by Blaž Kosovel

This contribution is not concerned with a specific artwork or even with the transitory art field. My purpose is to zoom out from art and focus on the sole word transitoriness. I will try to define it in relation to similar notions, I will show how it is related to our times and why it can be an appropriate description of today’s world condition.

The root of the word transitory is trans, which in Latin means across. All concepts with the prefix trans are in one way or another related to change. This is very important for the human condition, because human beings are always in relation to something else. There is no growth without change and exchange. To name just a few of these concepts, there is transformation: a change in form or appearance, usually without the possibility to come back. The transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly or the transformation of a flower into a fruit. Transgression is the overcoming of rules or limitations. Transmission means passing through of something; it can be information on a radio or a gear in a motor. Transcendence means overcoming physical existence or its limitations. Transcendence is a voyage out of the burden of nature. This is also true when nature becomes a burden. Trance is related to it, a state of not being here by being in an altered state of mind. Transportation is the change of place, going from point A to point B; we know both the departure and the arrival place. It is a way to be in transit, meaning »to go across«. Both transitory and transitional derive from transit, the difference between them being the importance of the departure and arrival. Is the notion of point A and B crucial or is our path of going across more important?

Transitional refers to transition, therefore to a process or a period of change. Transition is a time between two stable moments, from point A to point B. Nowadays, the term is also used for the so-called countries of transition, i.e. the countries transitioning from the communist societies to capitalist ones. The two points are clearly visible, and the transition ends when a country is fully on the next level. Transitional period is just something in between.

Transitory, on the other hand, is something that is by nature bound to change, something impermanent. Thus, transitory is not just »something in between«, it is the most important thing. This is why we can say our life is transitory.

There are two other similar notions: transient and temporary. Transient is something brief, short-lived, something that does not last long. Temporary relates to something that is impermanent as well, but in a strong relation to time (tempus is time in Latin). Temporal used to be a synonym for secular, stressing our brief existence on Earth in opposition to the eternity of afterlife. In the same way, saying that life is transitional means that real life actually begins only with death. We can see the life of the soul as transitional if we believe that it does not die with the body. Transitional is therefore related to a distinct change between points A and B, and temporary is related to time as its most important variable. There are more and more temporary jobs nowadays, which means that there are jobs that last for a short period of time. The same job can also be defined as a transitional one, meaning that it is a job between two »real« jobs.

On the other hand, transitory does not have distinct points A and B, the emphasis is not on time and neither on the beginning nor the end, but on the sole process of change. Saying that life is transitory emphasizes that life is always changing and that it will end in the end.

However, transitional periods are not just periods in between any more, but are more and more becoming regularities, thus making life with all its transitions much more transitory as it used to be. To stress the importance of transitions in human life, I will make an oversimplified difference between traditional and contemporary environment. It is an oversimplification because I do not want to say that there are no traditions in contemporary world any more, I just want to stress the difference between different environments.

Tradition can be defined as the transmission of customs and beliefs through generations, how you behave, eat and dress, what you are allowed to do and how you relate to life and death. People inside these patterns are strictly regulated, every transgression is severely punished. This also means that there are clear lines of transition in these patterns, with rituals functioning as institutions that mark the passage, the trans. One of the most common is the transition from childhood into adulthood, which in every community is connected with specific initiation rituals, through which a child shows that he deserves to be an adult. In our society, we can say that the last real transition into adulthood was the one-year conscription army.

In times when regulations kept people tight in distinct positions in their communities, everybody got a specific value and meaning. That also means that traditional transitions were crucial for people to make sense of their lives. Nowadays, all these boundaries are blurred, we have plenty of possible transitions but with the inflation of them they become almost worthless. When do we become adults? Today, this is not an easy question, because the complexity of today’s society does not make growing up an easy thing. In the USA, they tried to solve the problem with the creation of teenage years, i.e. a ten years mid-period between being a child and an adult. Initiation became a time of learning in the conscription education. Teenagers were the carriers of a newly created field of youth culture, which was not yet a »real« culture. All theses ideas were carried through the ocean to Europe in the post-war decades.

In the last decades, the lines started to push higher and higher, with youth culture becoming mainstream culture. There was a lot of writing about »twenty-something life«, meaning the life after graduation and before getting a »real job«, an appropriate profession. However, because these real jobs nowadays never come, there is more and more writing about the idea that »the thirties are the new twenties«, meaning that there is less and less real adulthood, there is less and less clear where and even what is a point B to which we can transition from point A.

I want to stress three fields that are related to this transition into adulthood: education, work and marriage.

Education was always about learning something in order to get a degree that enabled a person to have a profession. Work was a vocation, another distinct position in society. Even in times before organized education, there was a guild system with a master-apprentice relationship, where you had to learn your skills in order to become a master. With modern economy in the 20^th century, decades of work resulted in paid retirement.

University used to be the final and definite step in education, where you reached the highest peak of human achievement. Even the importance of a diploma can be seen in a way as a title for women: when they graduated, even unmarried women could be called Mrs. instead of Miss. University degree was therefore a final step in the educational process, on the other hand, it was also an important step into the adulthood. Today, this is not possible anymore, because of so many people and so many information.

We live in times of mass education, where it is supposed that everybody graduates, which makes a bachelor degree really just a first step in the educational process. This process never really ends, because so much new information is created every day and has to be processed somehow. There are so many new inventions and so many new ways of work to be implemented. It is also impossible anymore that one person grasps all the knowledge that exists. This crisis of the university as a holistic project is seen in the creation of the Life-Long Learning Programs, the most popular of them being the Erasmus student exchange. Nowadays, university is not a definite educational institution that can give you a definite social position. There is too much of everything new every day. Therefore, when and where is the point when you grow up, when are you educated enough to be an adult or even to be an educated person?

The end of education also resulted in getting work according to one’s expertise. Precisely because there are not so many life-long contract jobs any more, there are more and more short-term and project jobs. This is by no means something strange, seeing it from the position of endless transitions: a project is a truly transitional form, having a beginning and an end. What happens today is that after a project you can get another one, and after that just another one. You can also have more than one project simultaneously. The same goes for temporary jobs that are becoming more and more an everyday practice. This chain of projects and temporary jobs forces a person to transition from one transitional period to another, but without really transiting to an actual point B. The whole chain of transitions is today’s reality, thus making this endless transition our common condition.

For the same reason marriage is not important anymore and transitions from one partner to another are so common. Marriage used to be the pillar of the traditional economy, this is why in Ancient Rome only the patricians could marry. In Medieval Europe, the feudalistic system restricted the production, management and exchange of goods and let them circle only in family environment. Marriage was thus the creation of a new household, which was actually the only economy. In the time when there were no national economies, when there was no unified global economy, marriage was not about love, but about managing property and work. In the time when there was no ministry of economics, marriage was about economy. However, with the creation of nation states, nations became new big families, with political economy as a means of managing the production and the exchange of goods. In that time, marriage was about a distinct position in society. With the growing importance of the state and diminishing importance of the Church, the importance of marriage diminished. It became more and more just a romantic endeavor, not something that happened once in a lifetime. This went the farthest in USA where people marry and divorce out of a pure impulse.

However, the state is not the most important institution any more. In the last decades, transnational institutions, corporations and national unions such as EU took the lead, making economy global on a scale that it was never before. With the creation of new global markets and their unification, we got an enormous space for exchange and production. Goods started to flow all around the world; today’s production is on one side of the Earth, consumption on the other. One of the craziest examples of this are fish that are shipped from Northern Europe to China in order to be sliced and then back to Europe. Because it is cheaper that way. Consumerism is just an endless flow of goods that has to be exchanged faster and faster in order to keep the global economy afloat. The same is with fashion, which regulates the taste of the markets in order to make changes faster.

Besides goods, people are more and more in transit as well, migrating throughout the world in search for better work or just for the pleasure of traveling. There is not (a lot of) avant(o)urism any more, just tourism, today’s fastest growing consumer industry, where destinations are new consumer goods, not means for revelations. Moreover, instead of spiritual transcendence, there is more and more transit, physical through space or virtual through internet. Alongside goods and people, with the appearance of the internet, information exchange just exploded. However, while Guthenberg’s invention of the printing that enabled fast dissemination of new ideas started the protestant revolution, the internet has not yet created a similar opposition to the global economy. Just the opposite – it made it stronger. Because today’s society is a society of endless exchange and endless sequences of transitions. »Change is the only constant« is a very popular saying in business circles. Although it is a quote from Heraclites, it has a much different sounding after 2,500 years: today’s society needs constant change, but this change has to stay inside strict rules of exchange. In modern era, politics is mostly subordinated to economy, making modern politics’ main concern the management of society, its people, goods, technology, information, capital and land. After the modern creation of national economy, the question of revolution was mostly just the question of how to change the management of the economy. This is why all the revolutions goals are another variation of the same system as well. Both socialism and capitalism need the state and its economy to function.

The already mentioned transition from (the so-called) communism to (the so-called) capitalism is the only possible transition, because it was a transition into the global (neo)liberal economy. This is why all the strategies and practices of resistance and emancipation create just another variation within the global economy of exchange. Moreover, anti-capitalist strategies are mostly related to a change of the economy on a global scale, which does not change the idea of the global economy as such. The exchange as such is not at stake, it always persists in every new scenario of change. Modern era was always about creating new ways of life, new alternatives; this is how all totalitarian movements were created as well. The same goes for avant-garde movements, the desire of which was the same – to impose their view on the society as whole, not just on a specific segment.

As I tried to show in this very brief outline, we have less life-changing transitions because we are living in a constant transitional period, without a real ending point to which we are transiting. This makes life much more uncertain, but, on the other hand, also much freer. And this is how society becomes much more transitory than it ever was. Life is transitory by nature, because it ends in some point. On the other hand, , communities and societies tend to last and were not as transitory as they are today. This means that transitoriness is one of the most important notions to understand in today’s society. Therefore, to raise the question about transitoriness is to question this endless change and – even most important – the boundary through which the change happens. Hence, the point is not to overcome the boundary and create a new variation of something, but to tarry with the boundary, to question the sole idea of change. This could be an appropriate way to embrace transitoriness.

by Luka Zagoričnik

In this brief text, I would like to enter the sphere of public space by means of listening to public protests as an assemblage of different initiatives, as a cacophonous event full of noises, voices, gestures, bodies and energies that enter the field of transitoriness before categorization, formations, unison voices, fixed ideologies, demands, initiatives and actions. In other words, I would like to grasp or listen to the protests that happened in 2012 in Slovenia before the moment of their articulation. I will listen to them as if they were noise, noise that is not only a rapture, a void or defined with its known meaning, but noise as a problematic field that is based on contradictions that are present in the noise itself; inside these contradictions lies an open field of possibilities. Or as the title suggests – “Noise as potentiality for political/artistic action”. The theme of noise is quite fitting for the context of this symposium, not only because of its inherent transitory nature, but also for its tight etymologic connection to the sea and the navy in its form as noisea, as it was emphasized by Michael Serres: the sea, not only as white noise that is produced when the waves reach the shore, but white noise as pure potentiality that contains every possible frequency, and also has a shifting form, non-pattern nature, forming and deforming of waves, crashing into each other, etc. Nevertheless, we are on Cyprus and the waves are right in front of us.

In the last two decades, noise has become a fashionable item to be observed from a theoretical point of view. The theory is as follows: Disruptiveness and disorders lie in the very center of noise. Its ontological condition is a paradox because noise always creates and dissolves structures at the same time – it eats itself in order to constantly reemerge through a flux of data streams, information and sound. It doesn’t have a fixed form or fixed points, it escapes meaning, but at the same time it also provides it. It is multilayered with constant dislocations, it is confrontational but at the same time set in the background, and filtered through our perceptions or formal measures. It can be a discomfort or comfort. But what I want to suggest is that it is crucially embedded in our culture, even though we are doing everything to erase it from our lives or to contain it. However, in order to start thinking about noise as part of our culture, we have to abolish its confrontational moment by confronting it with silence, which is inherent to noise and can be understood as background noise – an omnipresent entity.

At the start, the protest in Slovenia in 2012 didn’t really have a fixed target. Targets were many and in its physical materialization in public squares and streets, as Johnny Cash would sing, ‘multitudes were marching’ … and creating noise: antiglobalists, anarchists, common people, workers, army veterans, artists, intellectuals, fascists, they were all creating a dynamic body of voices, sounds, bodies and actions that were totally undifferentiated. If you can control the movements and the bodies during a protest with architectural space, police formations, special forces, corridors and legal rules, you cannot confine noise – it resonates, it bounces, it echoes and moves around, entering bodies, creating forms, and setting up actions. Which brings us also to the question of a tactical use of sound – through organization, megaphones, speakers, microphones, mobile technologies, sound devices, acoustic or amplified instruments, mobile and non-mobile sound systems which all enter the ever-shifting sound matter without a fixed center or fixed dynamics. We can also observe power relationships: who wants to be heard more, who wants to mobilize bodies and voices. Of course, the other side uses sound to control the masses as well, through modern technology that is devised for the warfare and not available for commercial use. There was shouting, booing, whistling, cheering, singing, playing music, performing, each of these activities mobilizing part of the crowd and then shifting somewhere else and so resisting immediate articulation. It’s tempting to say that their way of operating was prompted by affect rather than reasoning. And this is the moment that produced discomfort amidst the general public, the press and political powers.

When this noise reaches the point of articulation in the form of a unisono voice, movement, demand or political party, it is immediately subsumed in the prevailing political discourse, where it becomes an easy target for dominant politics and where, in order to be heard and seen, has to play by the already existing rules of the game, which is the game of politics that isn’t even in the domain of politics anymore, as many would say nowadays. When it contains itself, it loses its potentiality and changes from transitory to transitional, with a clear meaning and aim. Noise, of course, is not immune to this process, it is not even immune to becoming a commodity inside the frame of vulgar capitalism. For example, noise in the context of music as musical genre or noise as a commodity on the idea market: it is present in the heterogeneous field of academic sound studies for the last two decades, in information theory, in urbanism and architecture through the concepts of soundscape and sonic ecology, in the field of physics and acoustics, and in art through various practices of sound art. The last context is particularly interesting because noise, in the contemporary art field, has always been castrated – confined with spaces where it is presented (galleries, museums, even public spaces) and following strict regulations that prevent its potentiality to unleash.

Finally, I would like to present two works from the contemporary art field that are using musical form for their content: the first one, entitled Improvised Non-Concert, is by a Basque artist Mattin, and the second one, entitled Concierto ZAJ para 30 o 60 voces, is by a Spanish artist Esther Ferrer. Both are placed in the context of a concert while also trying to subvert it, and both can also be placed in the context of a social experiment and in the field of participatory art. They both rely on the loose structure, i.e. the structure of space and time of the performance. The second one also relies on the score or set of loose instructions. I participated in Improvised Non-Concert at last Documenta. It happened after the discussion among invited artists, theoreticians and the general public called Noise & Capitalism. Both, the discussion and the concert exposed themselves as not being goal-centered, in the sense of wanting to result in a product, but rather focusing on the activity. During the non–concert, we were put in a space and it began — there was no goal, just the presence of people in a certain context and their activities. Some would talk, some would sing, dance, do nothing, some tried to provoke others, some tried to form a group, etc. During this activity, certain structures emerged and vanished, power relations formed and dissolved, some people performed, while some (just) thought they didn’t … It generated noise and posed question through the act of improvisation as a musical and performing act, a concert as a musical or non-musical act and as a social activity. Here, improvisation is the key thing; it’s the making of music that takes activity as a starting point rather than focusing on a final product. Somewhere during this improvised non-concert, Mattin dissolves this all too often presumed premise and puts it under critical observation. It should be noted that in Mattin’s case, what is problematic is exactly the aspect of observation and the role of the observer.

Esther Ferrer is one of the Spanish pioneers of modern performance art. In the seventies, she was a member of the collective ZAJ together with Walter Marchetti and Juan Higaldo that were closely associated with John Cage and the international Fluxus movement. In her work, Esther Ferrer continues with its basic premises. One of them is that through performance, social situations, tensions between the work, the performer and the audience are created; the latter two becoming a single but heterogenous body that is characterized by a specific social space. It also reveals itself in the present work Concierto ZAJ para 30 o 60 voces, which involved about forty people, including many non-musicians, performers and visitors who are united in one body, a social unit through the medium of voice and sound followed by an open composition, in which voices of different people enter individually, each one every minute, with content of your own choice that you can sing, recite, speak, yell, etc. And in various languages ​​and in different positions in space. This can be a public space, a theater, a gallery or anything else that deals with artistic and social forms with their own pulse and dynamics. The piece was originally written in 1984 and it could therefore be said that it belongs to a specific time and place, but the recent performances and record release from 2010 by the label w.m.o/r reveals its potential for a politically charged art of noise. Both Mattin and Ferrer use a well-established art form (a concert, or non-concert in Mattin’s terms following modern philosophical tradition of François Laruelle and his followers) and transform it into social action which defies strict definitions and containment, therefore creating a powerful field of potentiality, an event inside the art and political space.

TRANSITORY ART FROM THE EYE OF THE BODY AND BACK INTO BECOMING

by Sabin Borș

… Yet you would like to understand what transitory is, curiously…
Reading this, hearing that, one hopes to grasp a sense of what is coming through,
already aware of its passage, the movement of the unseen, the shift of knowledge,
the smothering ruin within.

Twentieth century philosophies have long strived to develop and overcome the operational concepts for the investigation and criticism of the representational and non-representational dimensions of the image. To say the image is that which contains the unseen in what is visible has become a truism, but it is also true of the way we think the transitory is the vessel of history or the way we consider the neutral for its ethics. There is an ‘economy’ at work between appearance and disappearance, one that inscribes the image with the power to divide the visible and the invisible, restructuring the ways in which our lives are defined within a certain culture of the image. Culture is dependent on visuality to such an extent that some phenomenological implications of this economy now lie forgotten.

Phenomenology – Transitory Ontology – Germinal Virtuality

The visible was already a transitory and almost imperceptible event in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The task of its actual representation was left to history’s castaways: artists and philosophers. Whether a “strait between exterior horizons and interior horizons” or “an ephemeral modulation of this world” [1] the visible for Merleau-Ponty was the illumination of a ‘momentary crystallization’ of visibility cast to draw up the topography and the trajectory of vision. Shapes stabilize in the exterior, while the subject intuitively captures them and thus institutes the visible through the very dematerialization that separates the subject from the object: “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?” asks Merleau-Ponty. The very notion of chiasm was based on the oscillation between the visible and the invisible to account for the way intentionality is diffused and ‘the production of subjectivity’ immerses into the flesh of the world. For Heidegger, it was the openness of poetry that enables us to dwell with things by hovering above them. Poetry displays what things are and could be, while the poet calls “that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself”. [2] A ground of the apparent is brought into question here. Being is the foundation of things rather than the network of practical or cognitive relationships they share. In Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead discusses discontinuity as the essence of time, one that is nevertheless seen as a constant transition of one individuation to another, a continuity dependent on the decision of each existence. His phrase, “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming” [3] marks a reversal of the order of causes: continuity is the effect of interferences between transitions and concrescences. The idea of an existential heritage passed down from one precursor to the entity that comes after it creates a series of inheritances and transmissions that Whitehead calls ‘trajectories.’ The actual entities are acts of becoming that form these trajectories. Whitehead divides them into concrescences, or “the fluency inherent in the constitution of the particular existent,” and transitions, or “the fluency whereby the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes the existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process”. [4] To simplify, two moments come together and generate a succession of inheritances and transmissions that resembles rhythms or intervals. With every breath ceased, another germinal breath prepares to displace the interval, to span the linearity of time, to give it its breathless depth. Just like a heartbeat, movement relies on a series of discontinuous acts of becoming, a series of contractions and absorptions that sustain the measurable harmonies. And it is Deleuze who, after Anti-Oedipus, raised the one question that marked the transition to A Thousand Plateaus: How does one write a sociology of fluxes? How do you psychologize a process that has no ‘for whom’? This process describes the virtual connections and assemblages that Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Geology of Morals’ formulates as a process of stratification that disengages molecular forces from their misleading anthropomorphic and representational determinations. The social desiring-machine makes place for the stratifications of the brain that compose the image of thought. It is the infinite speed of thought that makes the transition between the various thresholds that compose the specific infinity of the concept. [5]

A more radical approach is taken by Alain Badiou in his attempt to find a ‘transitory ontology’ on a progression where nothing is concluded, an ‘intervallic dimension’ that has set no clear destination. [6] For Badiou, the event itself is transitory and cannot be decided within a situation. It can only be decided by a subject. A break from Heidegger’s poetic ontology brings Badiou closer to an engagement of thought with ‘contemporary atheism’, which departs from any lapse into the nihilism of finitude only to open up a different possibility in the field of the infinite fidelity to the event. Philosophy must assume the gravity of acting and thinking in its pursuit of the (trace of) truth by way of ‘restrained’ and militant action. Badiou’s militant subject is engaged in a mathematics of Being which is the thinking of every situation as pure multiple. (p. 30) This conception parts with Deleuze’s Nietzschean vitalism and the Anglo-Saxon linguistic turn to found mathematics as a thinking of ontology, or what Badiou calls the ‘Platonism of the multiple’, an attempt to separate logics and mathematics. Badiou’s Platonism acknowledges mathematics as a thought that is intransitive to sensible and linguistic experience, and dependent on a decision that makes space for the undecidable, while assuming that everything consistent exists. (p. 91) There is no knowing subject here; as mathematics proceeds axiomatically, thought must decide in favour of the axiom of choice. Binary oppositions subject/object or virtual/actual are abandoned in favour of an activation of being embodied in thought, with a logic of appearing that concerns the relations within possible situations. (p. 165)

In Semblance and Event [7], Brian Massumi’s discussion on the radical empiricism of William James draws on the distinction between ‘objective-transitions-leading-to-functional-ends’ and ‘experiences-and-percepts corresponding to them in the subject’. Since they “both are in the transition”, things and their experience are in transition together. Objects and subjects share this transitional movement of performative sharing, with the object bringing the subjective poles of the movement into phase. The object relates to ‘subjects’ as “differential poles integrating into a unity of movement”, which is the event. The duration of the event’s demonstrative performance is characterized by “a mutual participation co-defining the same dynamic” where subjective and objective elements “resolve back into differentials” only to let movement continue again. The object is an accumulation of transitions that is not defined by form but rather by the dispute of its renewal, as the identity of the event’s elements only follows their integration and dispersal: “What the object will definitely have been, and what precisely will have been the role of the subjects, is clear only in retrospect after each integration – by which time they are already in transit to another terminus.” Subject and object are thus defined in addition to one another, complementary, “in a continuing movement of integration and decoupling, phasing and dephasing, whose dynamic takes precedence over their always provisional identities”. [8] Subject and object are variations of themselves and each other concurrently; they inter-cross each other. Rather than fulfilling objective ends, says Massumi, we are carried “by wavelike tendencies, in a rollover of experiences perpetually substituting for each other”. As James puts it, “These [transitional] termini… are self-supporting. They are not ‘true’ of anything else, they simply are, are real. They ‘lean on nothing’… Rather, does the whole fabric of experience lean on them”. [9] It is a definition of art that must be performed and brought into effect, a definition of living art, or the arts of life, a transitional expression of ‘creative philosophy’ that is continuously in the making. A germinal virtuality seems to allow for transformations and inter-generational processes that hold the power to in-form relations and expressions.

The Touching Eye and the Hunt for Seeing

It is the relation between transition and virtuality that is of interest to an idea of transitory art. It should follow transitions understood as processes through which the actual occasions of art are produced. Transition and the migratory movement of the transitory suppose the transitioning to and from occasions, the interpretative repetition of the past that provides the conditions for novelty. In their attempt to define an aesthetics of transition, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins [10] trace the recent history of ‘apocalyptic transformations’ the computer brought at the end of the twentieth century and unveil the transition of media as a medium in transition. The technological utopias grounded on participatory democracy see their reverse in “an online culture of chaos” where information is commodified and human experience is ‘denatured’ or displaced by the virtual reality of the computer screen. Periods characterized by cycles of innovation and experimentation that often end in creative anarchy and institutionalization, as shown by Debora L. Spar [11], have brought a need for “a pragmatic, historically informed perspective that maps a sensible middle ground” amidst current conceptual uncertainties and technological transitions, with “media change as an accretive, gradual process”. (p. 2) The coming moment of media convergence brings a need to “recognize that such convergences occur regularly in the history of communications and that they are especially likely to occur when an emerging technology has temporarily destabilized the relations among existing media”. (p. 3) William Uricchio carries the idea further. [12] The transitional status of media is given by its ongoing and multi-faceted evolution. Technology, signifying systems, cultural contexts and cultural practices meet the trans-national dimensions of variant cultural meanings and the cross-audience dimensions of representational pressures, identity problems and moral panics. Systematic deployments, the dramatic re-purposing of media systems, or the intermedial redefinition of media are resonant echoes of “a media present that is itself very much in transition […] a moment of media instability” that holds the power to inform the reconstitution of media (pp. 30-31) and “to resituate the possible meanings that an isolated medium can generate”. (p. 32)

These transitional instances can be observed in what concerns the video work of art. Despite the cinematic appearance of the narratives a video work produces, what it involves is a direct material coincidence between two micro temporal logics of sensation and computation. What constitutes the image in a video work of art is not the cinematic frame, but the contingencies of micro temporal frames of perceptibility. The cinematic image is made of micro images that are just as many micro temporal binding events. The very medium tells this to us. From the electromagnetic flow of the video to the algorithmic flow of the computer, a certain deterritorialization of the medium takes place. The transition from copper to fibre-optic cables informs the medium while the flow of information overcomes matter. But the images produced by electronic and digital technologies are transformations and composites of forces and intensities that dispute their fields within the flow.

It is Bernard Stiegler’s The Tongue of the Eye [13] that questions the meaning of ‘art history’ and raises the stakes for a thinking on transitory art. For Stiegler, existence is exceeded by consistence, which “are objects that do not exist, but which consist”. Existence is “that which projects a consistence that it is not” for we have a tendency not to act out. The aesthetic development of non-human beings proceeds by means of works, which is to say through technique, therein giving access to consistence. The artist, like the philosopher, scientist, lawyer, or politician have the task to invent new libidinal economies in the place of those no longer working: “In this context, artists have a very specific responsibility: it is in the work of art that what constitutes the libido makes itself most purely visible. What is the work of an artist – say, a painter? To produce an eye. […] it is painting, sculpture, architecture, the entire visibility of that which has been seen by those who have seen it only to the extent that they knew how to bring it to sight.” (pp. 227-228) Stiegler resumes: “The spiritual eye that visible works give us to see is woven by the hands of artists.” We step outside our own bodies, through a social body that is woven by a tekhnē – “the tongue with the hand of the writer, the eye with the hand of the painter, the ear with the hand and the eye of the musician”. An ‘organic arrangement’ is formed through the montage of various forms that are projected in order to give us our eyes. Most modern painters, says Stiegler, were obsessed “by the becoming-invisible of the visible”. (p. 228) In order for us to see, a work must first be shown. It is for this reason that the museum is a place where we train our eyes to see and to transform themselves to reach their vision. But for Stiegler, the aesthetic experience is replaced today by the aesthetic conditioning to which culture industry is making us regress: “We have been destroyed and blinded – all of us, for what we are – by this becoming-regressive of our ever-narrowing gaze [regard].” (p. 229) If art is to find its contemplative gaze on the comings and becomings into consistence, it must step back from “the voyeurist gaze introduced by the buzz, the latest find in what has become a veritable marketing of art, and a contradiction in terms”. An active contemplation is a technique to take care of oneself, the others, and the realm of others.

In Stiegler’s conception, we are technical and symbolic beings for as long as we regard “and reveal an eye that regards us in all that we see”. That which regards us like this is that which is constituted by our sharing of the world, i.e. our individuation with one another that constitutes ourselves as such. Stiegler’s account of a visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid opens the question of a pre-individual eye. The cultural superpositions in the collection of Western paintings allows the eye to “yield through space and time”, to constitute and deploy itself as a ‘milieu’. (p. 231) “Over-saturated by history – by a History of the eye – it constitutes what Simondon calls a pre-individual milieu, the pre-individual foundation of vision, which is to say, of the eye that is not in the eye socket, but rather like that which constitutes the symbolic process of transindividuation giving us to see the visible as it has never been seen. This transformation of the eye […] is called the history of art.” (p. 231) The transformation of the retinal eye takes place by assembling the organs through inanimate beings such as pigments of paint which thus become organic. “Every museum,” says Stiegler, “gives us to see this condition of seeing, and at the same time a genealogy of the eye that regards and is regarded […] even while it teaches the eye to see that to which it has yet to open. This transformation, which is the enlargening of the body by non-living organs […] produces organa, artifices, works as well as tools and things (which are all, always, tools in some manner). These artifices hold together bodies and put them in relation […].” (p. 232) The aesthetic turns of the nineteenth and twentieth century, or what Stiegler calls “a machinic turn in sensibility”, triggered a series of short-circuits in the process of transindividuation that broke away from the ideas of sociation and culturality as active relations towards art to give way to cultural consumption. The expansion of the sensible is replaced, for Stiegler, by “an aesthetic conditioning that induces gregarious behavior”. (p. 233) The “great technological and industrial mutation” currently taking place is, according to Stiegler, digitalization. The development of digital technologies and networks allows a symbolic life based on associative and participative relations. As the artist deals with the public, “he sculpts the social” and must fulfill the political role of securing the processes of transindividuation in the current aesthetic wars dominated by the culture industry.

The Re-Sociation of Relational Bodies

The question of how can art sculpt the social through associative and participative relations is central to anything we were to label as transitory art, given that digital art remains largely constrained within an image framework, and that many of the works we call ‘interactive’ do not succeed in overcoming the hegemony of the picture and the picturesque. [14] Art needs to engage the body in a way that unveils the transient contingencies of the body’s interactions with its environment. In doing so, it can challenge the idea of boundaries and the nature of constructions, whence the social and the political are founded. Art – and ‘transitory art’ in particular – must emerge in the space of reconstituent activity. The political implications of this are fundamental and go back to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the body politics in action, where the public only appears through the processes of speech and action. [15] Art must not create [reproduce?] the space of appearance, but create appearance itself, and in that give us to see the visible as it has never been seen. It is the multiple and mutually inclusive dimensions of reality that art of transitoriness must actuate, topological extensions of the real that engage all senses into a holistic experience.

Transitory art is not about the momentary, the provisional, or the content of moments. It is an art of mutual immanence, sharing the very in-ness and trailing of experience, without a perceptible transition. It is what Brian Massumi calls ‘experiential dissolve’ when discussing the affective event of anger: “There’s no determinate transition in a dissolve, just a continuous fading-out overlapping with a continuous fading-in. The point at which the changeover occurs is imperceptible by nature. It is purely abstract. But it must have happened. We know it did, because even if it wasn’t perceived, it was unmistakably felt. Known-felt, thought-felt. It’s a virtual affective event.” [16] The idea of transitoriness does not lie within the movement – it is an affective accumulation of shifting and varying non-localities. And to be able to render this, art must search for an affective eye endowed with the ability to fold vision and cause the folding of the body within the environment, a merge, a blending within the environment. The eye becomes the environment. It is what Deleuze has already seen as bodily forms of transition, in a more nuanced take on the idea of non-place as “a place only of changes”. These ideas are best reflected in dance and the choreography of thoughts it involves. “Dance makes directly perceptually-felt time of the body expressing its potential for change,” says Massumi, only to continue: “Dance is the conversion of the body’s movement in space into the Time of its alteration: its speculative translation into a universe of pure bodily becoming. […] The semblance of meaning produced by the dance is a direct, perceptually felt experience of the body’s power of animate becoming. Semblance of self-expression: pure impersonal expression of bodily power, in nonsensuous excess over the body. […] Body unlimited.” [17] This lived intensity and tension of living leads to existential procedures that can be translated artistically in order to convey the transformation of affects into emotion, so that it is their transition that renders us the continuous transformation of art and our re-invested vision, implicitly – “Any of these procedures can be narrativized in one way or another, structurally coded according to one version or another of what constitutes a structure, or procedurally formalized to one degree or another. Whichever path is taken, the point of conversion is the transformation of vitality affect into emotion. The conversion into emotion may be explicitly noted, thereby becoming the content itself.” [18]

Ideas of how we may understand transitory art and the transitoriness of art can also reflect Stamatia Portanova’s investigations on the digital as a metaphor of thought in Moving without a Body. [19] Portanova’s interpretation of technologies as ideas is based on ideas in matter, the potentiality lying behind materiality, and virtuality as a structural “incorporeal potential for variation”. The body becomes a map of both possible and impossible articulations and variations that, while “implicit in its composition”, open the body to transitional becomings. For Portanova, digital technology “is what modulates movements in a definitive manner; the digital is not a modulation but a codifying mold”. (p. 37) As such, it holds the potential to open perception to the “relational in-between” Erin Manning talks about, “as a resonating dimension of potential”. [20] By redefining movement into a series of virtual, rational and relational objects, digital technologies would desubjectify it and distinguish movement “from its mere organic and phenomenal embodiment”. (p. 64) A topological conception of both the body and its situation enables us to think of ourselves, art, gestures and activities in terms of the continuous subsistence as “the invariants of all transformational events”. Ultimately, it all comes down to the activation and actualization that would produce and “make felt [my emphasis] the schism between the virtual folds of duration and the actual openings of the now in its quality of passage. On its way”. [21] This is a way to think change without any thing changing, concludes Portanova in her account of Manning’s concepts, or rather “to activate the immutability of being (object) by replacing it with the movements of becoming (relation)”. Like objects, subjects are made of relation.

It is relation that makes me believe that one perspective was not sufficiently discussed: that of camouflage. An expression of the modernist impulse in both arts and politics, camouflage becomes meaningful as a way of seeing, being, and moving in the world, allowing one to blend in and stand out concurrently. But, as Hanna Rose Shell explains, [22] “it is an individuated form of self-awareness that is also part of a network of institutional practices. It is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation”. (p. 21) The static, serial and dynamic forms of camouflage reflect distinctive types of photographic reconnaissance, changing in proportion as environments and technologies evolve. Their convergence is an expression of the “chameleonic impulse” to represent, or what the author calls “the technological approximation of visual evanescence”. Camouflage is a seeing which “is activated precisely by the rendering invisible of the self”. (p. 23) As technologies take over, people become increasingly passive as images are accepted as truth, in an operational sense. Live bodies, natural objects and human activities “are the locus of active processes of self-fashioning and the substrate of camouflage media practices”. “What is the configuration of self versus environment that enables one to efface the traces of one’s own presence from photographic media of surveillance?” asks Hanna Rose Shell – “It is camouflage consciousness [my emphasis], in which full self-consciousness becomes literal photographic self-analysis.” (p. 23) Camouflage too is made of relation. It is becoming and becoming-relation, one that is logic and poetic at the same time.

A Museum of Transitory Art. ART UNLIMITED

OK, let’s say transitory art… But a museum of transitory art?

The museum of transitory art could be an institution that encompasses the relational logics of the transitory and offers a participatory perspective over artistic practices, which, through their affective vitality and incorporeal impressions, show us a seeing that contributes to our transindividuation as human beings. Far from seeing this museum in its strictly institutional sense, I instead see it as a shifting yet practicable state that defines a generalized model of political action towards us and the environment. A museum, i.e. a political memory which informs action models, conscious and unconscious constructions of our awareness. A museum, i.e. a curatorial act that attends to memory, not by framing it into confined spaces or conceptual frameworks, but precisely through making available, accessible and approachable a set of artistic practices that shift away from current artistic trends only to generalize transindividual ways of seeing and becoming. It is an evolutionary understanding of both art and architecture that challenges the natural, cultural and historical foundations to address a memorial ecosystem. From artistic display and cultural display to ethical (self) display. It is not only the borders of mediums that become immaterial, but the borders of life itself. Our own bodies become more fragile, our own identities more mobile, our own desires more indistinguishable, our own selves more unstable.

The metaphorical re-construction of modern art as transitory art expresses a critical shift. That is, an urgent need for (self-)criticism. Art can incite to expression only as long as it triggers self-awakening and challenges the cultural establishments of memory. I understand a museum of transitory art as a metaphor not only for the need to re-evaluate the foundational architecture and institution of the museum, but the very architecture of socio-political memory. A shift from economical rationality and technocratic bureaucracies to the civil logics of the public space, re-constituted. THE TRANSITORY IS THE MEMORY ITSELF. MEMORY IS THE EVENT. And it is memory, in the end, that a museum challenges, architecturally and institutionally. Art is not only seeing – transindividuation is introspection and, more importantly, recollection; a way of seeing and assuming what happens between, in-between artistic practices and exhibits, in-between the social and the political – in-between history and evolution, as consciousness first and then as human be(com)ings. While a didactic discipline continues to inform the visual stimulus of art as what we may call the pedagogy and education of seeing, art and its museums need to build the interiorly common memory, a germinal memory of ourselves as human be(com)ings.

A museum of transitory art, that is, an open space for our transition from input individuals to environs. A shift from the material and political archaeology of knowledge to the ‘stratigraphy’ of the living. The museum itself needs to interfere culture as discontinuity. In order to do this, a museum of transitory art needs to profanate the very institution of museum and art, so as to allow for a fundamental political restitution. This is not a museum of institutional practice, but rather the architecture of a metaphor. And it is this metaphor that can be turned into a model of political and aesthetic action. Ethical and pragmatic politics – spontaneous political aesthetics. It is our Boîte-en-valise – to challenge the confinement of art within the walls of a museum, not with the irony of preserving Readymades as works of art by an institution, as Duchamp has out-maneuvered the traditional concept of the museum through practice and theory, but as a re-sociated habitus bearing the full weight of responsibility for the beings to come.

Liberate (our)selves! Liberate (your)selves!

ART UNLIMITED

References:

[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Intertwining, The Chiasm’, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1968, p. 132.

[2] Martin Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, New York, 1971, pp. 213-229, p. 218 in particular. Full quote: “What remains alien to the god, the sight of the sky – this is what is familiar to man. And what is that? Everything that shimmers and blooms in the sky and thus under the sky and thus on earth, everything that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes – but also everything that goes and stumbles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens. Into this, which is intimate to man but alien to the god, the unknown imparts itself, in order to remain guarded within it as the unknown. But the poet calls all the brightness of the sights of the sky and every sound of its courses and breezes into the singing word and there makes them shine and ring. Yet the poet, if he is a poet, does not describe the mere appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is – unknown.” (p. 215)

[3] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, 1979, p. 35.

[4] Id., ibid., p. 210.

[5] “Concepts are ‘absolute surfaces or volumes’, forms whose only object is the inseparability of distinct variations.” The ‘survey’ [survol] is the state of the concept or its specific infinity, although the infinities may be larger or smaller according to the number of components, thresholds and bridges. In this sense the concept is act of thought, it is thought operating at infinite (although greater or lesser) speed.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, p. 21.

[6] Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. by Norman Madarasz, State University of New York Press, New York, 2006.

[7] Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2011, especially pp. 29-37.

[8] Id., ibid.

[9] William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1996, p. 238 and p. 202, quoted by Brian Massumi in Semblance and Event, op. cit., p. 32.

[10] David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, ‘Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition’, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, associate editor: Brad Seawell, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2003, pp. 1-16.

[11] Debora L. Spar, Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet, Harcourt, New York, 2011, mentioned in id., ibid., p. 2.

[12] William Uricchio, ‘Historicizing Media in Transition’, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, op. cit., pp. 23-39.

[13] Bernard Stiegler, “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means”, translated by Thangam Ravindranathan with Bernard Geoghegan, in Releasing the Image: from literature to new media, edited by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2011, pp. 222-236.

[14] Installations relying on digital images rarely rethink the body and the socius in the environment and instead demonstrate the technological coups rather than an actual merging within the environment. Since most of the surfaces inciting to active responses rely on a series of stills (I touch the wall or I move my hand, the wall changes colour when and sometimes where the hand made the touch or the movement), it is a rather ‘didactic’ interaction that visually demonstrates that interactions actually take place. But is the hand nothing more than a proximate switch?

[15] Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition, second edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.

[16] Brian Massumi, op. cit., p. 65.

[17] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Séan Hand, University Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, quoted and explained by Brian Massumi, op. cit., pp. 140-141.

[18] Brian Massumi, op. cit., p. 153.

[19] Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2013.

[20] Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 66, quoted in Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body, op. cit., p. 38.

[21] Erin Manning, ‘The Art of Time,’ in the catalog of the 2012 Sydney Biennale, p. 2, quoted by Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body, op. cit., p. 90.

[22] The following ideas are taken from Hanna Rose Shell’s remarkable investigations in Hide and Seek. Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, MIT Press / Zone Books, 2012.

by Dunja Kukovec

The art of the last century is (was) subject to continuous tending towards the new; it was called modern at first, then contemporary and finally (new) media art.

Transitory art is art that exposes – at the level of concept and context – the question of the boundary. It represents a digression from the hysteria of capitalism, refusing the terminology that tends towards the new, such as modern, contemporary or (new) media art. It is taking shape in a time when invention per se or novum as such fail to be either a fetish or a solution; for many answers and (short-lived) novelties hide precisely in the substitution or alteration of context, in the transition from one reality into another and some or the same forms into others.

Our full acceptance, and often abuse of the contextuality of truth (and art) notwithstanding, there remains the key question of not abandoning the boundary, for it is only without boundaries and beyond that the impossible or the absolute may be achieved. Yet, in a time of the so-called “open society”, the perception of the boundary represents that very margin that defines both the outside and the inside. If until recently we were insisting that there are no boundaries, then also the beyond as such could not be possible. Today, we know and clearly see where the boundary (boundaries) stands, yet the “beyond” fails to come to pass. Therefore, the key question is not the abandonment of the boundaries or the narrowness of views, but rather why, despite our full knowledge and cognition, nothing really changes at the substantial social level.

Transitory art is consonant with the present in which no one is (does not want to or cannot be) neither in nor out, and in which we are aware of the answers, numerous new methods, tactics and strategies, but still fail to apply them in the geopolitically or technologically separated realities. Transitory stands for flexible, mobile, passing, unsteady, or even adaptable; while in formal terms, it may represent an event, an impression, a hack, a change of thinking or a gesture not necessarily tied to an object of art.

MUSEUM OF TRANSITORY ART
Collective institutions of the last century that have shaped the paradigm of the present with mnemotechniques, history analysis and systematic archiving, function only under the guise of the universal and the objective; in practice they involve strategies of patriarchal-colonialist forces that create particular worth (and values). One day, history will be rewritten anew and archives will be updated.

MoTA museum exists both in real and virtual space. It may occupy either an existing institution or a public space. At times, it may occupy the actual physical space, while at other times, it occupies only a contextual framework. MoTA museum is not a national or an “exclusive” stronghold, yet it institutionalizes memory and gives meaning to art. Since collective institutions are a must for the visions of the past, understanding of the present and mastering of the future, MoTA museum is a reconstructed museum that is at once utopia and reality, vision and history.

If the avant-garde movements, overwhelmed by the futuristic enthusiasm, endeavored to open, bring the museum of modern art outdoors and destroy the archives, MoTA museum adapts to the time-space situation, somehow subordinating to art. Moreover, if in the past museums represented an artistic framework within which everything could become art, now, a museum is everywhere where art is present. MoTA museum maintains at least three parameters typical of a museum, but it de-constructs and re-constructs them.

The concept of collection and ownership is being maintained through the production and financing of art projects and artists, the space is a super-space or a network, while Mediatheque and ArtistTalk represent an archive and an educational “department”.

MoTA is a museum of transitory art that can really produce something precisely by insisting on the intersection of the established form of the museum and the new field of transitory art.

COLLABORATION AND REPRESENTATION

MoTA consistently seeks a networked, horizontal and consensual way of working that finds its utmost expression in the active collaboration. Everyone takes part in decision-making and is responsible for a particular field. Along with the support of the methods of collaboration, both among the artists themselves, as well as among artists, curators, theoreticians, producers and spectators, the museum best serves the artistic project if it fully conforms to its content and various needs.

MoTA sets out to represent artistic practices and projects that are often overlooked by the existing institutions. Some artists try to avoid the predictable institutional framework, while at times, their practice may shift into other artistic fields.

Since we believe that the attempt of social and artistic engagement taking the form of discovering, unveiling of, warning against or questioning the sociopolitical, technological and informational reality does no longer represent (the only) significant deviation from anxiousness, we are also interested in subjectivity as such and the direct and autonomous creative process such as, for example, programming or painting; we aim to research into the potential artistic practices that are introverted on the one hand, and formally experimental on the other.

FROM BRIGHT IDEAS TOWARDS THE QUESTIONS OF THE EVERYDAY

Let us now return to the question of the everyday, where transitory art searches for and also finds a great deal of answers or questions. Science and theory seem not to give much importance to this question and therefore, debates about the everyday turn out to be extremely irrelevant or even absurd. However, human life is best manifested in the everyday that constitutes most of our – seemingly happy – lives.
In the revolution of the everyday, only art with its transitory nature can facilitate the understanding of ever new realities that differ, above all, by what is or is not allowed, how we behave (or how we should behave) and what state the physical body is in – sitting, standing, walking, running, driving or dancing.

Public Discussion on Tactical Media

Artists: Núria Güell and Jean-Baptiste Naudy (Société Réaliste)
Moderator and transcript: Ida Hiršenfelder

The discussion on tactical media took place at ARTos Foundation, Nicosia, Cyprus from 23rd to 25th May, 2014 in the frame of Cartography of transitions. A transitory Research Symposium and Meeting. The guest artists of the discussion were Jean-Baptiste Naudy from Société Réaliste cooperative and Núria Güell who both have rich artistic practice in the field of what might also be called tactical media, developing a number of tools for civil disobedience. At the beginning we agreed to follow one of the objectives of the discussion to map out the idea or transitory art as a concept and to explore versatile fields of its emergence in the context of artistic usage of tactical media.

Ida Hiršenfelder: Speaking about tactical media, I would like to know if you yourself could describe your artistic work as tactical media? Furthermore, is it a part of contemporary fine art, is it a part of media art? Can it be analogue, must it be digital?

Jean-Baptiste Naudy: Firstly of all, I do not have the slightest idea of what transitory art might be. Even the very word is extremely blurry, especially if you ask yourself a reverse question what art is not transitory. Secondly, about tactical media, I do not recognise it as a specific category of art production since every art production is mediatic i.e. uses media. Some art production may have a tactical relationship to the media that it is using, but I would not say that it is something related to new media, because I simply do not believe in the existence of media art in the first place. For me it is all part of the same field which is the field of art, which is a complex, multilayered, multi-oriented practice. The interesting thing about this field is also that it is very contradictory and antagonistic, but I would not like to categorise it as media art and look for subcategories like e.g. tactical. I would never define myself as new media or old media artist neither as tactical or non-tactical. I am just an artist and I am using media and tactics in consideration of the context.

Núria Güell: I agree with Jean-Baptiste. I normally would not use new media in my projects, only on rare occasions. Most usually I use traditional media in conjunction with people, laws, regulations, or other social normatives. But I do consider my work as a tactical process, because I usually have a very clear objective. Keeping that in mind, I design the best strategy to reach my initial goal. I do not describe myself as a new media artist or anything like that. I am also not very interested in the debate about definitions of certain types of art or anything like that.

IH: This lack of interest in categorizing particular types of art is understandable also from the point of view of the notion of transitory art as it was proposed by MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art, since it is trying to define that, which has not been defined or mapped out in the contemporary art production nor accepted by established art circles.

JBN: Actually, I am not against trying to find definitions, I am against categories. If you present the contemporary art as something archaic to the point that it is not able to integrate new practices, new approaches, or tactical usage of its own media then we have a problem. Nevertheless, this is a technical discussion about the art field. I would rather propose a completely ideological discussion about the art field. The fact is that 99% of the contemporary art production is repeating the dominant doxa, thus creating objects for the decoration of the cathedral of capitalism. In this context it does not matter whether one uses new media or old media, because this is not about categories, it is about divisions or splits or confrontations. Most of the art producers are still living in the ideological dream from the 90s, which came right after the cold war and the Fukuyama’s nonsensical notions like the end of history or the global village, which proposes that thanks to the liberal economy the American world peace and the Internet are going to make us all get along nicely. This idea, which was aimed at advancing the agenda of the West has ended in the beginning of 2000, yet a lot of artists are still imprinted by this ideology. By the end of the 90s social movements and the international organisations were contesting the status quo from Seattle to World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, etc. Fifteen years after the choice is clear. The artists have to take sides and start to employ tactical usage of their art. If one decides to take the dominant side, one needs not to use any tactics, because what one has to say is already embedded in the dominant discourse.

IH: I believe that to some extent your art practice might be understood as challenging the dominant discourse. Looking back at the history of the term, tactical media was first used for collective media interventions, guerrilla communication and radical entertainment or hacking the mass media from within. Apart from this narrow definition of tactical media in arts there are a number of other undertakings that might also fall under this term like challenging hierarchies and economic relations,, addressing geo-political inequalities, racism, sexism, nationalism, pointing out contradictions in legal system, mapping out social geographies, presenting statistical data, etc. What tactics do you use in your own art?

NG: In my work I would always work with existing laws and policies. In the initial research, I seek out the laws that are the representations of power relations of the institutions or the state. Then I take this same laws, and turn them upside down and inside out and actually play them against themselves in a sort of displaced legal application. For example, I found a law, which the banking system is using to help clients. I have made a master plan which proposed the application of the same law that regulates the money generating activity of the banks. I made a strategy in which the clients could play this law against the bank system. This is usually my methodology of work and my main goal is to subvert the status quo and especially to empower the people who would normally find themselves in submissive position in relation to the law. Initially, all my projects are realised first outside of the system of art or art institutions in the public space or wherever else. I seem to always have to have this two realities. I produce the work outside of the artworld and then I present it in the context of a gallery or museum.

JBN: Talking about tactics to challenge hierarchies, I think it depends a lot of the context. This is the problem with the theory of art because it is generalising situations that are extremely specific. The situation at the White Cube Gallery in London is not the same as the situation at the state museum in Russia. This means one cannot present the same work in the same way. For example, last February we exhibited in Budapest. The political and ideological cultural scene in Budapest is just frightening, since real-life crypto-fascist people are running this country. In this exhibition we started the show with a gay flag. I would never do this in Paris or London, because it would have no meaning, but in Budapest putting the rainbow flag as the standard of our discourse was a very powerful gesture. Another thing about hierarchies, I am also very skeptical when people proclaim that some fight is over. Like saying that the institutional critique is over. As long as institutions exist there should be also the critique of it. Same thing goes for feminism. Let me set two examples. We were invited to an European project in 2006 called “How to do things in the middle of nowhere?” The idea itself was very ideological to start with. The initiators were German based curators and from this perspective they were addressing Eastern Europe as a place in the middle of nowhere. The way we responded was not to propose a work about Eastern Europe, but we answered their question “With money!” Our project was actually a financial scam to fund exhibitions in Eastern Europe. The second example is about Documenta 12 in 2007. It was based on three topical questions: “Is modernity our antiquity?”, “What is to be done?” and “What is bare life?”. We were asked to develop a project and again we did something about money, since we believe that only a decadent bourgeois is asking oneself such leisure questions like what is to be done. We opened a bank account at a French multinational bank Société Générale. The first question we answered with a call for donations, the second question with the IBAN info, for the third answer we gave the access info to the people along with the login and password, so it became a collective bank account. We did not care what happens to the account or how the people use it, just to set the structure that allows people to do things. 24 hours after we had launched the account, it was closed by the bank server, because there were too many requests to change the password and to re-privatise the account.

IH: Interesting how you both worked on subverting the banking system. In the case of Société Réaliste the public outcome with re-privatisation was quite perverse. Núria, how would you compare it with your outcomes, given that one of the key questions about tactical media is how the actions are receiving public recognition of the wider public, not just the art crowd. How important is it for you to generate the public outside the contemporary art field or galleries and museums?

NG: At the moment, I am working on a project called Degenerated Political Art. Ethic Protocol. that is very similar to what you have just described Jean-Baptiste. It is a creation of a bank in a fiscal paradise or so called offshore tax haven. Its objective is to stimulate the people and give them tools and knowledge to create an autonomous economic system that would be completely independent from the states, European Union or the Central Bank, setting up a situation in which their interference would not be possible.

JBN: We are actually doing something similar in the Netherlands and it has to do with tax haven, banking operations and specific loans. This has a lot to do with what you Núria were saying about inverting the banking system and using it against it. We are going to use the free trade zone that is otherwise reserved for multinational corporations, using their very own legal system in order to allow ordinary people to stop paying their taxes, because only simple people are actually paying taxes. The top ten corporations in the Netherlands are not paying a single euro of tax money. They call this patriotic capitalism.

NG: Coming back to the question about tactics and still talking about our tax haven project, in a few days we going to present the project Degenerated Political Art in Barcelona. We already established a corporation in a tax haven. The founders of the bank are me and my partner Levi Orta and we used the designated artistic production budget in order to create a society in a tax haven. Taking advantage of the jurisdiction of the country where the subsidiary is based, this will allow us to evade the taxes related to any profits. We are going to send invoices to any of the museums that we are working with and from this time on, we will need not to pay any taxes at all, neither to Spanish nor EU government nor any other country. At the present time, at the Spanish stock exchange group is composed for 35 biggest corporations and all of them have their accounts in tax haven and they need not to pay any taxes. So our project is creating the same conditions, only in the context of the art world.

JBN: Just for information. Google Corporation is annually making 1 billion dollars of profit in France alone, of which it is not paying a single dollar of taxes, because it is domiciliated in Ireland. And then from Ireland the profit is transferred to Luxembourg, from there to Cayman Islands, from Cayman Islands back to Silicon Valley.

NG: Even worse, last year The Apple Company has forced the Spanish government to compensate for their losses of profits from annual budget, because they supposedly did not earn enough and the state had to give them the money.

IH: You take a very current sociopolitical problematic and make the contradictions and power relations visible. Does it also have an immediate impact in the wider public?

JBN: People are mostly aware of what banks and the corporations are doing, what art does is give them a specific flavour. This question of the audience is very 1990s problem, due to the emergence of so-called relational aesthetics. This discourse is very rotten, that is why I would not like to talk about it ideologically, but simply economically. It comes from a situation in France in the beginning of the 90s when massive state funding for culture was stopped. The main argument in the discourse was that art is too elitist and it does not reach the real people. Instead of funding art, they started to fund only socio-art projects, which means asking artists to do social work instead of social workers, but paying them less than social workers, causing also less efficiency, but making art useful. That completely displaced the work of the art and turned the artists into social animators, while pretending that this is some kind of cure for social illness. On the contrary, I think art is here to kill the ill men, to finish it not to cure it. I also think there is a no real difference between art audience and non-art audience apart from the accessibility of art. I do not like taking audience for stupid people.

NG: Responding to what Jean-Batiste has been just talking about. I agree with what has been said. I am also very much against the term responsible or conscience art. What I try with my art is to interpolate, to make an antagonist situation in the audience that feels committed to take position. The aim is to make a confrontation and force the people to take an ethical stand. The audience for me is very important. In my projects I see and meet a lot of different audiences, not only the art audience. I also received a lot of mails and correspondence from people that are not a part of the art world and they do not address the issues of art. This is extremely important for my projects. This happens in the process of naturalisation of the art projects, because they are often not talked about in the art press, but in the social press and alternative media. This allows me to arrive to different publics.

JBN: I would like to mention one example about the audience from the history of art. A Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica1 who was a member of a samba collective in a favela. He was invited to exhibit his work in fabric and textiles at the Museum of Art in Rio de Janeiro. So, he brought his fabrics into the museum along with dozens of favela inhabitants from the samba collective who were wearing the textiles. He kept it a secret until the opening of the exhibition and that was very tactful. At first, the security did not allow the people to enter the museum, but then he made them enter.

IH: Jean-Batiste, to me, your statement that it does not matter what the audience are is quite unsettling. Perhaps we should explain this in more detail. The audience may be racially or socially stigmatised, which means it cannot be possible to talk about audience in general, because a lot of people as you have mentioned do not have access to art. I would also imagine that the role of art is not simply to educate, but to make things visible. I would insist again on the question of the approach to the audience. I agree that the question could not be answered in the frame of relational aesthetics, which was justly criticised for imposing power positions of the white male and other colonial relations. The question would be, what have we learned in the past fifteen years. At the end of the day, the position of white male is also something white male should reflect. Núria, you have worked with migrants and highly unprivileged people a lot. How do you deal with your privileged position?

NG: I am very conscious of my privileges as a white European woman and I also have a lot of privileges as an artist, because I can say to the institutions quite freely that I want to do this or that. I see the institutions as someone who is able to provide the funds. When I think about the projects, I am also constantly thinking how can I use this privilege in order to subvert the conditions, the laws or to subvert the situation itself. The projects that I did with migrants, I made this situation very clear. I have this particular set of privileges as a white artist and we can do some kind of project together. It is extremely important that I am very clear with the people. What I actually do, is to instrumentalise the art. My aim is to do something concerning social relations, something other that art, but in order to achieve my goal, I need to make use of the institution of art.

IH: One of the privileges of the art is also class migration. For an artist it might be quite normal to live in a five star hotel while being completely penniless.

JBN: This is because it is not an economical privilege. Following what Núria said, it is about symbolic privilege. What is for example Oiticica’s privilege? He was a poor Brazilian gay guy, but he was allowed to enter the museum because he was an artist. And how he used the privilege is to make other people enter the privileged zone.

NG: The last project Black over White that I did in MACBA last month we did exactly this. Many people who are in contact with me following the project are not interested in art. They are interested in the issues that the work speaks about, but not in art.

JBN: Just one more thing about the audience. I strongly disagree with critics who say that our work is too complex and that people live in a TV culture and do not understand complex references. People are first of all not like that. They are reading books, which may not be academic, but they have their culture and they live in the middle of symbols and images. Karl Marx’s Kapital is a very intense and complicated book, yet it managed to fuel world social movement for the past two hundred years. And another thing about artists, they are workers just like everybody else. I am also very irritated by people who are wondering about revolutionary art, because there is a time to make art and a time to make a revolution, and when you are a revolutionary you do not make art at that moment. At the time of the revolution, like in Istanbul or Kiew, all the social roles fall.

IH: You were talking before about the idea of bringing people in the institution Jean-Batiste, which actually affirms the institution and mentioned that artists are workers just like everyone else.

NG: I do not believe that the artists are like other workers, because the artists have more responsibility from other workers. The artists have a public voice with interviews, films, texts, medias, which bring more responsibility. In my projects I am constantly thinking about how can I use this visibility in order to achieve my goal. The other thing is that in the history, the art has won an autonomy from different power structures like the church, the kings, the tradition and different powers, so I think the consequence of this is that art is now a freer space, and one can do a lot of things what others cannot, because people give other meanings to art. Some people may also think that it is less important or less serious, but actually artists can do a lot of very illegal things and do not have to face consequences. In my work for example I do very illegal things.

JBN: I agree with the difference in positions, but I am not so sure about the illegal part. If you do something very illegal and you try to justify it with art, you still go to jail. Well, come to think about it, maybe even not. William Burroughs killed his wife and said it was a performance.

NG: Yes, for sure there are things that even artists could not get away with.

JBN: Just to make it clear, with this notion of an artist as any other worker, I meant that artists have the same responsibilities regarding social issues and class divisions. The second point is that capitalism loves artists as a model of workfare. Why? An artist is able to work 22 hours per day 6 days a week all year round for 0 euros, just because it is his or her project. That is a perfect worker!

IH: So far we established that art which is tactical or uses tactical media must be grounded in the current sociopolitical atmosphere. In the continuation of the discussion I would be interested to talk about the visual output of your work. Núria, you claim that you do not use new media, but you use video, documents, analogue technical media. In this context I think you were talking about symbols in some of your works Jean-Batiste and you were addressing the question of language. So what kind of visual language do you use in order to convey your ideas? I am thinking of this in the relation to representational tactics.

JBN: When you cited my statement that art is full of symbols, I did not mean that art is symbolic, this would imply that art is a metaphor. And this is very dangerous because that is a question of inefficiency of art. Some people may dismiss it saying that it is only poetry. They fail to understand that poetry is not a metaphor, it is the reality of the language. It is the real potentiality of the language and art is the same thing. The infinite possibilities of the reconfiguration of the real. That is why freedom of art is to that extent a symbol for the freedom of anybody else. For example, Société Réaliste only uses common forms and things that are a part of our daily lives, like corporate logotypes or very basic visualisations of architectural projects. This basic forms can immediately be translate by the people and it gives them space to transform them.

I would like to say one more thing about tactics… We are talking lately a lot about boycott with our friends, about this very old topic for activists and leftists. About a year and a half ago we were for example attacked in Paris by people who accused us of taking part in a programme in Israel, saying that we are legitimising the Israeli politics. Contrary to their opinion, I think that the critique of Zionists is the strongest right in Israel and people need to talk about this things right there and then preferably with outsiders. Now, we have another question of boycott at the Manifesta 10 in the Hermitage. In this case I hold a completely opposite opinion, because Hermitage’s context is stronger than any work of art. I believe Putin is stronger than any work of art and if it would be stronger, it would not be shown there in the first place. So my problem in terms of tactics, positioning and treating the environment and superstructure of art is for example the case of Thomas Hirschhorn, who once stated he will never exhibit in Austria as long as the rightists are in power, yet at the present time I see him conducting symbolic vampirism with everything that looks revolutionary and at the same time he is posing as a critic of the boycott of Manifesta 10.

IH: This is a wonderful example, but then again, every institution is a challenge per se. For example working with MACBA is also a big challenge. Núria, how would you treat the visual language or what is your view of exhibiting for example the documents or the leftovers of the project in a museum?

NG: I try to make my language as clear as possible in order to communicate to as many people as I can. A lot of people that are not interested in the art context are interested in the work itself. The language is very plain and very clear that is way it is easy for them to enter into the work. The question of exhibiting in the museum follows this line, but I use it in a different way. In the museums, I mostly exhibit documents, but I would never consider this as an artwork. My artwork is what happens outside of the museum. Documentation is only something that has remained from the artwork, something for the museums and archives.

IH: Do you think that it is important to show the documents in order to promote the activities that were happening outside or just to justify the institutional framework in order that you can finance your activities?

NG: Both. On the first level I need the finances and I use the institutions to provide the funding, but on the second level, I am also interested in museums per se, because that gives me an opportunity to see the activities in a more reflexive way, to maybe notice something that did not happen on the in the activities on the streets but comes later. Because of this realisations I am in a way interested also with the museum context. But the work is never located in the museum.

IH: Maybe now would be the time to talk about the conditions for the production of your work. Is it self made, DIY, do you higher craftswomen and craftsmen to produce certain works or in what kind of context would you use the services of other people for realisation of the work? Do you sell your work or do you finance it with public or private funding and what is your ideological view of any of this funding sources for your art?

NG: I have a gallery that is selling my work, but actually not many people are interested in buying it though. The gallery does not support me financially. The financial support for my projects depends, sometimes I take whatever means I can find. A lot of times it would be produced by museums and institutions that invite me to produce the work and also provide the financial input. I also receive grands. For example the project Degenerated Political Art. Ethic Protocol. that I am doing in the tax haven is financed by a group of activists, because they are very interested in my proposal. Because they liked my idea, they also provided for my travel. A lot of people criticised me that it is not ethical to sell my work in the gallery, at the same time a lot of people say that the state with public money again means conforming to the policies of the state.

JBN: May I be very mean. People that have a problem with selling works in galleries are the people that cannot sell their work in galleries. Honestly, concerning the question of private and public money, I do have a problem with funding that is coming from Arab Emirates. They support museums everywhere, they are funding curators, giving hundreds of thousands of euros to make shitty projects. The financiers probably do not even see the project. However, money is nor good nor bad. When Hans Haacke put up his show in New York and attacked Cartier Foundation, which is based on a jewell company in France that was massively involved with apartheid in South Africa. The point is that Haacke found himself in the middle of the most famous museum of the world. He did not want to reject this opportunity, he rather exhibited the way how the museum wants him to exhibit, which means with the money from the apartheid. Regarding the production, we work in a completely non-studio environment. Of course, we make all the sketches and ideas, but we do not produce the objects ourselves. In a way, we are the engineers or designers of the artwork and then we address the specialists with machines and technical skills. Regarding production of the project. We never produce a project out of the blue. We are usually invited somewhere, we are given the context and financial framework and then we start to think about the work on the scale that is realistic. Our limit is that we do not pay for our own work.

IH: Can you maybe reflect on the ideology that is produced by EU and its funding? I think that we are starting to see the results of this policies that promote project and not-programme oriented work and most of all precarity. How do you work with EU policies that creates a extremely precarious situation for anyone. It usually goes along the line: all right, this year are going to finance women in technology, last year we were financing Roma crafts. Is it possible that art would subvert its own milking cow?

JBN: One of the problems with the planning of Culture 2000 or Culture 2007 for example is that they promise to give the money, but they do not give it to you. You first must have a loan of, say, half a million euros, and only after you have filed in all the reports you are in title to have this money returned. I know a lot of projects that went bankrupt, took a loan at a bank and then failed to comply to EU standards, because of stupid bureaucratic regulations. Everyone also knows that European Administration is an ideological machine. You only get financing if you comply to this ideology. The level of contradictions also depends on the amount of money. If you receive five thousand euros you are relatively free, but ask architects, when they are dealing with a project for hundred million euros. At that point, there is no freedom. But I trust artworks. If an artwork is strong it is stronger than the context, stronger than its own economy, than the audience, the art world, critics, curators, or stronger than Vladimir Putin.

NG: That is why one has to understand where the money is coming from when one is invited to exhibit at some museum or institution. Then one can think about how one wants to use this money. But one has to understand that all the institutions, some more and some less are opaque or non-transparent. And I accept any money as long as I can be sure that using this money I will be able to subvert something that has to do with institutions of power.

At the beginning the idea of a difference between the media art and contemporary fine art was somehow omitted, yet in Slovenian context, the definition of media art was very necessary to oppose the modernist power structures as well as relational aesthetics discourse from the 90s. There was a need to create a separate field for financing Internet based things, anything to do with programing, generative art, mechanics. At the end of the day, tactics and tactical thinking as a methodology may be applied in any art form, while tactical media in art production is still mostly describing practices like programing, hacking or mass media interventions. And yet again, what does this tell us about transitory art, is still a mistery.

1 Hélio Oiticica: Parangolés, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 1965

by Société Réaliste

One of the most important characteristics of “territories” is that they are perpetually in flux. One should be able to document them simultaneously, but that makes their perception problematic. It is not possible for us to take a step back far enough to perceive their entire width or grasp the profundity of their depth. If we do move far back enough, we end up creating an observation post, which is a distinct territory separate from the one being observed. Here are a few concrete examples.

Take the beltway around Paris, the “Périphérique“, for example. A 35 km long urban speedway, the official purpose of which is to avoid traffic congestion. It is the second of the four-belt bypass system around the city: within Paris, the Maréchaux boulevards. Some hundred meters further out, the Périphérique; some ten kilometers further, the A86 highway; another 20, the Francilienne. All are designed for the same purpose.

The Périphérique is commonly seen as a psychological frontier, even though many “Parisian” infrastructures spread across it. It is clear that the system aimed at managing the flow that includes the Périphérique has a purpose beyond traffic control and the prevention of traffic congestion. This road is a fortification. In addition to this, there is the “pourtour de Paris”, a peculiar type of territorial moat. It is a strip of land that stretches around the outside of the Périphérique. Yet, it is not a part of the suburbs according to the cadastre. A “tiny” belt, some of it constructed, some of it empty. It is a buffer zone, in the sense that it helps distinguish one place from another and acts as a dividing line. As is the case of other buffer zones, this type of territory, even if empty, has a tendency to turn into a de facto wall, the point where the “sub” and the “urban” part. This zone allows for a certain type of flow, like a border control checkpoint, appointed not by the administration but by the mapping out of the city itself. It is a variable integration territory (VIT), just like there are variable message displays (VMD) all along the Périphérique. The fact that this zone is strategically kept as a fallow gives it a differentiating character (it creates a differentiation as much as it is a difference in itself and of itself). A difference under control.

Then, there is that strange “city” called Pas de la Casa, whose territory belongs to the parish of Encamp, right at the frontier of the Principality of Andorra. It consists of buildings erected one meter behind the border control checkpoint. Why build a city there, in the middle of nowhere? There was nothing more than a shelter for shepherds in that area during the fifties because life in the middle of high mountains is not so easy. The Pas de la Casa was built in order to create a legal trench, a border city between France and the Principality of Andorra, a tax haven. There, poor people get duty-free cigarettes and rich people invest their money into special funds. Once the deadweight of the French and the Spanish laws was jettisoned over the Andorran mountains, it helped create the bricks that constructed the city walls. The territory is autonomous, but not entirely. It is a place where illegal trade becomes legal. But not just trade. It is also a land where smugglers operate under the benevolent eye of the officials in charge of public order, and where order organises and controls disorderly zones. Andorra, this tiny round country, functions as the legal blind spot of the French and Spanish periphery. It is an opaque mountain highway service area transformed into a state. A free trade zone, much like Hainan, used by two states that purportedly uphold the rule of law: France and Spain. This begs the question: if the rule of law does indeed have its place, does it not always need an area of lawlessness that is both peripheral and integrated, in order to exist? The more we look at Pas de la Casa, the more our perception of metropolitan suburbs changes. Controlled lawlessness.

There is also a country that nobody has heard of, which is nowhere near joining the EU, simply because nobody, apart from itself, recognises it. Well, not entirely – this country is called Transnistria and is recognised by Russia. It is a part of Moldova, which proclaimed itself an independent state in 1991; afraid it would become a Moldovan-Romanian province following the collapse of the Soviet empire. The territory is populated by 500 000 Transnistrians, financed and armed by the Russians, but not Russian. It is lawless area, recognised as such by the law. Yet another massive smugglers’ haven, another buffer zone, for sure. A territorial tool, but always under control.

What are these territories? “Fortifications”, if we understand this term by its Latin meaning “fortis facere”, or “to make strong”, “to strengthen” – something that happens to whoever controls them. Are they enclaves? Yes, but paradoxically, they are open. One finds them everywhere, at every level. At the state level, this depends on the point of view: there are five such “grey zones” according to the OECD and 43 according to ATTAC. But both organisations agree on the matter of Andorra. They also exist at the level of the road, at the building level, perhaps, and at the level of metaphoric territories.

We mentioned the Parisian “pourtour”, the Pas de la Casa and Transnistria, but we must also mention Tijuana and the Maquiladoras on the Mexico-United States border, the industrial parks by the Palestinian wall (which is considered to be a Security Fence, the “Jidar al-fasl al-‘unsuri”, the “wall of racial separation”), the two neighbourhoods in Karachi in North Nazimabad Town, called Buffer zone I and II, the square-kilometre-sized territory between Italy and Switzerland, Campione d’Italia, and the neighbourhoods in Havana where Westerners are allowed to partake in the “capitalism of the body”.

Within the complexity of the organisation of territories and the tangle of spheres, these are the areas of passage and separation. One must observe and inquire whether this is not indeed a checkpoint geostrategy. We can even provide it with a basic morphology: first area – checkpoint – zone – checkpoint – second area. Sufficient evidence must be provided in order to determine to which point the word “free” in the terms “free zone” and “free trade” pinpoints a central contemporary problem, repression through “freedom”.

We started off by saying that it is difficult to step back far enough in order to see the big picture, both in terms of width and depth. Société Réaliste’s project  »Ministère de l’Architecture« is barely interested in architecture, and even less in ministries. However, it strives to bring together territories that have been unfortunately separated by geographic infamy. »Ministère de l’Architecture« strives to produce aberrant perceptions, which are nonetheless necessary. It should be thought of as a transit lounge in an airport, where entities that do not know each other gather and are provided with an opportunity to kill time together. What common ground is there between a parking area for trucks in Tiraspol, the bottom of the lake in Lugano, a wasteland in Porte d’Aubervilliers, a slum in Karachi, a bar in Mexicali, a hotel in Havana, a supermarket in Andorra, or a factory in Tulkarem? It is an exchange, which – although it is often unfruitful – could allow the peculiarity of these elements to disappear in order to illuminate some connecting threads. And then other checkpoints, other beltways, other grey areas will enter the picture. Proposals will be made, some will complain about the hyperactive incompetence of the Ministère, say that its officials are aloof, abusive and Byelorussian; people may even question what purpose stirring up these reflections serves; and the logo of the Ministère, erected, insensitive and dominating, will forward the question to all the duly documented territories.

What purpose can these areas serve? Why are we prevented from putting them in the same place? Is there a Transnistrian future for the Porte de Pantin? We must establish an intellectual tool in order to remove the term “nearshoring” from the economic vocabulary alone, and understand its urban, political and cultural meaning. If someone else were to talk about “grey zones with undefined contours, which both separate and connect the camps of masters and slaves”, could »Ministère de l’Architecture« help better pinpoint this vague definition?

Société Réaliste, Paris, July 2006

by Petko Dourmana

2013, installation

exhibition posters, Android tablets with AR application, flat screen

Presented at: MSGSÜ Tophane-i Amire Kültür ve Merkezi, Istanbul
as part of T.R.I.B.E exhibition 1.10 – 10.10.2013

Ars longa, ratio brevis

Art is not about the audience anymore but about the art world that has successfully overtaken art itself. Art doesn’t need to address society with its actual problems since self-referencing and recasting existing cultural comments and interpretations has become the norm. Art suffers globalization even more than any other aspect of contemporary society and public life. Contemporary art is fully globalized and even a different representation of a particular local context is globally demanded.
Art, or rather the art world, has lost its influence on society and its avant-garde status.

On the other hand, technology is so rapidly developing and new media have changed so much and influenced society that even though the art world itself long resisted these processes, it is eventually undergoing a technological transformation imposed as a social necessity. The role of social media in channeling an interest in art already surpasses that of traditional mass media and of professional magazines. Artists ranking web platforms take over the job of art critics and even that of curators by showing to the audience directly the ‘score’ of an artist.

All this is not a surprise since the art world itself decided on this hierarchical model of ranking artists as a meta form of evaluation and organization of artists’ careers as a way of dealing with the growing number of artists and the enormous amount of art production. This process of automatization of curatorial work mirrors the global tendency of optimization of office work that has already taken place in the fields of corporate management and finance resulting in rapid shrinking of the wannabe middle-class office proletariat.

The Ranking Project is an app for smart phones and tablets that shows in front of the gallery (and also in front of a big poster or billboard promoting the show) the rating of the participating artists through big colorful spheres. The sizes of the spheres represent the rank of each artist. These spheres are the aura of the artist, sized not by the hermetic specialist knowledge of a single curator or critic, but by a machine algorithm calculating their gross value in the economy of attention by factoring participations in biennials and exhibitions.

by Petko Dourmana

Presented at ARTos Foundation, Nicosia (cy); 11-12 October 2013

The original setup for this installation consists of a military tent from WWI, a toy Edison-style cup phonograph kit, recording on plastic cups, a monitor, a DVD player, loudspeakers, and a microphone.
Size of tent: 2.20 m x 2.20 m x 4.40 m

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do …
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too!
(Macdermott’s War Song lyrics)

It was 1878 when in the United States Edison patented the phonograph that was later developed into the gramophone and remained the most common device for playing recorded sound until the 1980s.

In the same year, across the ocean the music-hall singer G. H. Macdermott (aka “the Great Macdermott”) introduced his War Song in the London Pavilion.

This is one of the very first examples of modern propaganda. Macdermott was commissioned to make the song with the aim to influence public opinion in Britain in the middle of the political crisis between the British Empire and Russia, after the war with Turkey in the Balkans and Caucasus. The crisis ended with a diplomatic triumph of Britain’s Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and after the song a politician from the opposition Labour Party invented the term jingoism that is now used for describing ‘extreme chauvinism or nationalism marked especially by a belligerent foreign policy.’

It is amazing how political life changed forever since audiovisual mass media and propaganda charged pop culture were invented and eventually became an intrinsic part of public life. In 2008, exactly one hundred and thirty years after these events, we could celebrate an anniversary of audiovisual industry and jingoism – with Russia becoming again the world’s Evil, with the US presidential campaign in which a remote war that can be seen as a perfect example of jingoism was described as “God’s Plan” and with the Blue Ray (probably the last hard copy media) slowly becoming world standard.

To remind us of all these events, Petko Dourmana invited in his Chain Reaction Pavilion everybody who wanted to sing Macdermott’s war song Jingo with a karaoke set that uses a toy Edison-style cup phonograph. In the plastic cups, used as recording media, visitors earned a free beer after singing.

Works presented: 

- The ranking project

– Jingo Karaoke

When we enter the world presented by Ohira and Bonilha in their exhibition The Unknown – A Hypothesis About Immanence, we immediately face an intriguing mix of the technological and supernatural that extends to the paranormal. We encounter something unknown, something that calls for our curiosity and wondering. Electronic devices, stripped of their usual industrially designed appearance and their technological purposes, open for our interpellation. The Psychophone, a device for transcommunication with other dimensions, Raspberrypsy, a closed video loop using a visual variant of Schriber’s method displaying enigmatic images that are not expected there, and two Contemporary Divinities, simple radio receivers using a galenite crystal and a germanium photodiode that deliver sound out of thin air – all these make us question the way things work in the real world, outside laboratories and professional or academic discourse about technology. This drive of curiosity is what invites the spectator to make new interpretations about his or her relationship with technology. To interpret the unknown that technology can produce.

A broad fascination with electronic devices and electricity in general, reaching out of circles of professionals, seems to be a frequent phenomenon of the 20th century. Sparked by the first “entrapment” of a lightning bolt, ever feared by humans, into the so-called Leiden jar and carried on by Nikola Tesla, who devised a technological way to manipulate it on a large scale, the electrical revolution changed almost every aspect of human lives. The path for the emergence of radio apparatuses, first electrical devices to use electromagnetic waves travelling simply through air, was paved with the discovery of radio waves by Hertz by the end of 19th century and their successful manipulation for transmission by Tesla and Marconi. Photos of people firmly sitting or standing while listening to a contemporary radio broadcast keep an aura of mysticism. We cannot understand the strange arrangement of people in such photos if we don’t know that something invisible to the naked eye is going on – massive transcommunication.

The beginnings of manipulation with electricity urged the scientific community to articulate a theoretical framework for describing and explaining phenomena connected to it. Despite the vast usefulness of the theory of electromagnetism that resulted from this effort, its complex mathematics and the use of the somehow fuzzy and non-intuitive central concept of (electric and magnetic) field still leave some room for various articulations of popular representations connected to it. The use of the concept of field has spread also to other areas of human knowledge and practice, including the pre-existent classical physics, information theory and bio-energetic healing. On the other hand, electricity has been available in our homes for more than a century now and many people deal with various electric devices and make their own explorations. This is a fertile constellation for the blooming of alternative non-scientific explanations of phenomena. Understanding seems to be a basic intellectual human need.

Strange phenomena connected to electricity and labelled supernatural date back at least to antiquity, but of course the human fear of lightning bolts, which were ascribed to gods, had appeared even earlier. The aurora borealis, for example, was in the Middle Ages most often seen as a foretelling of a catastrophe. The Frankenstein story created by Mary Shelley was based on actually performed experiments with electric current flowing through cadavers and lifting them to sit straight up. Experiments involving electromagnetism often include levitating bodies. The famous photos of Tesla with lightning bolts flying above his head make a deep impression on any viewer, even nowadays; the fact that they were taken on his request makes him look like a mystificator. The ability to produce human-sized lightning bolts seems to be so intriguing that it has weaved its way into a subculture of Tesla enthusiasts, reproducing the so-called Tesla coil, originally meant for wireless distribution of electrical energy as a kind of electrical monument. Also, Tesla’s promise of delivering free energy through the air is still the goal of the whole subculture of technological enthusiasts that try to build an electrical perpetuum mobile and disprove the law of entropy that in theory forbids it; this is nowadays found under the internet umbrella term free energy. Some physicists that engaged in a theoretical description of their homemade free energy machines in order to expose the theoretical mistakes of their undermining by the law of entropy gradually became aware that this is a difficult and time-consuming task not really worth pursuing.

What I want to point out with these examples is that electrical phenomena, in spite of the fact that electricity has been ‘domesticated’ for more than a century, seem difficult enough to be theoretically described that one almost needs a technical formal education to feel comfortable with their explanations. And this is in the face of the fact that we live in the era of computers and information technology, which are nothing but devices for fine manipulations of electric impulses. Basically, we live amidst a lot of machines whose functioning we don’t really understand well. This leaves room for alternative explanations of some electrical phenomena, which may very well be intertwined with extraordinary personal, maybe even paranormal experience. In recent decades, technology conceived of as technological culture has also become an area of interest for various artists who mix art and science. In Slovenia, such authors include, for example, Dragan Živadinov and Marko Peljhan. That is all about the general socio-technological conditions into which we are by default immersed, and now let’s enter Ohira and Bonilha’s exhibition of some, let’s call them, technological unknowns.
The authors themselves, already with the choice of the exhibition title, offer their interpretation guidelines for the exhibited unknowns. Their intention is, apparently, to strip technological artefacts of their usual role, determined to serve human needs, and expose what is truly immanent to them, what is their genuine immanence. Not what something does, in terms of serving human needs, but what something is capable of doing. For example, what happens when you make a closed loop with a device originally meant to be a medium like a TV or a camera? You turn something that was meant to be a medium, an instrument, into the message itself. You expose its immanent features by closing its mediational channel to the outer world and peep through the loop, as a hidden viewer, to see what happens. What you find are, surprisingly, some kind of patterns, maybe proper images that were not supposed to be there. Technology is supposed to be predictable, this is why we rely on its use, however, this result seems to have been unpredictable. These images seem to be what the machine produces on its own, despite being turned off, or to put it more poetically, we could say, what the machine dreams.
When you reconfigure a radio receiver so that it is not tuned to any frequency, as it is its primary purpose, what happens? You remove a limitation of the device designed in a way to obediently and predictably serve massive human communication. You make way for the device to produce uncontrolled signals, its own immanent language, so to say. Again, we deal with some ‘dead’ tool, something material, which all of a sudden seems to become alive and acquire a will of its own. Or, to put it differently, it acquires the potential to become a vehicle for communication with other forms of life which find their communication seat somewhere within the machine, immanent to it.

The immanent substance of what we usually label ‘material’ is even more stressed with Contemporary Divinities #1 and #2, two radio receivers powered by a galenite crystal and a germanium diode, respectively. We are used to electric devices needing some electric source for their functioning, whereas the two Divinities work by themselves, apparently acquiring electric energy from the air and ground. They do not need human intervention in the form of plugging to acquire energy, they do it by themselves. In this sense, they are self-sustained, independent, and the galenite crystal and germanium diode are the immanent material hearts that deliver energy from ‘within’ the machine due to their special material features.

Immanence as a philosophical idea is a major feature of pantheistic philosophical systems such as Spinoza’s, Bruno’s or Schelling’s, for example. In a certain sense, it puts the focus on the conception that the world is self-contained, all life forms are part of it and all possible deities and higher beings are somewhere within it, maybe in some specific place, or maybe everywhere. Historically, this idea emerged in contrast to the well-affirmed concept of a transcendent God in the Christian world and was most sharply subsumed in Spinoza’s claim deussivenatura, God or nature. In the present context of technology, the implication of the immanence hypothesis is that technology, which is sometimes venerated beyond all limits, is part of the world, too, and therefore has no manipulative powers that transcend it or that are almost godlike. It is not something omnipotent, which one could be lead to think when watching an atomic bomb explosion, for example. This claim may seem as obvious as it can be but, being immersed in a deeply technological society, people sometimes tend to regard technology as a kind of saviour.

The thesis of immanence of technology amounts to dethroning the manipulative principle of technology, which permeates most of our everyday lives. In this respect, a similar position was taken by Heidegger in his work The Question Concerning Technology (1954), in which he identifies the essence of technology as creating standing reserves for exploitation. This backwardly defines us as exploiters – the more we live a technology-supported life, the more we figure as beings of exploitation. The hypothesis of immanence of technology in this regard implies also opening new potentials and perspectives of our own being in the world, not only as consumers and exploiters of technological devices but also as wondering, playful, poetic and communicative beings.

A crucial role in this opening of perspectives is played by explanations. The Psychophone phenomenon of contacting dead persons or spirits and Schriber’s method of feedback loop producing strange or unexpected audio and visual phenomena are in conflict with the ordinary scientific rationale because they lack explanation, more specifically, of the scientific kind. They point to the irritating fact that something technological remains unexplained. If it is often publicly heard that science has still a lot to discover, this often relates to cosmological research of the universe or to high energy particle physics – the so-called basic sciences. But technology is supposed to be already thoroughly explored because it is human-made, and when we make something, we are supposed to know all about it and have an explanation for all of its functioning. This standpoint was inscribed in scientific explanations and has been widely held by most participants of the scientific community for centuries. It constitutes the so-called foundationist understanding of explanations as determining what is possible and what is not. If something cannot be justified with an explanation, then it is not possible. This view largely appertained to the rationalist mind relying on Cartesian certainty and modern scientific objectification of nature, according to which everything that could be demonstrated rationally or, to put it in modern scientific terms, mathematically, counted as existing. This attitude culminated in scientific determinism that extended its influence well into the 20th century. Controversies over quantum physics, however, contributed a lot to its abandonment.

This rational and logical determination of scientific theories was embedded in scientific explanations and set the limits of what is possible. In this sense, such explanations had a justificatory and transcendent status with regard to actual events, similarly as gods in some religions. The term “natural law” echoes this transcendent status. Science as such was in this sense seen as superior to nature, as well as eschatological, propelling constant linear progress. Among historians and philosophers of science, the illusion of constant epistemological progress of science was disclosed by Thomas Kuhn in his epochal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). His main point was that progress in science cannot be conceived as linear but rather as a movement constituted of paradigmatic shifts called scientific revolutions, between which longer periods of the so-called normal science are established. Before him, Karl Popper had already made a major impact on philosophers of science with his view on scientific theories presented in his work The logic of scientific discovery (1934). He established the criterion of fallibility, which is the principle that a scientific theory can fundamentally never be confirmed, and is on the contrary always subject to verifications and merely the best theory at disposal, the one that has not been rejected. This mitigated a little the status of the Cartesian certainty that scientific theories had enjoyed up to that moment. A very sharp criticism of the epistemological basis of science, which triggered much discussion, was that of Paul Feyerabend in his Against Method (1975). His main idea is that there is no unique methodology in science, which was labelled as epistemological anarchism.
Generally speaking, philosophers of science have since then ‘softened’ their views on scientific explanations. They have broadened the concept of rationality in order to allow variations and changes in scientific methods, some even claiming that following the same strict rules would be irrational. In the 1970s, semantic theories of science started emerging, conceiving of science as the practice of making scientific models. The latter are basically of limited reach and cannot be generalized to the extent that they would describe ‘the whole world’ – the more particular and practical they are, the more limited their reach is. This view leaves room for models to have a descriptive, predictive and explanatory role but not necessarily an unlimited justificatory one, in the sense of exclusively determining what is possible and what is not. In fact, they still do so, but in the domain of their validity. Among practitioners of science, however, older views are still quite spread because not enough effort is put into presenting the relevance of these questions in an adequate manner during formal technical education.

By making the clash between the scientific and alternative explanations of the exhibited technological unknowns explicit, Ohira&Bonilha’s work points also to the limits imposed by science through scientific explanations. Their action is in trying to trigger new perspectives in the thinking viewer, in evoking the question about the real meaning of an explanation, whether it is scientific or not, about its place in our everyday life, and the way it contributes to the shaping of meaning. Not only about the reason these devices are such and such and why some human inventors made them that way, but also about the manner in which their being such and such influences our self-understanding.

An influential work that opened these questions was Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). Criticizing a sort of emptiness of scientific theories, which is reflected in mathematical formalization, but not disregarding science and its achievements, he points out that modern science has difficulty in delivering meaning to non-scientists. Its crisis stems from the fact that a huge gap has formed between scientific and everyday thinking about world phenomena, and this is a crisis of meaning. He coins his central term lifeworld in order to account for the inextricable intertwining of thinking and lifestyle, theory and practice, subject and object. He points out that our knowledge and self-understanding are basically intersubjective and form within our lifeworld. In terms of science, this means stressing what is the mutual influence of laboratory measurement practices and theory articulation. This aspect is also one that Kuhn stresses, and he presents to us a certain epistemological hermeneutical loop. Even in science, as in other areas of life, what we create, in this case scientific theories, has a feedback influence on us, sometimes more, sometimes less directly. And, moreover, we, as beings, develop certain responses to our environment, we expand into our lifeworld. In the case of technology, this means that we develop a certain attitude towards devices, we build a meaning entangled with them. This includes triggering certain responses on our part, which form part of the interaction experience.

The question then is not how to correctly understand the working of the Psychophone, Contemporary Divinities and the video feedback loop using Schriber’s method. A more appropriate question is what other way is there to free these technological tokens from limiting scientific explanations in a way that does not make us “suspicious about all that is new but unexplained, which often eliminates the chance to change things for better”, as the authors say in an interview.

If we are technically more precise, these devices are not in reality energetically self-sustained nor totally closed within themselves, essentially isolated from the environment. The two Divinities with their semiconductor ‘hearts’ get their energy from sunrays, like photovoltaic solar cells, and are therefore dependent on energy from their environment. But for us, beings of technology, it is amazing that such a small piece of material with no additional elements can open a one-way communication channel with the world. Poetically put, a ray of light enables us to connect with social information and events. This reads pretty much like a description of a magic stone and it could very well be seen that way without causing harm to anybody.

The Psychophone, because it can catch a wide range of signal frequencies (it is not tuned like a radio), is susceptible to various kinds of electromagnetic signals. Our environment is full of electromagnetic signals coming from phones, radio antennas, electrical cables, amateur radio emitters, outer space etc. In a way, one expects to catch some kind of a signal if a receiver is transformed this way. On the other hand, again, we can wonder how is communication between such distant places made possible with nothing else than immanent qualities of materials used for antennas and receivers. Electromagnetic fields used for wireless telecommunication can truly be seen as a wonder that no one can really justify in a rational, logical way as something that is given, named and given an explanation to live along with this phenomenon. With the Psychophone, the listener can discern sometimes more, sometimes less distinct sound patterns, as well as voices, and maybe have a chance to establish real contact with some radio amateurs. Taking into account the projective nature of human mind, one could in principle even hear known people or those who are already dead. Most of us do hear their voices from time to time in our heads anyway and nobody bothers to ask where they come from. If we imagine a situation where such a Psychophone acquires the status of a device that triggers such experience in some person’s psyche, we can most definitely say that the Psychophone is a device for transcommunicaton.

The video camera closed loop using Schriber’s method is not a hermetically closed loop. Even if the system is turned off, one has to connect it to some electrical source in order to see the intriguing images, otherwise there would be none. This way, the machine still gets a minimum of energy that enables some electrons to leave the cathode, fly and hit the screen, which are finally recorded by the camera. Still, the fact remains that when the device is not in operation mode, strange patterns appear on the screen, displaying moderate regularity. A tentative technical explanation would be that this is probably the result of the frequency of movement of cathode rays on the screen, the sampling frequency of the camera and the feedback loop between the camera and the screen, the latter achieving a similar effect as the two opposing mirrors and repeating an image ad infinitum. But what we can find fascinating is the fact that even when the machine ‘sleeps’, it ‘dreams’ about patterns. That is something partially ordered, in which humans tend to see different meaningful things, e.g. asteroids, details of flies or something else. If our visual projection of meaning unfolds continuously, and the machine becomes the token that triggers this process, it can be rightfully named a (one way) transcommunication device.

What does having a scientific explanation mean for these phenomena? Does it preclude their ‘immanent magic’ from opening free interpretational questions of other types? The answer is affirmative only if we understand scientific explanations in the rationalistic sense of justification for the existence of phenomena. But if we understand scientific theories as symbolic models of reality used for practical manipulation and mediation in a large and still growing scientific community, then there should be no greater conflict in keeping our interpretational options open, in sparing transcommunication a place under the sun. Such a position enables us to keep our horizon of understanding open, to more freely interpret what happens when humans and human-made machines interact, how they have a backward influence on our self-understanding and so on. The technological unknowns of Ohira&Bonilha disclose us mainly as communicative beings, as beings in search for other possibilities for communication, not stopping only at the established ones. We never know if new interpretations may bring some solutions that could change our attitude towards technology, nature, death, love, beauty and other potentially important topics in our lives. If they help bring some ethical or aesthetical turn, of which our society seems so much in need.

What scientists often overlook is the role of explanation in human lives in general, and what is the function of scientific explanations. Claiming that scientific explanations are the Truth, as some do, is a perspective-closing position, which chokes creativity and even development that is praised so much by the same scientists. What amateurs of science sometimes forget is that they can fall prey to the imperative of a hidden final Truth, which is possibly being held hostage by scientists, giving birth to conspiracy theories in science. Ohira&Bonilha invite the witnesses of their work to “exercise freedom” by building their own understanding of technological unknowns without closing the horizon for only one type of explanation, one preselected Truth.