledging or bearing witness to another’s pain- you did live, you did die.
You did interact with your environment and your surroundings and your environment and your surrounding interacted with you.
Traveling with families in tow, dinner digesting, passing intact shopping districts with lights blazing into the night and buyer-friendly pre-selected music played for its soothing effects on the equilibrium of an individual’s addiction to consumption and accumulation, into the theater where the simulation of another reality is before us - one of bombed out buildings, annihilated infrastructure, children, husbands dead and gone, torture and rape, deliberate environmental contamination, the purposeful destruction of shared cultural artifacts and history- and yet still the strength to live- is this hope or determination?
Thus, this is a transformation from one reality to the next, a movement from the theater of everyday life to the theater of a projected reality – an assemblage of desire, nine parts from variations in space/time assembled as a singular instance. Assembling the…
…individuals that have compassions developed by seeing, if not experiencing, the suffering of others.
And as the theater lights die and return - 'A Call to Prayer' is heard 5 times a day: at dawn, at midday, in the afternoon, at sunset, and finally when the sky becomes dark and daytime is over. ‘The Call’ is like eating. It is like breathing. It is exercise. It is thought.
Earliest television memories were of coming face to face with children our own age, on the other side of the world, suffering from famine. Looking into faces we felt a strong sense that here was another form of us. If we had been born to another family that might be us… years later on TV George Bush “the first” announcing a war with Iraq and our crying- at 14… then ash covered witnesses of the fall of the World Trade Center who would, a few hours after seeing them on TV, be walking, still in shock, under our Manhattan apartment window… Hurricane Katrina and crying men and women begging for relief as family members were dying of heat stroke, lack of medication, lack of water… a baby in her mother’s arms that would not wake up…
We hear the 'call to prayer'. It is within a theater. The theater is within a theater. The theater is within the theater of the spectacle. Theaters are always within other theaters – theaters are part of assemblages. They re-enact histories and create new desires. They create new concepts within their walls. They highlight instances of external theaters and create new instances of them – a re-appropriation of spectacle. A theater creates a spectacle within a spectacle - though through its re-appropriation an art form is assembled and maintained extending throughout a given time duration.
That the suffering of others, the deaths of their loved-ones, will not go unnoticed by the rest of the world. We may very well belong to a society that is oversaturated with images and accounts of pain, suffering, destruction, and it may desensitize some and activate others, while others still may become media-recluses, dropping out of the media game by putting an end to newspaper subscriptions, to internet news, to television. As a citizen of the United States is it our responsibility to bare witness to what evils our elected government enacts upon others, and in our name? Can accounts of suffering reach a critical mass that will demand an end to its cause?
A critical threshold is often reached that tips the balance of social bodies and organization. Theater is not a 'television'. It is not a 'machinic enslavement' insofar as the “television viewers are no longer consumers or users, nor even subjects who supposedly “make” it, but intrinsic component pieces, “input” and “output”, feedback or recurrences that are no longer connected to the machine in such a way as to produce or use it.” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p.458) The theater breathes – it takes breaths. It assembles briefly and then disassembles after a certain amount of designated time only to reassemble again in a new altered form.
Unlike electronic media that is reproducible bit-for-bit and culturally replicated as perfect clones of itself for the mass component parts, the theater operates within the theater of mass cultural replication but is a temporary autonomous zone within the larger assemblage where variation is its strength. Each day the assemblage comes together a variation on the machine take place. The machine is the theater itself but it never runs the same way twice.
A performance is a re-enactment of jumbled bits of information re-assembled in a new form, a synthesis of externals. It is not pre-recorded but still alive as an ecology that grows as time extends its duration to the end.
Have we as a civilization become accustomed to images of war and suffering - become desensitized to imagery of complete destruction? To have the voices, to hear the stories of a part of a population rendered all but silent, to cry with them and experience their suffering - to raise our fists in solidarity from the comforts of our own warm living-rooms, or the mediated environment of the theater, empowers or awakens us and- is a powerful reminder that we are all still human.
A theater within a theater: nine parts is a theater within the “theater of militaris.” (Virilio p. 108)
Iraq is at the center but its projections are global. It plays out in variation over and over again. Iraq is its own theater – Bagdad is its stage. The television is a simulation of unreal events – the television is the American social assemblages 'portal' into that external theatrical event called 'Iraq': it is the viral extension of the external. Iraq is a theater of variation – each breath of life and death are different than the previous. We have created a theater of our own to give theatrics to the external theater of Iraq – a different theater where the stage is everywhere and the patrons are collaborators in its production. This is the invasiveness of territory.
The stage is open to narrative – there is always a story to internalize and leave with. A memory is pasted down through subsequent generations and triggered by externals and internals in relation to the body in question. The body in question is a becoming – one that becomes its surroundings…
…and those who have become women can become other things as well – artists, painters, creators.
Layal, the Iraqi artist and painter, is alive on stage and breathing the breath of herself through the actress that she is represented by - who in turn is representing Layla al-attar, the artist and creator of the “Bush is Criminal” mosaic at the Rashid hotel. The narrative does not necessarily have to be historically correct because the documentation of facts do not directly correspond with the narrative of the theatrics yet we do not necessarily mind because the flow of memory and reproducibility through the system of the Iraq social network is intact. The singularity of mind becomes a by-product as art. And art materializes as a physical demonstration of that singularity:
The mosaic, an unflattering portrait of Bush [The First] with his teeth bared in a scowl, was installed later in 1993 right in the Al-Rashid's doorway complete with a caption in Arabic and English: "Bush is criminal.
In Arab culture, putting the soles of the feet to ones face is a grave insult. Patrons that walked into the hotel walked over the commissioned 1993 mosaic and wiped their feet on it. The notion of Iraqi feet trudging over George Herbert Walker Bush’s face was thus particularly appealing after the 1991 Iraq invasion. The hotel had been heavily trafficked by foreign guests and the base of journalism operation during the 1991 Gulf War.
The face – the bust: portraiture is not a face anymore than it is a pipe. Yet the memory of reaction, action and experience is long. An occurrence of visualization (the dream) has a forceful power to create new building blocks for intensities. The intensity becomes field for new intensities to be sown. Image power is intensified greatly when it becomes participatory and interactive. Dead images hang on walls. Living images are those that we touch, smell, hear, see and walk upon. This image has a breath in its ability to create vibrations and oscillations through populations. Its power is in the nature of its physical projections as much as in its mental projections giving no preference to either one or the other.
Some notables who have purportedly walked over the floor mosaic at the Rashid Hotel:
- U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on the upper lip.
- Russian nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky on the Adam’s apple.
- Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter made a point of sidestepping.
- U.N. weapons inspector Hoans Blix over the shoulder.
- International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohammed El Baradei over the shoulder.
Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Rick Schwarts
Thursday night, April 10th, 2003, U.S. soldiers, wielding hammers and chisels dug out the mosaic replacing it with a portrait of Saddam Hussein – no photographs are available.
We know the power of removing a central feature of a system in order to disrupt the over-all ecology that is present. A desert ecology, for example, is very fragile. Biotic and abiotic factors interact supporting a diverse community of plant and animal life that has “evolved resistance to and methods of circumventing the extreme temperature and arid conditions” Plant, animal, and bacterial population interact with latitude and longitude, soil and climate. As in any ecology, the system can be highly disrupted by removing an integral part of the over-all assemblage OR by introducing a new part.
Social organization acts also as an ecology or assemblage and when one part of that social organization is disrupted consequences can not only be devastating to that ecological formation but also create a new less-than desirable aftermath containing within its genetic makeup the possibilities for regional, national and even global ramifications.
An occupation is a territorial one; it is an infestation that is highly invasive.
To occupy ones territory one must first erase ones cultural history, replacing the offensive imagery with ones own. That is how territory is marked and remade in the conquerors image.
We have imported a breeding population. We arrive. We survive. We thrive. The ecosystem in question has now suffered a disturbance; this disturbance changes the fundamental nature of the ecosystem (Byers 2002). Cultural histories have been thrown in disarray.
…and around the same time, the Baghdad museum of art was looted.
As Layal states:
“My sister wants me to come to London… If all the artists leave, who will inspire the people?”
The loss of culture is the first step in domination. To destroy ones history first is to destroy the retention of memories (Diamond, J. 2005). A place open up, there is a hole just waiting to be filled by an invading species, and invading culture – the ground become fertile for this invasive species to take root.
The real Layal, Layla al-Attar, was killed on June 27, 1993 by a missile attack on Baghdad ordered by US President Bill Clinton.
And Layla states:
“Why would they bomb a painter?”
Our own theater is distant and removed to the point that the invasion cannot be controlled or contained from a distance. There cannot be any distant projection to pull itself back because the weight of the invasive species is too strong to stop itself from trying to root. In it’s trying to survive though, native species develop other ways to retain their territory. The performance in this theater is immediate because pre-planning has no barring on performance art other than a ‘rough sketch’ of possibilities - but nothing as machine-like as our own theatrical needs.
…the suffering of others is not amplified by distance so it must be amplified in some other way. Theatrical means, artistic means can create singular instances that have breeding potentialities – a reproducibility that can replicate itself quickly throughout a small system. An invasive species always folds back upon itself because it facilitates the destruction of the ecology that allowed it to survive in the first place.
References
Byers, J. E. (2002) Impact of non-indigenous species on natives enhanced by anthropogenic alteration of selection regimes. Oikos 97 (3): 449-458.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Diamond, J. (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books.
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Virilio, P. (2006). City of Panic. Berg Publishrs.
]]>markHOWTO: Cirrus Logic Crystal CS4237B on Ubuntu/Fluxbox Dell Latitude Cpi D300xt2007-09-28T17:27:00-06:002007-05-25T11:46:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.6605.25.07
This tutorial shows how to install the drivers for a Crystal CS4237B on Ubuntu/Fluxbox Dell Latitude Cpi D300xt.
This tutorial is based on a ALSA user group thead here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg16416.html
This tutorial shows how to install the drivers for a Crystal CS4237B on Ubuntu/Fluxbox Dell Latitude Cpi D300xt.
This tutorial is based on a ALSA user group thead here:
http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg16416.html
I have been trying at this card for a couple of weeks. I tried multiple methods and none of them seemed to work. At the same time my hacking-around left a bunch of stuff that I did not know what to do with nor did I no if I was just making the situation worse!!
I ended up with deleting the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file and making a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa file:
This I added a bunch of stuff (options, etc) that I found and grabbed off the web. This really did nothing for me. I then decided to start over because I finally found something that worked for me and I didn’t want all my hacking around to conflict so I removed and reinstalled the sound:
This basically just reset everthing to base install (II am assuming) because I noticed that my /etc/modprobe.d/alsa file I made was gone and the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base file was back! So now I start over and here is what worked for me.
Again I removed the alsa-base file and replaced it with /etc/modprobe.d/alsa:
I then added the line ‘snd-cs4236’ to the bottom of my /etc/modules file:
$ sudo nano /etc/modules
So that my /etc/modules now looks like this:
# /etc/modules: kernel modules to load at boot time.
#
# This file contains the names of kernel modules that should be
# loaded at boot time, one per line. Lines beginning with “#” are
# ignored
# This is my wi-fi card driver
ndiswrapper
# This is my sound card driver
snd-cs4236
And then I save with ‘ctrl-o’ and exit with ‘ctrl-x’. I am not really sure if I am proceeding in the right order. I imagine that this step could be done after the next part of this tutorial but I just want to document ‘every’ I do in a linear order so that I can later repeat and/or alter my steps if necessary.
Now I load the snd-cs426 driver into the kernal.
First I login as super user:
$ su
Password: ********
Then I check to make sure that my card is active:
$ cat /sys/devices/pnp0/00:10/resources
state = active
io 0x210-0x217
It is ‘active’. If it was ‘disabled’ I would then:
$ echo auto >/sys/devices/pnp0/00:10/resources
$ echo activate >/sys/devices/pnp0/00:10/resources
So now lets try to load ‘alsamixer’. Previously with my other configuration attempts I had been getting this really annoying error message when trying to load which said "alsamixer: function snd_mixer_load failed: Invalid argument". How obnoxious!! But this time:
$ alsamixer
SWEET!!! It works!!! I un-mute the master with the ‘m’ key (if its not un-muted already) and use my arrows to navigate to the ‘mic’. I bring the ‘mic’ volume up with the UP-arrow and make sure it is unmated – ‘m’. So to test I fire up my audio program ‘pd’ (puredata) and choose ‘alsa’ from the ‘Media’ menu item – and hit ‘OK’. Then again from the ‘Media’ menu I choose ‘Test Audio and MIDI’. I plug my headphones in and give it a test. Sweet!! All works good!
Now I have PD (puredata) running on an old Dell Latitute Cpi d300xt using Ubuntu/Fluxbox…..
NEXT: Getting everything to load at boot… HA
]]>markESSAY: Carlos Katastrofsky and Internet Artworks: Conceptualizing Centrality and Maritime Networks2007-04-17T09:06:00-06:002007-04-17T09:06:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.5404.17.07
An essay devoted to the work of Carlos Katastrofsky by conceptualizing his work through ideas of centrality and maritime networks.
An essay devoted to the work of Carlos Katastrofsky by conceptualizing his work through ideas of centrality and maritime networks.For the past decade or so, artists have been increasingly relying on the Internet for communications and collaborations. Email, website, forums and mailing lists have all contributed to these new and emerging communicational methods. For me, as an emerging artist in the late 1990’s, communication and collaborations between artists was a product of late night drunken and drug induced squabblings in a comfortable home environment eventually emerging as some sort of theoretical epiphany that might or might not be forgot the following day. As unproductive as these ‘sessions’ would sometimes be, those were the good days!
Unfortunately (and fortunately for ones health!) as artists have a greater and greater need of expending their palette across localized and territorialized borders, the Internet develops for them into a finer and more accessible medium for artistic communication. Rather than linkages to specific artistic parties formed through common expressive relationships based on personal and physical interactions, artistic collaborations through internet technologies have created a type of nodal mesh that is much more reminiscent of a maritime network than a centralized territorial state ‘capital’. As Manuel Delanda (2006) explains in the case of maritime networks “it was not the increased differentiation of one and the same regional culture that expressed a dominant position but the gathering of expressions from all over the world.” (p. 110)
Artistic cultural expressions were once, for the most part, homogenous as far as cities and city centers were concerned. This is because cultural creators tending to have fixed relationships with other cultural creators that were localized as far as territory goes which allowed creation of singular cultural entities to be amplified in their unique qualities giving ‘cities’ their cultural significance and legitimacy in relationship to the rest of the world. As Delanda (Ibid) remarks on these localized relationships:
The largest central places, often playing the role of political capitals, attracted talented people from the lower-ranked towns: people who brought with them linguistic and nonlinguistic elements of their own local culture. Over time, these capitals gathered, elaborated and synthesized these elements into a more or less homogenous product which was then re-exported back to the smaller [centers]. The higher prestige of the more differentiated culture at the top acted as a magnet for the short-distance migratory patterns of cultural producers and gave the synthesized cultural product the means to propagate throughout the region. (p. 111)
New York and Paris dominated the global art scene in the 20th century in fact because the finest artists and cultural producers of the world centralized in these specific areas: this is where the industry for cultural communications between like-minded individuals took place. In the first half of this century, the dominant capital for artistic production shifted from Paris to New York and in the case of Marcel Duchamp, for example, as Paul Virilio (2005) amply points out, this was who the “much vaunted NY ‘art scene’ centered around” (p. 48). As a reason and as a byproduct of this centralization the artistic and cultural global significance was averted in their gaze “from the Medusa of the twentieth century, deserting the fields of horror of totalitarianism” (Ibid)
At this point I would like to introduce the work of Carlos Katastrofsky (see http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net/) who I have been communicating with in artistic and conceptual collaboration and communication over the past year. Based in Vienna, Austria, our relationship has evolved over distances rather than proximity because of the ‘speed’ of new communications technologies. What I have observed is a relationship that is more closely related to a ‘maritime network’ that a centralized cultural ‘center’. Also, what is interesting, is that this sort of collaborative expression and idea exchange does not divert the gaze from world situations in the same way as a central ‘art scene’ very often can do. Locality contains a certain amount of unique information that can be ‘exchanged’ with other specific localities thereby increasing the potentialities for new concepts and ideas to emerge. Rather than centralized exchanges that amplify one specific concept and create rather homogeneous variations as an ‘art-scene’ can do, global communication methods between heterogeneous artistic elements can produce very interesting and unique results that all contain capacities for new and unique variation. This is the nature of recent discoveries in artistic practice and collaborations often deemed as ‘net.art’, ‘generative art’, ‘emergent art’ etc.
In this essay I would like to focus on two works by Katastrofsky that have both a conceptual impact and a material one: works that express themselves via networks and that create a communicative structure with other artists and collaborators to vitiate upon and elicit a response. One work is called ‘internet art for poor people (2006)’ (http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net/poor.html) and the other is called ‘russian roulette (2006)’ (http://roulette.cont3xt.net/)
First let us look at the work ‘internet art for poor people’. I am forced to imagine for a second that I am without connection to the outside world. There is simplicity in its execution that is almost laughable in that it is just a reoccurrence OR replication of what we, as internet users, have seen on occasion – though a lot less frequently lately: “404 Not Found. The requested URL was not found anywhere”. Because information can also have an ecological crisis associated with its creation, appropriation and dispersal, ‘access’ to this information has become detrimental in establishing previously hard-to-make connections that have historically been reserved for ‘the elite’ and ‘powerful’ that have all the means of procuring any information available. Those with the least access to information historically have been those most subjected to the will of ‘the informationally informed’: the poor and lower-classes.
Electronic information creates no less of a circumstance and those that do not have access are continually on the ‘catch-up’ as new forms of information and information dispersal (technologies) emerge. But rather than engage in a lengthy discourse on ‘information freedom’, some neo-Marxist ‘net Theory’ analysis, or any other prevailing theoretical thought on ‘net culture’ – let go back and take a look at this idea of the ‘maritime network’ and ‘centralized territory’. On a computer network the ‘404 Not Found’ error creates an immediate grounding to a persons centralized and fixed territorial locality. It is an error whereby the computer browser is looping back upon itself. There are no distances and speed is only approximated by the computational power of ones own CPU. The ‘404 Not Found’ error is a textual loop as an image loop that, as Virilio (Ibid) states “has become the signature of contemporary disasters” (p.85)
If hurricane Katrina exposed a population of poverty that was masked from the outside world (as many urban, centralized American city populations are) than ‘404 Not found’ exposes the lack of interconnected communications between heterogeneous populations. If hurricane Katrina exposed a ‘looping’ or continuous ‘folding back’ of special parameters towards its center then ‘404 Not Found’ exposes the ‘folding back’ OR looping of the poverty effect – one that is barley escapable. Lets make a note that the city of New Orleans ‘imploded’ from its edges inward rendering it ‘inescapable’ also!
The ‘net effect’ of continuous looping due to lack of proper network connectedness can be a fatal one. ‘404 Not Found’ is an example patch of a singular number sequence that has nowhere to go and affects nothing thereby rendering useless the machine (or software in this instance) it is run on. Emergent wholes have the potential to “react back on their components” (Delanda 2006 p.118) to either enable them or to constrain them. Cities, populations, and even cultural creations can exhibit these phenomenon and can choose, though way of connections, maritime or centralized properties. Yet others can not ‘choose’ which system OR assemblage to become apart of but are subjected to the constraint and freedoms that they emerge within.
Let us now look at a work of Katastrofsky’s that exhibits another spectrum of conceptual properties - “Russian Roulette”. This work highlights the nature of ‘maritime networks’, which also are not immune to disastrous results. Interconnectivity, speed and the ease of communication technologies do not necessarily mean a more democratic or ‘equal’ system. What I am interested in through this work, is the difference in the relationships that are exhibited comparatively to the previously discussed work – “internet for poor people”.
“Russian Roulette” is a ‘download’ button that will download to your computer a random file. As the work points out:
the file you can download below by pressing the button is randomly chosen. but be aware! it could be pornographic, a virus that crashes your entire system, a britney spears - song or other bad data. but it also could be some really great stuff... who knows? (Katastrofsky 2006)
We do not know what we are downloading to our computer. By pressing the button ‘the void’ becomes known – it materializes on our desktop and/or becomes apart of our computer system. What we are doing when we press this button is allowing an external world, one which is not of local origin, to access our desks – to become apart of our system and to create a synthesis between two historically unconnected locals.
The maritime networks of Europe engaged in a similar exchange. As ships traveled from Venice to Antwerp to Genoa to Amsterdam (Delanda 2006) to deliver goods and merchandise, and to make exchanges, these ships also brought with them this same unknown – ecological ‘voids’, pieces of information from previous localities. Sometimes these pieces of information were in the form of viruses that would mutate and take hold on a population as these networks developed and became denser. The viral holocaust of the Native-Americans in the Americas was one such result of these new and emerging networks of trade and organization. Ecological exchanges were also present in genetic ‘plant’ information such as herbs and spice plants from Asia and other exotics and invasive species. Animal life (domesticated) also found the speed of ‘breeding’ as different versions of the same species were much more easily breed due to breed exchanges from different parts of the world.
Warfare is another exchange that became quicker as networks became faster and more accessible. Weapons and war machinery could be remote, dictated from over-seas such as the British war in the Americas was. And wasn’t September 11th 2001 initiated by a ‘network’ from a distance both in time and space?
The ‘download’ button is always a gamble because we do not know what might be received from the other end – we do not know its immediate or its eventual consequences. Choosing to become apart of this network or ‘maritime’ role is choosing to take risks with outside materials and information’s that are not always apparent as ‘this is this’ or ‘this is that’ from the start. There is always an accident waiting to happen because as in ‘Russian Roulette’ ones chances will eventually run out.
The ‘download’ button is metaphorical (ecologically, materialistically) but it is also practical because we can see and directly observe the results electronically on the computer. It is not though, a simulation or simply ‘virtuality’ as we might hope. The computer plays a vital role in the exchange of information and has the ability to affect remote assemblages in unpredictable ways – unpredictable in the sense that there is a cause and effect, of course, but also unpredictable in that the creation and dissemination of information always has the repercussions of eventually folding back upon oneself. This can have positive of negative consequences such as in the case of 9/11 or the New York ‘blackouts’ of 2002 where the capacities to provide (energy) could not meet the capacities to consume – what came in externally could not meet the demand for what a population increasingly became reliant upon internally. The energy networks crashed as a result of there own empowerment – the inevitable accident on a grand scale which was the result of a complex gamble of reliance on an imperfect assemblage.
The ‘download’ button is also an ‘upload’ button. Ones consumption of information does end on the computer but is consumed and ‘uploaded’ the local assemblage through persona, physical and electronic information exchanges. The ‘download’ button, the virus, comes form ‘outside’ to affect the ‘inside’ – it is destabilizing mechanism for the greater assemblage whole. This deterritorializing affect creates and information explosion – an ‘information bomb’ wherever it might land. Like the centrality and homogeny of a system that accepts nothing form the outside has the potential accident of imploding, a ‘maritime’ allows for the potentialities to exist for ‘exploding’ (population explosions, viral explosions, ecological explosions).
The ‘download’ button means ‘I want too know’ NOT ‘I do NOT want to know’. This comes will all the weight associated with it, a window to the world is not always the best of choices! Katastrofsky could just as easily be Catastrophe! As Virilio (2006) stated, “Perhaps this is what they mean when they talk about an ‘open society’ – like the city offering itself without resistance to its invaders?” (p.110)
In this essay I tried to create a novel approach to critiquing art (internet art) based on the work of Carlos Katastrofsky. Rather than simply view and critique the internet works ‘internet for poor people’ and ‘Russian roulette’ I tried to make connections and synthesize a new way for critique that looks at artwork though a contemporary theoretical lens. This was done by combining Manuel Delanda’s concept of ‘maritime networks’ and ‘centralize territories’, and Paul Virilios style of writing as well as examples from ‘City of Panic’. My attempt was to draw connections between the three entities and to understand Katastrofsky work through theory while creating my own language for art critique.
References
Delanda, M. (2006) A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum.
Katastrofsky, C. (2006) Russian Roulete. Internet Artwork residing at http://roulette.cont3xt.net/
Virilio, P. (2005) City of Panic. New York. Berg.
]]>markNET.ART: Wars Grind Things To A Halt2007-03-05T19:46:00-06:002007-03-05T19:41:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.5103.05.07
A web work that demonstrates how a browser window might 'grind to a halt' by (re)streaming online content.
A web work that demonstrates how a browser window might 'grind to a halt' by (re)streaming online content.The particular analogy is 'war'. All (re)streamed videos are war related subsequently grinding the computer system that it is loaded on to a halt.
> yeah, great. imagine the fight of the software with
> all those bits and
> bytes...
>
> On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 18:03:09 +0100,
> wrote:
>
> > it's great.
> > palmtop - black screen. no change.
> >
> > lattitude D505 laptop - gray background w/ white
> boxes.. each flls in
> > with black movie and a play button, from the top
> down with no other
> > particular order.
> > there was still 146 items left to load from the
> beggining of writing
> > this letteruntil now (approx. 3/4 loaded) boxes
> still black. clost
> > controle of the browser window. invasion complete.
> browser window
> > tried to jum into the whole screen, i forced it to
> a background via
> > alt.TAB
> > browser interface remained inaccessible, with zero
> element of
> > interaction or controle. unable to crash the
> program through the
> > explorer bar at the bottom of the screen.
> Alt.ctrl.Delete - the
> > background image of my desktop scrolled down from
> the to of the
> > screen. i opened Task Manager.. then the prior
> command through
> > explorer bar finalized.
> > an all round enjoyable experience. contemplating
> the possibilities
> > behind each play button.. what footage could it
> have been? i wanted to
> > open the link again to try and get a box to play
> some footage.
> >
> > some new mac - boxes were black with the play
> button, with no other
> > results.
> >
> >
> > Quoting Chiara Passa :
> >
> >> Oh.. i can't open the page my firefox crashes...
> >>
> >> http://megrimm.net/content/netart/wars/
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On 11/23/06, mark edward grimm
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> i can get it to see about 10 or 11 at the most.
> on my
> >>> fastest system... maybe i should lessen the
> amount of
> >>> vids and increase the size so that a little more
> show
> >>> up...
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --- carlos katastrofsky
>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> hehe... i like this. tried to open it and
> didn't
> >>>> even see one movie
> >>>> running before my computer crashed.
> >>>> :-)
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:58:55 +0100, mark edward
> >>>> grimm
> >>>> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> > i remember a conversation carlos and i had a
> while
> >>>> > back about a netart piece that crashes the
> >>>> > computer/browser (i think it was somthing
> like
> >>>> this).
> >>>> > i have been messing around with google video.
> the
> >>>> > following link is the top fifty videos in
> >>>> google.video
> >>>> > under the keyword "war". All videos attempt
> to
> >>>> play
> >>>> > simultaneously. the processor gets so
> strained
> >>>> that it
> >>>> > renders the computer almost useless... i only
> wish
> >>>> > that more vids played at once before the
> computer
> >>>> gave
> >>>> > up... maybe my system is slow.... also seems
> best
> >>>> if
> >>>> > you leave it running for an hour or so..!!
> ha..
> >>>> >
]]>markESSAY: Painting as Image Assemblage and Reterritorialization in the works of Jacob Roesch2007-02-28T08:56:00-06:002007-02-28T08:55:00-06:00tag:markedwardgrimm,2008:bits.5002.28.07
An essay about a painter friend of mine.
An essay about a painter friend of mine.It would be easy to write about Jacob Roesch’s paintings in a traditional sense. One could talk about color, form, materials, imagery, structure etc. There is no denying that there is a modernist aspect to his work: it draws on rich traditions in art history and can be judged and compared as such to those histories. In this essay I do not wish to regurgitate the same tired language used to describe and critique such work but instead I am interested in approaching the work in a novel way. By creating my own twists and turns to synthesize an argument that shows the various external sources that combine and converge allowing these paintings and imagery to emerge and ‘become’. I will thus describe the conditions that gave rise to this work rather that try to undertake a study of the ‘work’ itself.
In relationship to Jacob Roesch, I am in a unique position to write about his work. I have been very close to Jacob in friendship for several years and have had the opportunity to know the intricate and intimate details association with his paintings evolution. Writing on his work is a task I undertook, not simply and a gesture of friendship, but with the preconception that artists should be writing about artists: artists they know personally, artists that they collaborate with, or artists that they respect.
Part of the idea in writing ‘essays by artists on artists’ is to 'bypass' the ‘expertise’ of the critic/historian. The idea is that an artist, to paraphrase Deleuze (1995), can take another artist from behind in essay form and produce a mutant child that could or could not resemble its parent’s original conception. ‘The essay’ becomes the writer as much as it is a product of the relationship between artists. The work under focus becomes a part of the jurisdiction of the artist/writers own work/theory therefore making the given artists work part of their own. With this precondition, artistic work does not exhibit negative OR positive qualities but instead exhibits qualities of its own accords in the historical, theoretical, political, sociological etc. frame in which the artist/essay-writer responds to it. The work is then not criticized in the sense that the historical tradition of 'critique' dictates, but instead becomes a product of is own processes that gave rise to that work AND the processes that gave rise to the essay that was written based on that work. I believe this to be a valid way (artists writing about artists) that artists can begin to balance art-world power by helping to facilitate the disintegration of established 20th century art world relationships (artist/critic/historian/academic) and the classification of those disciplines in favor of more heterogeny and fluidity.
To use this concept as a starting point I will begin with my own experience and observations that I see extremely apparent in Roesch’s painted works and make observations on how his painted works materialized based on recent philosophical discourses in assemblage theory. To briefly define, assemblage theory as outlined by Manual Delanda (2006) crosses the nature-cultural divide by treating wholes as entities derived from the convergences of historical processes once composed of heterogeneous parts. To quote, “Entities ranging from atoms and molecules to biological organisms, species and ecosystems may be usefully treated as assemblages” (Ibid p. 3) To begin to understand the painted works of Roesch as assemblages it is essential that one first understand the territory that they surround, a territory that “is made of decoded fragments of all kinds” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 504). In the painted works of Roesch I am interested in these fragments of information (social, material) that create the territory for the paintings to emerge as an assembly of his various social processes.
Roesch’s works resemble something less than any artistic ‘drive’ to paint or ‘express’ but rather are the result of a lingering memory that must emerge and materialize as a rehabilitation mechanism for a genuine desire to turn what is perceived as chaotic into a lasting sense of order. These ‘memories’ are both psychological (embedded in the neural-net of the brain) and technological, derived from direct observation resulting in the taking of a digital photograph. “Memories always have a reterritorialization function” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987 p. 294) and Roesch’s are no exception, territorializing and assembling to form a painted image. His painting process currently is a result of a combination/convergence of ‘memories’ of specific people and places and digital photographs in which a photo is responded to through the calling of a certain memory associated with it in
