Collective organization
collective organization↵
Display Distribute
[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.
— ‘Getting a Move On: A Logistics of Thought towards Print and Publics’, Elaine W. Ho
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,
On the interest in mail art, I found it poignant that at the beginning of the pandemic in the West there was a sudden interest in mail art again—even e-mail chain letters started to resurface in my inbox. Of course, with the diminishing of face-to-face contact it makes perfect sense that other channels by which intimacy and affect can travel opened. The LIGHT LOGISTICS project of Display Distribute is viewed in mainland China and Hong Kong much more more through this social lens than as the larger inquiry into infrastructure that we discuss ourselves, or at least from my own point of view as a courier, these are the kinds of comments we hear most from receivers and participating couriers, because the real interaction we have via logisticking garners a completely different conversation 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 with 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 affects our relations to the world and with one another.
Best,
e
2020-11-11
Dear Elaine,
My good friend Goodiepal (musician, one-of-a-kind-person and community activist from Denmark) 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! Hearing that we are only second-degree separated—like Display Distribute manoeuvres, one-to-one-to-one—begs for other kinds of collusions and forms of radical exchange. At least it sounds like his European underground↵ railroad is a heroic form of subterfuge worth learning from. 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. The West gets a good laugh about China announcing more than often enough about its ‘feelings’ getting 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 to dismantle the system. 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, etc., 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 in the shadows of our realm... 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 15 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 exists. 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, etc.).
–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 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: I find it excellent how Display Distribute shifts this whole perspective—the often deadlocked and tired debate, on ‘Who will read it?’.
E: I think the need to play with formats now more than ever before is not because crisis is upon us, but because the problems that were always there have been revealed more blatantly. Why art, design, and culture are still important is because they deal with methodologies—comings together and ways of seeing and playing that precede the politics that most everyday folk don’t even realize addresses (or neglects, or unfairly treats) them. So education, and welfare, and government funding all need to go through a self-reflexive hall of mirrors, so to speak.
F: I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, I’m afraid of the empty gestures↵ and buzzwords that will get ticked off (like, for example, ‘care’ as a now-ubiquitous noun in art project funding application prose) if this becomes more mainstream. In Europe, I also witness the constant failure of artists to truly commit to collective projects and not just use them as platforms↵ for displaying/performing their individual portfolios.
E: Yes, we’ve watched the hype on care build up over the last year to no surprise at all, but I guess that’s the nature of hype, isn’t it? The tricky thing about care, and so many practices actually, is that they really need to be enacted rather than theorized. But the need to repeat, repeat, and repeat again to people who are less affected by what is lacking in the system (power is a crux issue at every scale) somehow also gives those of us down in the ‘undercommons’ a tremendous pressure to re-circuit, re-articulate, and re-work the existing imaginaries.
What you mentioned about the failure to really collectivize in Europe is also a problem in Hong Kong and China. When HomeShop, the artist-run project space I was involved with from 2008–2013, was invited to participate in the ‘Unlived by What is Seen’ exhibition in 2014, the curators told us they wanted to include us as a collective practice because they felt that all the other collectives they observed in China at the time were merely solidarity-for-opportunity kinds of conglomerations, often splitting up when the group becomes famous enough that the individuals of a group can then make their way with solo careers.
So it’s no wonder that so many of us have that starry-eyed fascination with the hype of many Indonesian collectives, haha, but as discussed with my friend Riar Rizaldi in a talk a couple of weeks ago, there are many problems there as well that tend not to get discussed publicly, and the exportation of nongkrong can in some ways be just as much of a selling strategy like anything else.
That said, having much more time to read and dilly-dally around in a confined space these days, I finally got to read your paper on 1970s Mail Art more carefully, and the key value I can take from the various examples you present is to see similar struggles and resonances resulting in similar impulses and tactics, such that your idea of the ‘eternal network’ represents a notion of affinity.
F: Yes, and I am also wondering whether these struggles, resonances, and mistakes need to be constantly re-enacted and repeated by each new generation in order to be fully (i.e, not just in an abstract or disembodied manner) understood.
E: What changes along the way, from generation-to-generation mutation? Does such repetition confine our mail art fandom to the realm of marginal play? Whatever foresight those projects from the 1960s forward had for internet behaviours today—and as you say our pinpointing of AI/algorithms as the evils of the system is misplaced—how could intimate and networked actions parasiting off of larger infrastructures really effect anything?
F: Maybe that’s the problem—that, by focusing on (larger societal) effects, we’re unintentionally superimposing growth or impact expectations on these projects while their main value might have been their subjective-collective experience, and functioning as an experiment?
E: Thank you for the reminder. I have to tell myself again and again in so many arenas to focus upon ‘subjective-collective experience, and functioning as an experiment’, rather than the unintentional but hard-to-escape notions of growth, development, and impact, as you say… The question of change is perhaps naïve and misplaced. Anyhow, there are certain murky areas between centralization and decentralization in which Display Distribute is certainly implicated. You are right that ‘radical inclusivity’ does not necessarily garner any momentum, but neither do elitism and the reverse snobbery of oligarchic movements, which is a critique of both ends of the political spectrum.
If as you say the main value is located in the experiment of a subjective-collective experience, then your previous question might be answered by saying that the constant re-enactments and repetitions by new generations are necessary. Embodiment and affect cannot be historically reviewed except as practiced singularities, right?
F: Yes, but you could also criticize that as a petty-bourgeois hobbyist self-limitation that gives up on the larger picture…
E: Completely on the mark as well! There is a close friend with whom I have had many emotional disputes along these lines, and perhaps this pinpointed critique precisely circles us back in some way—whether as a picture or a way of manoeuvring—to the necessities of an eternal network.
2021-02-19
Dear 慢遞員易拎何子 (& 妍廷),
HQL-364 is currently quarantined in a hotel in Taichung. Elaine, I hope it’s not a major let-down that we have only been able to bag 13 copies because of the bulkiness of Yentings luggage. My agreement with courier Amy S. Wu was that she would give me a large stack of copies and that I would return to her whatever wouldn’t fit the luggage. The remaining 62 copies are currently at my home and still need to be returned to Amy, who lives nearby.
Florian