Distribution

distribution

logistics↵ part I

Elaine W. Ho & Florian Cramer

The following edited correspondence ran in parallel to shipment HQL-364 from Rotterdam to Hong Kong through the network of LIGHT LOGISTICS, a project initiated and coordinated by the ‘now and again exhibition space, distribution service, thematic inquiry, and sometimes shop in Kowloon, Hong Kong’, Display Distribute. LIGHT LOGISTICS is a ‘person-to-person distribution network enabled by the surplus carrying power of couriers’ and ‘a free but not-in-time service’.

 

The LIGHT LOGISTICS log references the hard tracking of global courier systems, yet with the wobbling reliability of gossip and uneven distribution of timing and information as its highlight terms of service. There is a clarity of transaction in that publications from our distro may be purchased, and points A and B are designated by where the book begins (most often from our relay centre in Hong Kong, but sometimes also directly from the publisher) and where the reader-receiver is located. But in and around that there is a narrative arc that makes space for all kinds of action and relation to occur, if one pays enough attention. Couriering becomes a physical linkage imbued with other potentiality, because the courier is very often a reader or bookmaker herself, or becomes one. In this sense, our enterprise feels more akin to the challenge of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’—a strange realism composed of the banal details of moving things from one place to another, begging other possibilities for the ways we inscribe the world.

2020-11-04

Hello Elaine,

Are you familiar with mail artist Ulises Carrión’s projected courier system E.A.M.I.S. (‘Erratic Art Mail International System’) from 1977? It was preceded by an essay ‘Mail Art and the Big Monster’ in which he wrote:

Mail art uses as support the postal system—a complex, international system of transport, including thousands of people, buildings, machinery, world treaties, and God knows what. The proof that the post is not the medium is that to use it, an artist doesn’t need to understand how it functions. Even in the utopic possibility that the artist reaches complete understanding of the system, he cannot control it.

… All I know is that there is a Monster, and that by posting all sorts of mail pieces, I am knocking at his door.

 

To quote from the EAMIS manifesto:

An alternative to the official
Post Offices.

1.

The E.A.M.I.S will carry messages in any format: cards, letters, parcels, etc, and realized in any medium—book, cassette, tape, film, etc.

2.

The message must reach the E.A.M.I.S office by any way other than the official Post Offices. It can be delivered by the author or by any other person. …

8.

By using the E.A.M.I.S you support the only alternative to the national bureaucracies and you strengthen the international artists community.

Ulises Carrión (Post Master)

Florian

 

2020-11-14

Dear Florian,

Yes, I found it poignant that at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in the West there was a sudden interest in one-on-one correspondences again—even e-mail chain letters started to resurface in my inbox. Of course, with the diminishing of face-to-face contact the opening of other channels by which intimacy and affect can travel makes perfect sense. The LIGHT LOGISTICS project of Display Distribute is viewed in mainland China and Hong Kong much more through this social lens than as the larger inquiry into infrastructure that we discuss ourselves. At least from my own point of view as a courier, these are the kinds of comments we hear most from receivers and other participating couriers, because the real-life interactions logisticking garners are completely different encounters than would happen otherwise with the commercial courier companies that everyone has now grown accustomed to in their daily lives. We find out we have friends in common, we tell one another our travel plans, there are publishing projects and even the sharing of pet photos among strangers. Maybe it’s a bit mundane or trite, but the also banal question of slowness that is intertwined with these interactions and journeys is one of the most important aspects of reconsidering how globalization, technology, and infrastructure affect our relations to the world and with one another.

Best,

e

 

2020-11-11

Dear Elaine,

My friend Goodiepal (musician, one-of-a-kind-person, and community activist living in Copenhagen) runs a similar courier system where people send postal mail to his mother or grandmother [he doesn’t have an e-mail address]/Friends pick it up and physically deliver it to him wherever in the world he is. His collective (Goodiepal & Pals) now also runs a courier/smuggling operation to bring refugees over the EU border in Serbia.

-F

 

2020-11-10

Dear Florian,

Goodiepal, yes! It sounds like his European underground railroad is a heroic form of subterfuge from which we could learn more and exchange with. It has also always been our main reference to think through smugglers and pirates and parallel traders. With the fragile relations between Hong Kong and the mainland being the very first impetus, the transition toward focusing upon publications being carried across borders has very much to do with the sensitivity of content and those risks involved. As an aside, I like very much the use of the word ‘sensitivity’ when discussing the sociopolitical ‘appropriateness’ of content in the Chinese context. Other countries get a good laugh about China announcing more than often enough about its ‘feelings’ being hurt by other countries, but what is acute about this notion is that it does not remove the realm of aesthetics and the affective from politics as most nation states pretend to do in the name of a general welfare. Regardless, for us to slip the most personal and/or minute of encounters into a structure that does not need them could perhaps be described as a soft call to sensitize, weaken, or slow down the slick and steely frames that infrastructure and contemporary logistics↵ advance.

Today I had an interesting conversation with members of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and a few others, and JJ recalled how when they were doing interventions in the finance district of New York—I think in the early 2000s—wanting to learn all about finance as a means towards dismantling capitalism. But later, they grew to think that you don’t need to understand the system if you really want to smash it, because dismantling goes beyond reform;

 

the real goal would be to build up something completely other...

I don’t necessarily agree with this thought, though the degree of how much one should understand what one wants to infiltrate, rework, dismantle, and so on, needs to be addressed. It is notable, nevertheless, that Carrión also premises the ignorance of the artist as part of his manifest.

There was a period in my logistics↵ fervour where
I wanted to take online courses in industrial logistics↵ in order to understand the frameworks better, but perhaps intuitively the scale didn’t reach me down here in the shadowy realm of one-to-one exchanges... I have, however, investigatively engaged in some cross-border parallel trading of luxury cosmetics and milk powder!

Greetings from Guangzhou,

e

 

2020-11-18

While reading your text ‘Getting a Move On: A Logistics of Thought towards Print and Publics’, I was reminded of a discussion on piracy with Raqs Media Collective circa fifteen years ago that taught me about my (and generally Western) biases in perspectives on piracy. Back then, piracy was largely discussed in the context of download culture (with The Pirate Bay, Library.nu/LibGen, aaaaarg & WaReZ servers as the standard examples), but Raqs brought in the perspective of pirated software and DVDs sold on street markets. (I wonder whether that culture and economy still exist. When I moved to my neighbourhood in Rotterdam, it was still normal that when you went to a hairdresser, mobile vendors of pirated DVDs would come by and sell you the latest Hollywood films.) Back then, I largely shared the view of the Free Software/Open Source movement that intellectual property should end but that the piracy of commercial software ultimately had the effect of keeping the software industry in business—preventing a mainstream success of Free Software. Raqs, however, argued in favour of considering pirate work as a form of community care addressing real community needs, which then made me rethink my position. Nevertheless, I’m still torn on this issue. If one just sticks to the example of digital piracy, then one could argue that The Pirate Bay paved the way for Netflix, LibGen paved the way for Amazon Kindle, and WaReZ servers paved the way for App Stores; not only conceptually or in their user interface design, but also in the ‘content’ they provided. (The Pirate Bay offered pretty much the same kind of mainstream films that are offered by Netflix, and so on).

-F

 

E: There is a great text from Lawrence Liang (also a frequent collaborator with Raqs), Prashant Iyengar and Jiti Nichani called ‘How Does an Asian Commons Mean’, and it offers exactly a varying genealogy from which to historically and culturally understand piracy and versioning as a process of commoning. It was written some years ago and maybe also does not resolve the quandary you mention regarding how digital piracy and FLOSS (Free Libre and Open Source Software) movements have provided fodder for the strengthened barricades of corporate platforms, but this cat-and-mouse game was always the case, wasn’t it?

F: In my view, Open Source and piracy activists are still far ahead of contemporary art institutions in their rejection of property and alternative visions of ownership and public distribution. But I also tend to find those debates in FLOSS, piracy and associated art practices being stuck in discourses of the 1990s. They tend to get deadlocked in technicalities of media, and in debates on how to keep channels open. Therefore,
I am very much in tune with Display Distribute and how it has shifted all these questions to: ‘who will transport it?’ and ‘who will read it?’

(correspondence continued in collective organization)