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 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 August 21st, 2010 in musings and tagged action, art, curating, manifesta8, theory
We were confronted by a loss of faith, a lack of meaning in things that we did, that we invested all of this time and energy and resources into. We felt that art was always instrumentalized to further the agendas of others. We felt trapped, centripetally pulled into a cyclical space of crisis, anger, and confusion. We kept spinning around and around…
Behind every corner, in every headline, underlying every panel discussion and infused in every officially important art exhibition, a crisis lurked. Look out! Duck! Stay sharp! You better think fast and deal. Put out that fire, or be consumed by the flames of this or that impending sociopolitical Moloch. The curatorial statement should be approximately 1500 words in length.
It made us angry. Everything’s so fucked up. There’s no way out. After all the posts-this and -that we’re left with the same old totalizing hegemony, the monolith of neoliberalism. Always banging our heads against it, doing the dance, going through the motions of being “critical.” We asked the “right” questions of the “right” people and they gave us the “right” answers. Impeccable performances every time. The opening was a ripping party.
We were confused. It didn’t seem to get us anywhere — the right questions and the right answers. Nothing changed. Same old criticality, different venue. We couldn’t get organized, couldn’t get clear, no time to reflect, to strategize…
Meantime, we had another crisis to deal with. Back at it. Where’s the thing this time? Istanbul? Berlin? Sao Paolo? See you next year at the fair. Did ya hear? The ultra-nationalists won another handful of seats in Parliament. Or was it the Congress? Europe’s fucked, man. These guys just hate immigrants. There’s an Egyptian artist I saw at the last one — made this project where he reimagined some department store chain as an Arab souq. No shit. We should propose a project about that… I know some artists from South Africa that live between New York and Brussels.
Stilled pissed off. That exhibition of political art got panned in the critical journals. The popular press ignored it. The Right continued to dominate the debate with racist diatribes. The Left shouted weak neoliberal platitudes bathed in the worn rhetoric of socialism. The next day another dozen exhibition announcements came through E-FLUX, all variations on the same theme. Same old criticality, different venues. What are we doing? Career’s going great, though. See the news about the earthquake in Haiti? I saw this artist from Haiti in the last biennale…
Posted on May 22nd, 2010 in musings and tagged action mill, anthropology, research, theory, value
‘Value’ is one of those terms—like ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’—that I feel I hear more and more in our contemporary lexicon, and as a term that is used often enough and in several different contexts, its invocation is somewhat vague and its meaning even less clear. But like ‘community’ and ‘sustainability’ and any number of other fashionable terms we might come across in political speeches or keynote addresses or advertisements, it is this lack of definition that makes the word ‘value’ and its attendant concept all the more compelling as a subject for consideration. For example (drawn from my experience), we in The Action Mill, the design studio I work with, describe earnestly the value that we provide to our clients and partners (and even the more amorphous public good) through the work that we do. This comes in part from the general feeling that 1) we are doing important work that pushes progressive social change and promotes nonviolent strategy, and 2) our work can be measured in terms of things like maximization of existing resources, earned (that is, free) media from compelling public actions, and the production of knowledge and social capital. Of course, there is also a point at which all of this ‘value’ has to be reified in monetary terms: we are a business and we charge fees for our services. It is in this last point—the price tag, to be gauche—where the questions around value arise. What determines value? Who determines value? How is value mediated or transferred? What do we talk about when we talk about value?
We won’t be so surprised to discover that there is no aspect of life that is not touched by such questions about value. What I mean is that once the urgency of such questions about value was pointed out to me, then the only surprise I felt was that of the “no shit” variety. In reading David Graeber‘s Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (2004), I’ve begun to understand how a solid theory of value is essential to penetrating so many pressing sociopolitical, cultural, and economical conditions. As Graeber notes, anthropologists have not been very successful in developing such a theory of value—which is why he takes up the task here—but they do seem best equipped to do so. (We certainly can’t allow the economists to have the final say about value!) Anthropology is a curious field with a curious history filled with curious people studying even more curious peoples doing very curious things. The theory and the jargon are dense, but what comes through with a bit of laborious study are many incredible insights that are obviously about the practices of traditional peoples but also importantly about how we might both understand ourselves (first world westerners) and subsequently imagine other ways of being in the world that deviate from our dominant ideologies and paradigms. Hence, Graeber reviews the literature on how key anthropologists and social theorists have discussed value in order to work toward his own theory.
I’m working my way through the text. I’ve got a ways to go. I’m doubling back and rereading a lot. So this brief post is a placeholder for more focused future writing where I can dig in and make more salient connections to other issues and projects I’m working on (e.g. what is the value in producing a large, expensive international biennial exhibition of contemporary art?!). The most basic definition the book begins with is that social theory has dealt with three different conceptions of value that converge in our present understanding:
1. “values” in the sociological sense: conceptions of what is ultimately good, proper, or desirable in human life
2. “value” in the economic sense: the degree to which objects are desired, particularly, as measured by how much others are willing to give up to get them
3. “value” in the linguistic sense, which goes back to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966), and might most simply be glossed as “meaningful difference” (pp. 1-2)
When we talk about value, as in my example above, generally all of these conceptions factor into the meaning of the term. It is Graeber’s task to chart these conceptions and their convergence in what ultimately is a very politically engaged project. (His commitment to theorizing and practicing a radical politics from an anarchist perspective is clear.) There are some real lucid gems in Greaber’s writing. In closing, I’ll drop two adjacent passages here:
The ultimate stakes of politics, according to Turner, is not even the struggle to appropriate value; it is the struggle to establish what value is. Similarly, the ultimate freedom is not the freedom to create or accumulate value, but the freedom to decide (collectively or individually) what it is that make life worth living. In the end, then, politics is about the meaning of life. Any such project of constructing meanings necessarily involves imagining totalities (since this is the stuff of meaning), even if no such project can ever be completely translated into reality — reality being, by definition, what which is always more complicated than any construction we can put on it.
Any notion of freedom, whether it’s the more individualistic vision of creative consumption, or the notion of free cultural creativity and decentering I have been trying to develop here, demands both resistance against the imposition of any totalizing view of what society or value must be like, but also recognition that some kind of regulating mechanism will have to exist, and therefore, calls for serious thought about what sort will best ensure people are, in fact, free to conceive of value in whatever form they wish. If one does not, at least in the present day and age, one is simply going to end up reproducing the logic of the market without acknowledging it. And if we are going to try to think seriously about alternatives to the vision of “freedom” currently being presented to us—one in which nation-states serve primarily as protectors of corporate property, unelected international institutions regulate an otherwise unbridled “free market” mainly to protect the interests of financiers, and personal freedom becomes limited to personal consumption choices—we had best stop thinking that these matters are going to take care of themselves and start thinking of what a more viable and hopefully less coercive regulating mechanism might actually be like. (pp. 88-89)
Posted on May 15th, 2010 in musings and tagged action, action mill, design, strategy, theory
Strat(egy) to action and vice versa. Meaning that you can craft strategy in order to shape long-term goals and actions, but taking action makes strategy manifest and allows for iteration of that strategy. Action fleshes out nascent meaning! Learning with The Action Mill.
