Posted on July 5th, 2011 in of interest, peripherals and tagged architecture, art, mobility, nature, slowness, theory, walking
“Remember that project you did in grad school about the super slow mobile architecture that traveled around the earth?” Meredith asked me recently.
After some digging, I found the very much out-dated web documentation in my archives and thought it was interesting enough (for me, anyway) to put back online. In 2001 I was a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. One of the many courses I took outside the architecture school was a studio taught by Samantha Krukowski in the now defunct Convergent Media program. I ended up spending quite a bit of time in Convergent Media because 1) they were doing really interesting and cutting edge projects with digital tools, 2) the tools weren’t an end in themselves but a link in a creative process chain that stressed media translation between the analog and digital, and 3) the students and faculty there were in many ways much more sympathetic to my own artistic sensibility than the architects.
The Auto-Extraction Project gave me an opportunity to go deeper with some of the theoretical architecture research I was discovering through a speculative investigation of a hypothetical mobile architecture. As the explanatory text explains:
The Auto-Extraction Project is conceived of as a mobile architecture of restriction whereby the individual participant physically removes his/herself from mainstream culture/society by embarking on a hyper-slow journey around the earth. The structure of this mobile architecture consists of a compact, individual habitational cell equipped with austere sleeping, bathing, and cooking accommodations. Suspended from a high mono-rail-like track, the cell hovers above the ground a mere 9 – 12 inches (variably) and travels at a constant rate of approximately 10 feet per hour in perpetuity; the route which the track follows is remote and rugged, rarely passing through regions of significant human inhabitation.
There’s a good deal more documentation of the project here.
Posted on June 23rd, 2011 in project news and tagged art, ecology, environmentalism, exhibition, nature, philadelphia
I’ll be presenting a new project at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education as part of the upcoming exhibition “Facts and Fables: Stories of the Natural World,” which opens this Saturday, June 25, 4 – 7pm. The show includes some great work by a number of other artists, including my friends and colleagues, Jeanne Jaffe and Brian Collier.
The project, entitled “Nature Study, An Ambivalent Guide,” catalogs a contemplation of the ambivalence that defines humankind’s complex relationship to the natural environment. It consists of a printed guidebook that contains texts, field notes, sketches, photographs, interviews, and secondary research material. Accompanying the guidebook are several physical markers placed along the trail which establish an itinerant narrative through the range of perspectives presented in the guidebook.
See more documentation of the project here.
Posted on June 13th, 2011 in project news and tagged action mill, art, curating, manifesta8
Friends and collaborators Metahaven (Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk) recently asked me to contribute a short text for their publication project, The Exorcist, a journal that was created for Play Van Abbe, a multi-year exhibition series at Van Abbemuseum in The Netherlands. I was asked to write a reflection on Backbench, which was one of the projects that Bassam El Baroni and I initiated for our part of Manifesta 8. In the end, the project called Backbench that was presented in our exhibition was quite different from how we originally conceived it—and the beautifully designed and captured dramatization (film by Ergin Cavusoglu, set architecture by nOffice) of the actual interactions that comprised Backbench do not convey the full intensity and rawness of the experience. It still stings quite a bit to remember what happened a year ago. My short narrative included in The Exorcist (themed around “Negotiation”) is the only, and thus oblique, response I could manage.
A PDF of the journal is available for download here.
Image courtesy of Metahaven
Posted on November 2nd, 2010 in collaboration, project news and tagged activism, architecture, art, civil discourse, democracy, participation, theory
During the course of our work for Manifesta 8 (as Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum), Bassam El Baroni and I were invited by Markus Miessen to contribute a postscript to his latest book The Nightmare of Participation, which is the final installment of his trilogy of books on participation. (We commissioned nOffice, an architecture studio comprised of Markus and partners, Magnus Nilsson and Ralf Pflugfelder, to design both an architectural intervention and a display system for two projects in two separate exhibition spaces.) The book has just been released by Sternberg Press, and I’m happy to present our postscript below:
Postscript (from The Nightmare of Participation, Markus Miessen)
By Jeremy Beaudry and Bassam El Baroni
A nightmare is an iconic representation created by your mind. The idea of the icon is that it visualizes a situation that you cannot, in your conscious mind, imagine to be worse or more powerful. In sleep, the subconscious shows you something that your waking mind cannot elaborate on; it cannot construct a more difficult, horrific icon. The familiar and the plausible is often taken to such an extreme as to be terrifying, or problems that have no solution are presented. You become trapped in an endless cycle.
To wake up from a nightmare is to reach the threshold of realizing that you are in fact dreaming. You cannot escape the nightmare from within the logic of the dream itself; you must exit the dream world. Crossing the threshold of realization, you begin to understand that you are a character performing a role within a staged play—the dream—that you are watching. You observe this character, who is you, doing that which only a moment ago was natural and inevitable according to the logic of the nightmare. Escaping this logic, your conscious mind moves out of the dreamscape and into consciousness as the artificiality of the scene is revealed… the lights, the cameras, the props, the other actors, the monster who is not real, but rather, merely a huge animatronic puppet.
In the nightmare of participation, political subjects become caught in the logic of an iconic participation, a representative participation that has been exaggerated to the point of hollowness. The power of this participation is the power of the mesmerizing icon: It sustains the nightmare that we cannot wake up from, and it compels us to go on playing our assigned roles. Why has participation become a nightmare? The history is longer than we can tell here. Start looking a few decades back, to the 1980s, when the Western political model of participation as a legitimizing force emerged—a significant step in the evolution of late capitalism’s political theater. It is participation as instrumentalized political practice. Participation becomes a scripted scenario of liberal democracy, into which you insert the necessary actors, props, lighting, cameras, and mechanized monsters. Wake up!
A Worst-case Scripted Scenario of Participation! Imagine: the United Nations decides to build a new headquarters for the twenty-first century and beyond, a structure that truly can reflect the diversity of cultures and nations that comprise the global community. They invite architects, designers, and theorists from literally every corner of the world in order to participate in a design charrette to envision this pinnacle of world architecture. We might circumscribe the nightmare of participation in this scenario with the following: What is expected from the non-Western participants, such as the architect from Mozambique, or the interior designer from Oman? What are they supposed to contribute? Their heritage? Where does the premise for their participation come from?
Does the fact of their being from these places mean that they will actually think in terms related to where they are from? Is their otherness embodied so neatly, so simply? Or is difference not so evident as it used to be, and what if it were? What if they were so different that there was no common ground at all?
If these eager participants do represent a non- Western, non-modernist sphere, will they actually be acknowledged or seriously considered? Will anyone give a damn about their contributions if their alterity doesn’t meet the standards of acceptable difference?
Surely, many voices are represented—it is the UN afterall!—but what happens next? Representation is iconic and the icon can only deliver substance to a subconscious. What happens next? Nothing happens because no one wants anything to happen. We must want something to happen, and then state it in clear terms. We don’t want a representation; we want the thing itself. To wake up from the nightmare, a mechanism needs to be devised that does not function iconically, but practically. There is plenty of antagonism preloaded into the scenario above by reason of the nature of constructed difference. Difference was and is constructed by humans, but to get over difference we must construct a mechanism that exists in the world of consciousness, one that can reckon with the complexity of life. We need to leave antagonism behind for the sake of antagonism and move toward constructing solutions. Antagonism is a criticality applied from outside of the system, a criticality that is pessimistic and does not reciprocate. It only listens in order to consume and circulate that feedback within its own critical machine. Wake up!
The nightmare of participation can only end when we wake up to a strange world where we have accepted an order that is not predicated on the same measurement of things. Perhaps this is exactly why we don’t want to wake up from this nightmare. Perhaps to wake up to this strange world where we are truly disoriented is the nightmare we dread the most, and that is why we prefer to live in this recurring nightmare of participation, which we at least know and are familiar with.
In the present volume, the author—as well as his collaborators—has earnestly elaborated on the nightmare of participation in order to propose a series of countermeasures to a “politically motivated model of pseudo-participation.” The tactics suggested are drawn from diverse disciplines and knowledge bases, and they appear in several guises: the uninvited outsider, the crossbench practitioner, the management consultant / systems designer, to recall a few. And while our language here may veer more into the domain of the imaginative for metaphorical effect than Miessen’s, we understand the objective of this project to be a mechanism that moves us closer to the threshold of realization, the line at which we see the nightmare of participation for what it is and find agency to escape the grasp of its iconic power. The call to arms is clear: wake up!
Posted on October 21st, 2010 in collaboration, project news and tagged art, curating, manifesta8
I’ve recently returned from the opening of Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, in the region of Murcia, Spain. Working over the last year and a half with my good friend and colleague Bassam El Baroni as Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), we curated a multi-part project and exhibition in several venues across two cities in the region of Murcia, Spain. We were aided immensely by the Manifesta team, including our curatorial assistant, Yolande Riquelme, a young curator from Murcia.
To be as concise as possible, what we did was raise the question: How can any art project genuinely touch on the sophisticated and haphazard web of life’s complexity? To understand complexity, it is not enough just to possess the ability to be critical, and it can only be part of a more disciplined and strategic act. For the exhibition OVERSCORE, we aim to conceive, build and implement a curatorial interface which firstly outlines those elements hindering the emergence of complexity in art, and then to describe the strategies for projects seeking to embody it. The Theory of Applied Enigmatics is that interface. Here, the term ‘Enigmatics’ refers to ideas and proposals which appear or resonate from a confrontation with complexity.
An overscore is a line drawn through words. It partially erases them but also shows an ongoing process of editing; it reveals and obscures the past, while establishing links with what emerges in the present and future. Similarly, The Theory of Applied Enigmatics both highlights and seeks to revise the accepted institutional blueprints – those idealistic and often subconscious models which are used to simplify bigger issues concerning life, people, places, events, history and culture within artistic practice today. It also acts as the mechanism connecting the intellectual input of a diverse array of artists and contributors. The theory offers itself to the visitor as a key with which s/he can unlock the underlying frameworks of history, culture and politics existing in, and between, the artists’ works.
Former Post Office
Running for a period of 100 days, Manifesta 8 will be taking place in the cities of Murcia and Cartagena in historical buildings, museums, unconventional spaces and several media channels. Manifesta 8 is curated by three independent curatorial collectives, each of them developing a project as an autonomous curatorial contribution. The collectives are ACAF, Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS) and tranzit.org.
Central Hall, Former Post Office
