Publishing:Making Matters Lexicon

introduction

making matters

a vocabulary for collective arts

Janneke Wesseling & Florian Cramer

The world today faces overwhelming ecological and social problems and the concern for material existence on earth is more pressing than ever. When looking at the field of art and design, this means that research into our relation to the world around us and the actual making of things has acquired a new urgency. Making Matters asks what role visual artists and designers can play under these conditions. The book gathers a number of relevant making practices and investigates the urgency from which they arise.

One of the main departure points of Making Matters is the realization that collective action is necessary and inevitable, in society at large as well as in the field of the arts. Collective art and design practices therefore are the main focus of this book. They point to a transformation of working methods that not only shapes and changes practices but also affects artists and designers in their position and identity: from individuality and autonomy to experimental collectivity and collaboration, locally
as well as globally.

A new perspective on ‘making’ becomes apparent here. When practices shift towards collaborative making processes instead of individual products, what does ‘making’ and the production of concrete, material ‘things’ mean? Artists collaborate with non-artists and in doing so may take on other identities, such as researcher, community activist, computer hacker, or business consultant. The research done by these artists departs from the most diverse areas, from logistics and biotechnology to geology or dance. As a result, the distinction between art, design, research, and activism is dissolving. It follows that these practices may hardly be recognizable as art or design practices any longer, nor are their outcomes necessarily identifiable as artistic outcomes, let alone as specific art works. Some of these practices no longer conform to a conventional Western idea of art and art making. This book aims to identify some of their key concepts and to make their vocabularies accessible to a larger public.

The practices brought together in this book address specific ecological and social problems, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. All of them embrace the complexity of the various crises that we find ourselves in and try to develop ways of dealing with them. They experiment with and embody examples of new ways of living together and of
a sustainable existence on Earth with all living beings.

Material artistic practices, i.e., ways of concrete making and doing, often go hand-in-hand with
a theoretical inquiry. The textual and visual contributions in this book embody this intertwinement of conceptual and material thinking. The authors share an interest in artistic research, a relatively newly institutionalized research field that connects doing and thinking, making and theorizing, in a reciprocal exchange that does not prioritize one over the other. In artistic research, practical action (making) and theoretical reflection (thinking) go together, action and thought are inextricably linked.

Art contests the age-old dichotomy of theory and practice. Since Modernism, it has involved a constant questioning of the role of art and artist. The practices presented in this book put these questions on the table once more. They exemplify the attempt to bridge the distance between theory and practice, or even (in some cases) to obliterate the distinction between art production, critical reflection, and everyday life.  

The roles of artist, curator, institution (museum, Kunsthalle, artist-run spaces, biennial, documenta) and audience may become fused in the production of art.

This development raises fundamental questions
of authorship and of the status quo of the art object and process: where is it situated and how can it be perceived or experienced? The materialization of art, its aesthetic dimension, its ‘aesthetic—felt, spatio-temporal—dimension’, is acquiring new meaning and importance. In the light of the pressing challenges that we are facing on a global scale, and in the light of the critical and discursive potential of contemporary art practice, ‘making’ matters more than ever before.

how, on what ground, have the contributions
to this book been selected?

Artists collectives are at the centre of attention
in contemporary art discourse. The 15th edition of the world’s leading contemporary art exhibition documenta (2022) will bring the contemporary art phenomenon of multidisciplinary collectives to a wider audience. Not only are its curators, the Indonesian ruangrupa collective, such a collective themselves; most artists invited to documenta 15 are multidisciplinary collectives, too.

This book aims to contribute to the growing body
of literature on the phenomenon of the art collective in its present-day, multidisciplinary, and hybrid form.
It aims to provide insight into the subject matter of these collective multidisciplinary practices. Most contributors are practitioners whose work falls in
the cracks between the disciplines of art, design, critical theory, research, performance, community organization, social activism, and critical engagement with technology. Even when their work is grounded in one of those disciplines, it usually encompasses at least two others. In the end, these practices and the texts in this book complicate the following questions: What is research when it is done by artists? What is ‘making’ when it is informed by critical theory and turned into activism? What is ‘technology’ when it is articulated by performance artists and in community projects? What happens when their implicit concepts, definitions, and vocabularies, which differ from mainstream understandings of those same concepts, are explicated in a specific vocabulary?

The project began with a four-year research project by our material practices workgroup into the possibility of a crossover between art, design, and technology as an alternative to the capitalist-driven concept of the ‘creative industries’ consortium.
It ended with the observation that alternative crossovers exist in the often overlooked and often overlapping fields of artistic research, artists’ and designers’ experiments with commons, Open Source culture, post-humanism and biopolitics, alternative economies, and community organization. Artists do not simply depict or reflect upon these varying perspectives from a critical distance, but radically translate them into their everyday ways of living and working, in other words, into material practices. This book aims to explicate tacit knowledge from artists’ material practices and from real-life experiments conducted in a world in crisis while gaining insight into present-day paradigm shifts in the arts.  

The different disciplinary groundings of our contributors correspond to the respective disciplinary groundings and research specializations within the material practices workgroup: Leiden University, Willem de Kooning Academy, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Waag, West Den Haag. Based on the expertise and the discussions in the workgroup, contributors were invited who could help to both focus and complicate the question of how artists practices and real-life experiments amount to knowledge for ways of living and survival in the planetary crisis.

reading guide

The vocabulary of concepts relating to collective material art practices presented here is not an encyclopaedia nor even an inventory and it is by no means complete. It may be regarded as a thought experiment, aimed at stimulating further debate and new vocabularies.

The entries are categorized under seven headings, laid out in alphabetical order: bodies, collective, critique, economy, making, matter, and undisciplined. In some cases, entries refer to connected entries.
The order of reading is not linear. You are invited to read the entries in any given order.

bodies

embeddedness

Femke Snelting

Embeddedness: a triple d word with tentacles in geology, surfacing every trouble possible from dependency to duress. There is nothing simple about this term: embeddedness means to be attentive to multiple inter-operating spacetimes, to resonate with what is below as well as with what is above and delà, to resist extraction, and to account for remote implications.

In assembling ideas that are seemingly disconnected and uneven (the seabird and the epilogue, the song and the soil, the punch clock and the ecosystem, the streetlight
and the kick-on-beat), the logic
of knowing-to-prove is unsustainable because incongruity appears to be
offering atypical thinking.
Yet curiosity thrives.

embeddedness:
to be set solidly into a mass

Ship merchants operating from the Liverpool docks in the nineteenth century needed the tides predicted and their clocks calibrated, so they commissioned the Bidston Observatory. The observatory was to be strategically situated on the highest point of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking the river Mersey, the river Dee, and the Irish sea. Completed in 1866, it was made out of sandstone extracted from the bedrock below, creating a cavity which now forms the observatories’ extensive basements. Around the building, a deep moat was dug to minimize interference from neighbouring traffic. The plinth in the picture (p. 30) is a ‘bedrock connection point’, located in the observatory sub-vault. Sheltered from temperature shifts and movements from elsewhere, the plinth provided a stable platform for a century of exacting earth observation.

Cornwall, last fall. Suddenly they feel the ground tremble, and hear windows rattle. Afterwards, Dr. Ryan Law, managing director of Geothermal Engineering explains to the local press:

As part of the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power testing, we did cause some micro-seismicity. Although this was within our regulatory limits,

we are stopping operations until we understand the cause. The tremors are low-scale and should not be anything to be afraid of.

Geothermal energy is produced by harnessing heat from the earth’s core. To produce power from this heat, extremely deep wells need to be drilled and water is pumped through them at high pressure. Since the Bronze age, Cornwall has been mined for tin, copper, arsenic, and lithium. Tremors in the porous underground are set off as a result of the additional disturbance caused by geothermal boring. In the non-committal words of the general manager, they sense all the troubles that wreck the earth: ‘we caused micro-seismicity’ ... ‘within our regulatory limits’ ... ‘until we understand the cause’ ... ‘not anything to be afraid of’.

© Kym Ward (2022).

embeddedness:
laying in a bed of surrounding matter

South or north of here, already more than ten years ago. It takes him many long days to level the driveway of his holiday home. Using a barre à mine, a forged iron bar originally used by miners to pound the ground and break the surface, his movements reverberate through the valley. Eventually, he hits an immovable piece of rock and the pounding stops. He points, almost proudly, and says: ‘look, the earth!’  

Early on, the observatory installed a seismometer on the sub-vault plinth. Kept in the dark, it continuously auto-registered slight movements on light sensitive paper that corresponded with earthquakes experienced on the other side of the planet. A Milne-Shaw Vertical Tiltmeter was acquired in 1910, a precision instrument based on the same principle as the seismograph, where one part remains stationary and fixed, while another part moves together with the earth’s surface. The vertical tiltmeter derives its precision from using a rigid arm that points upwards, with a pendulum hanging down from it. The swinging of the pendulum, with its fulcrum fixed to the bedrock connection point, makes micro-seismicity observable by magnifying the actual motion of the earth. It was with this instrument that the phenomena of ‘tidal load’ could be observed, the oscillating north-south tilt of the Wirral peninsula due to the strain of the water weighing down the bedrock (and subsequently, the plinth itself) at high tide.

A physiotherapist once told me about her interest in how bodies feel their way around with the help of instruments. She explained her fascination through the example of cooking a soup or a sauce. If you stir the bottom with a wooden spoon, she said, you will feel precisely at which moment it starts to catch. You do not need to put your hand into the hot liquid to touch the bottom of the pan.

At the observatory, the so-called ‘ocean loading effect’ continued to be registered with increased precision until the early seventies, when the expanding data about earth tides from around the world started to show unexplained discrepancies in neighbouring sites; the magnitude of the north-south tilt varied by twenty percent when measured in one end of its sub-vault, or the other. In an article called ‘Tidal Tilt Anomalies’, two scientists working at Bidston claimed that these inconsistencies could be explained by unknowable couplings between the landmass movement and the strain on the site itself. ‘A mine or a tunnel, in which tilt measurements are usually taken, represents a discontinuity in the Earth’s crust.’ By comparing different types of instruments, they found that tiltmeters were extremely accurate but that they were measuring tidal tilt in combination with hyper local movements due to situated geological conditions. Tidal tilt observations where eventually abandoned due to non-compliant embedded data.

embeddedness:
trembling with the earth

As with many material evidences of techno-scientific progress, the appointing of stability, the fixing of a point zero wherever convenient, seems to require an entitled mode of being in the world.

Each point is merely a conceptual marker, which can be assigned and reassigned in the equation hierarchy as the ‘coordinating zero point’ and every line can be formed to be the ‘coordinating axis’.

Power arranges itself around such arbitrary vantage points, through which the movement of goods and people elsewhere can be controlled. Contributing to the reliable navigation of ships across the British empire, but also actively and continuously supporting the convenient fable of transparent observation, the Bidston Observatory aligned with different scales of capitalist endeavour, exploitation, colonialist and imperialist modes of worlding.

He is being driven around his native island Martinique, pointing out the places that he grew up in and that vanished after the earthquakes. The island is part of an archipelago located on the crumbling intersection of two tectonic plates, which makes the geo-plasticity of the earth regularly interact with human activity. ‘We understand the world better if we tremble with it’, he explains.

To be embedded depends politically nor epistemologically on a fixed locus of observation. It opposes systematic thinking without fear, because it is a mode of understanding the world that resonates with the multidimensional and multidirectional impact of being embedded, of its inherent instability. Embeddedness is to ‘tremble with the world’.

The image cuts back to the view from the car window, an undulating green landscape moving by under a bright blue sky filled with clouds. He continues:

The world trembles in every way. It trembles organically and geologically. It trembles even with the climate, poor me, as far
as I know. But the world also trembles through the relations
we have with each other.

gestures

Baruch Gottlieb

Czechoslovakian philosopher of communication Vilém Flusser asserted that the written word, with its linear, causal form of argumentation, was no longer sufficient to grapple with a world of technical effects occurring globally at the speed of light. One of his prescient claims was that what he called ‘technical images’ would take cultural precedence over the foregoing dominance of text. He defined technical, or synthetic images, as ‘projections from the level of code’, code inscribed in the apparatuses of modernity, be these technical or institutional. Technical images are, according to Flusser, ‘images of texts’ and thus synthesize human knowledge in forms that speed up critical responsiveness such that it can keep up with a very unstable condition.

Fred Forest, Les Gestes du Professeur, U-matic video, B/W, 1974.

But what would those technical images look like? How might they come to be employed for the critical purpose proposed by Flusser? Luckily, he was able to demonstrate what he had in mind, in a series of collaborations with artists. In experimental videos that he made with the sociological artist Fred Forest, Flusser explored the power of the human gesture as one of the new possibilities for critical human thinking, unlocked through video technology. In the video, Flusser can be seen gesturing avidly as he speaks about gesture. Forest, too, is instructed to gesture with his camera movements, and to criticize Flusser through these gestures. Likewise, Flusser instructs the future viewers of the video to use their own gestures in order to criticize both him and Forest. The viewers’ gestural feedback should then, Flusser and Forest intended, be captured on video, too, and edited into the next iteration of the tape.

This playful exercise is not only a new form of philosophy for the age of technical images. It also points to a more general critique of cultural production. The semantic content of an utterance fades behind the gesture with which the utterance is made. Additionally, this thinking through gestures is patently embodied and situated: It breaks with the enlightenment and modern-age pretension of an abstract, disembodied, pure rationality, embraces contingency, subjective experience, and becomes open for more people. Flusser’s commitment was in tune with his times and various critical revisions of enlightenment rationality in the twentieth century.
It was an answer to the challenge of how to reject disembodied rationalism without also giving up the possibility of critical thinking. This issue had also been explored by his contemporaries Marshall McLuhan
—with his penchant for slang and vernacular—
and Donna Haraway with her leaky neologisms and troubled ironies.

In the gesture, the intent of the utterance and the effects it produces, the experience it generates, is more important than any particular semantic content. In other words, non-verbal communication is more important than verbal communication, connotation more important than denotation. Consider the Facebook algorithm, which allows advertisers to manipulate the emotions of target demographics in real time, as revealed in the 2017 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Advertisers no longer send merely one message lauding their product. Instead, they send a series of messages, which in their aggregation nudge their human targets towards the desired purchases or other behaviour. In the electronic age, the gesture of publishing is thus fragmented into myriad probing moments. As McLuhan quipped, the medium is the massage.

A show in the cybernetic community Alphabetum, ‘Free Emojis’, explored emojis as a contemporary manifestation of gestural communication. What Flusser had provoked his readers with in the 1980s, has become today’s reality. Digital natives are indeed finding that technical images are far more apt for the analysis, commentary, and communication of our experience in the electronic age. Conversely, by observing emoji use we discover that text has not disappeared. In fact, we are writing and reading more than ever before while text has become more explicitly gestural.

hosting

Eleni Kamma

Hosting: a material practice that is linked to events in which humans are invited to participate. Hosting as a material practice relates to conditions of production in the field of socially engaged art, aimed at creating a community. Hosting operates in hybrid contexts between the physical and the online. Its relevance for social, technological, and cultural interactions is the re-imagination of how ‘I’ may relate to ‘we’ and vice versa.

During the Making Matters conference (November 2020), three live Etherpad sessions were hosted by researchers Anja Groten, Eleni Kamma and Pia Louwerens. These were interactive meetings in an online collaborative notepad, where participants discussed symposium topics that came up during the conference. Each of the three sessions experimented with online collaborative engagement. Communicating through the pad takes place purely on a level of ideas and writing and utilizes one’s ability to relate mentally through typing. All participants control and co-edit the text that is produced on the pad during the meeting. Despite its democratic intentions, the pad privileges those who prefer writing over speaking as a means of expression; it does not allow for equal access or experience for analphabets, people who have dyslexia and other learning disorders; and it excludes active participation for those not explicitly invited to the conversation. The one(s) who set up a conversation on the pad are also those who establish the group and do the inviting by sending the link. It depends on the pad’s host(s) whether they will publicly or privately share the link online.

On March 3, 2021, I explored ‘hosting’ further through an online participatory event hosted by Jubilee, a platform for artistic research and production, of which I am a member. The aim of this experimental public event, which consisted of four unique presentations, was to offer perspectives on nourishing through online communication tools. Upon registration, future participants were sent four simple ‘recipes’ (each conceived by one of the event’s hosts: Samah Hijawi, Philippine Hoegen, Eleni Kamma and Gosie Vervloessem), which they were invited to prepare beforehand. This event was recorded.

My prepared script went as follows:

1. Welcoming the audience
(we see and hear each other on Zoom)

Welcome! Tonight, we will explore a pilot version of ‘The Corners of the Mouth’, a project I initiated that focuses on our current hybrid life of physical confinement and increased online presence. How can we use this hybridity to cultivate new forms of artistic expression and strengthen the relation between ‘I’ and ‘we’ (‘we’ meaning: virtual communities of contemporary online users)? Tonight, I, Eleni Kamma, have invited Brussels-based artists Samah Hijawi, Gosie Vervloessem and Philippine Hoegen to share their expertise in practicing affective communication. Over the following two hours, we will offer different perspectives on recipes and nourishment. First, I will take around 20–25 minutes and ask you to take your drink and join us on Etherpad. Please stop your videos but do not mute yourselves. The link is in the chat. Please follow it and meet me there.

 

2. Participants come to the pad
(we hear each other on Zoom)

Please position your cursor in the space of the pad and experiment with typing. Could you share your name and what you are currently drinking with us?

I would encourage you to actively sense how your favourite beverage slowly slides from your mouth into your digestive system during the following twenty minutes.

During the first lockdown I became interested in whether Etherpad, an open-source online text editor, can reflect collectivity in these times. On Etherpad, each user’s contributions are indicated by a colour code and recorded onscreen in real time. Thought processes are revealed as thinking takes shape through typing. The pad enables writing that is collectively performed and witnessed.

I type:

Since then (especially during lockdowns), I think about communication under hybrid conditions, more precisely about possibilities to create affect by combining physical and digital communication processes.  

I type:

Faced with this question, I consulted the I Ching or The Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese form of divination consisting of 64 hexagrams. With a question in mind, you drop the coin six times, receiving a hexagram. The answer to my question was:

 

Several readings by commentators are available, such as Richard Wilhelm’s:

I am puzzled about how to interpret this.

What abstract images can ‘we’ construct with the question, the people involved, the time and place we are in? I will now feed the pad with the Hexagram’s lines that led me here. I invite you to a collaborative reading of the text. Let’s eat and digest the Hexagram’s words together. I invite you to vocalize the text, any way you like, loud, soft, or in your own language. Please try to both respect your rhythm and listen to the others!

• Line 1 (bottom line): You let your magic tortoise go, and look at me with the corners of your mouth drooping. Misfortune.
• Line 2: Turning to the summit for nourishment, deviating from the path to seek nourishment from the hill. Continuing to do this brings misfortune.
• Line 3: Turning away from nourishment. Perseverance brings misfortune. Do not act thus for ten years. Nothing serves to further.
• Line 4: Turning to the summit for provision of nourishment brings good fortune. Spying about with sharp eyes like a tiger with insatiable craving. No blame.
• Line 5: Turning away from the path. To remain persevering brings good fortune. One should not cross the great water.
• Line 6 (top line): The source of nourishment. Awareness of danger brings good fortune. It furthers one to cross the great water.

While I am typing this, we hear an ensemble of voices reading/translating the text in several languages. Simultaneously, the user icons indicate who speaks
on Zoom.

Thank you! Let’s take five minutes together on the pad. Consider it a digestion-absorption process. Feel free to select a spot on the pad, to find your position along the text. You are welcome to re-feed the pad and the rest of us with your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and concerns in relation to ‘The Corners of the Mouth’.  

Audio playing: (belly noises) Water enters the hungry belly

collective

collective organization

logistics part II

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, and was preceded by the correspondence in distribution

EWH: I think the need to play with formats of work, organization, and distribution are now more urgent than ever before—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.

FC: 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.

EWH: Yes, it is not surprising at all that we’ve watched the hype on care build up over the last year, but as someone primarily confined to margins, the mainstreaming of discourses is also something to learn and navigate as part of our practices. The tricky thing about care, and so many other widely debated issues is that they really need to be enacted rather than simply theorized or talked about. But the need to repeat, repeat, and repeat again to people who are less affected by what is lacking in the socioeconomic system (power is a crux issue at every scale) is a necessary part of expanding possibility. It entails ‘mainstreaming’ and popularizing and this gives those of us who do want to speak and practice from a position without power 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.

FC: Yes, and I am also wondering whether these struggles, resonances, and mistakes need to be constantly re-enacted and repeated by each new  

LIGHT LOGISTICS shipment HQL-364,
photo: Florian Cramer.

 

generation in order to be fully (i.e, not just in an abstract or disembodied manner) understood.

EWH: There are changes along the way, from generation-to-generation mutation. But I fear that despite such continuities, there is also a repetitive relegation to the realm of marginal play. Whatever foresight those projects from the sixties 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 parasitizing off of larger infrastructures really affect anything?

FC: 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?

EWH: 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. Regardless, it is difficult not to acknowledge outcomes as part of the process of communication that happens among any form of collective organizing. How that communication occurs is central to the difference between centralized or decentralized processes, and I think Display Distribute’s inquiry into grey economies actually implicates us within certain murky areas between centralization and decentralization. These have been some of the greatest challenges to the project, but they are reasons to continue. 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?

FC: Yes, but you could also criticize that as a petty-bourgeois hobbyist self-limitation that gives up on the larger picture…

EWH: 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 thirteen copies because of the bulkiness of Yenting’s 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

delivery of LIGHT LOGISTICS shipment HQL-364,
photo: Florian Cramer.

cybernetic community

Baruch Gottlieb

The material practices of many contemporary artist and activist collectives are strongly oriented towards, and embedded in, local communities. At the same time the concept of community has fundamentally changed through digital communication technology. It is a common assumption that non-digital local communities are distinct from digital global communities, but in fact the two are rather mutually and dynamically related in feedback loops of technical effects and social responses. This cybridity gives new urgency to the concept of community. Now, more than ever, it produces cultural and social tendencies and needs that defy expectations, place, and time.

Our actions have effects and these effects act back upon us in a learning process. While this is an uncontroversial statement, the age of hyper automation gives us the impression that this experience is massively compounded, as in a meta-butterfly effect, a feedforward hall of mirrors, or hell of mirrors. Our actions seem to have at once too little and too much consequence. How to get the right sense of scale in today’s intensively networked environment? Community no longer seems to have continuity, but appears to be an ad hoc grouping which could just as well be otherwise. One can be a part of several ‘communities’ at once, and then just as suddenly, of several others. As a community, we act as intersections of multi-dimensional Venn diagrams where our world of associations reconfigures around us in real time.

Of course community still has a centre of gravity, its provisional situatedness. In tension with the networked context, every member of a community has its own situatedness, if only in that of their physical body or device. What happens if a social network is radically distributed, and no longer runs on a central server, as in the case of software projects like Patchwork/SecureScuttlebutt? Then the network coheres around the chief maintainers of the project.

A community is always intractably material. What we would like to examine are the relationships and tensions between the participants and the material apparatus that entertains them. The physical space of the contemporary art institute West Den Haag includes an ‘Alphabetum’ which could be called a proto-institutionality dedicated to the forms of letters (grammatography). The community around the Alphabetum coalesces around its physical space, just as a community of an online social network coalesces in its respective physical space, i.e., its servers.

The Alphabetum functions as a laboratory for cybernetic community knowledge creation, the generation of unlikely and unexpected forms of expression and exchange. Also, as it is cybernetic, it is committed to storage, archiving as a recursive practice in a kind of communal learning. The exhibitions in the Alphabetum are probes sent out into the community for responses, which are processed and built into subsequent exhibitions. Through this recursive feedback process, the Alphabetum ‘learns’ about the environment that is interested in the programme. At the same time, it is instrumented by the public to respond to their interests. This community exercise is concretized in the exhibits on display in the Alphabetum, which are subsequently curated and recontextualized by the community.

platform

Anja Groten

a platform design request

In recent years the Hackers & Designers collective
has been frequently approached by organizations and initiatives from the fields of art, design, technology, and academia with the question: ‘Do you want to design our platform?’ An intricate question as the term platform refers to a multitude of phenomena and objects. The platform’s ambiguity seems particularly amplified when articulated as part of a design brief, suggesting that the platform is to be an expansion of the realm of designed things.

An organization as platform supports individuals or groups in addressing an audience. In a computational context, the term platform refers to a technical infrastructure, for instance an environment in which software applications are designed, deployed, or used, such as computer hardware, operating systems, gaming devices, mobile devices.

With the H&D collective we have designed, built, and maintained technical infrastructures, such as software, webware, and services that enable online collaboration, production, organization, and publishing of digital content. Such diy platforms are tool convergences that—in their particular composition—cater to the particular needs of the collective. They are content management systems, chat applications, collaborative writing tools, online spreadsheets and file sharing systems. These self-made, appropriated or hacked tools and systems are implicated in the ways the members of the collective work together. H&D’s technical infrastructure continuously evolves, and at times fails, or acts in an unexpected way. H&D shapes and reshapes its modes of organizing around the possibilities and limitations of such self-made platforms—along with learning to cope with system incompatibilities, broken links, expired protocols, and unreliable backups. Therefore, the notion of platform is at the core of its existence.

The platform-design request implies that a platform can be regarded as separate from its context, and that there is a causal relationship between platform and design. However, because of how the H&D collective has developed relationships with technical infrastructures
it would be difficult to disconnect the technical aspects from the organizational and social aspects of platforms. The question then arises whether platforms—in the way
we relate to them at H&D, as an inherent part of the collective’s fabric, including its characteristic of constant emergence, spontaneity, and unreliability—
can be designed at all?

In my view, the question: ‘Do you want to design
our platform?’ wrongly implies a certain fixedness,
a beginning and an end of a digital platform
and the possibility to foresee a platform’s trajectory.
The ‘commissioners’ who formulated the request position themselves as end users of the platform, and suggest some kind of ownership of it. It would be ‘their’ platform that ‘we’ are designing. However, a platform, as I see it, in its manifold of meanings is interwoven in collective practice and cannot be owned.

thinking with platforms

Besides its technical connotations, the term platform is also often used figuratively, for instance referring to organizations such as H&D. As such, it tends to assign an assumed value to the platform-organization as supportive and enabling, and risks a flattening of the technical and organizational particularities and implications of a collective. The question is how to think with the various meanings of ‘platform’? How do platform’s different (technical, organizational, architectural, political) connotations intersect—act together and apart?

In 2020, H&D developed a physical structure, the ‘H&D platform’, together with architectural designer Thomas Rustemeyer. The installation was meant to represent the H&D collective in its endeavour to bring together different practitioners, artists, designers, and computer programmers and facilitate exchanges among them. The platform would be activated at different moments, for instance as a workshop space, a stage for performances and presentations, and as a reading room.

H&D platform installation, Tetem Enschede, May 2020.

Sketch by Thomas Rustemeyer, 2020.

However, due to the global Covid-19 pandemic the platform as we had initially envisioned it remained more or less unvisited and untouched. Yet, through the sudden need for our planned activities to continue online, we developed other, digital, means of pursuing our activities. For instance, we created a project website that showcases the work of the contributing artists and draws together their research and process documentation. We furthermore developed the ‘H&D livestream platform’ as we witnessed an increasing fatigue of commercial platforms. The fatigue is caused by large tech companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Zoom, who profit from their user’s reliance upon them in times of crisis by selling their data.

H&D livestream platform and the physical platform installation,
NDSM FUSE, October, 2020.

The H&D livestream platform converges an open-source streaming software, a streaming service, and a chat interface. Certainly less clumsy ‘off-the-shelf’ platforms do exist. The H&D livestream platform ‘acted up’ and caused moments of discomfort through its glitches and lags. However, it sustained its appearance, and has hosted many online H&D events in different contexts.

In the context of H&D, the collective seems to establish intrinsic relationships with digital tools and technical infrastructures that expand the realm of utility. An important part of building and maintaining such relationships are the manners in which the collective copes with unreliability, exercising patience and curiosity towards unintended technical glitches. In such a context, platforms can therefore not be described as self-contained entities. They travel between a multiplicity of meanings and inhabit collective peculiarities, as they are designed and redesigned in action and through interaction, which, in my view, makes it impossible to uphold a user-designer distinction.

To recap, a self-organized collective such as H&D shapes itself through technical infrastructures. In turn, technical infrastructures also continuously evolve with the collective, oftentimes in unpredictable ways. The emerging technical infrastructure around the aforementioned exhibition project is an example of that. Through their co-evolvement with collective practice, such platforms can therefore not be described as disconnected from collectivity.

public time

Eleni Kamma

Public time: a period of a shared experience of an action taking place in common view, relating to, or being in the service of the common interest, during which the viewer’s agency is consciously enabled and mobilized through the physical relationship of his/her self to others. Public time is measured in the presence of witnesses, whereby humans and/or material things (recording devices and documents) serve as and certify evidence or proof. In an art practice, public time includes both the time needed for preparing an event or action and the event or action itself, which are made visible to and shared by an audience, either live and/or through media registration.

The term public time is relevant for the notion of parrhesia—meaning the courage to speak one’s mind—and for parrhesiastic practices, which I approach as exercises, understood in the ancient Greek context of askesis or disciplined practice. These exercises aim at finding the courage to speak one’s mind by positioning and expressing oneself in relation to others. This happens through an expanded version of performativity that focuses on the right of the people (non-privileged as much as privileged) to ‘appear’ and on the potential of technology and virtual participation to enable the appearance of these bodies. In the field of art, parrhesiastic practices often reveal uncomfortable truths about conventions by undoing dignity and seriousness. They aim at engaging and affecting the spectator through various strategies, ranging from playful, friendly, and healing, to confrontational, disruptive, or aggressive. Unlike trolling phenomena taking place in online social communities, for the one who practices parrhesia this revealing of uncomfortable truths needs to be coupled with some kind of implication, engagement, self-exposure, and a sense of personal responsibility and shame. At that very moment in which the parrhesiast speaks boldly, not only does he/she tackle truth and existing power relations, but also his/her own subjectivity. In finding the courage to examine one’s self and by putting his/her beliefs to the test on a daily basis, the one
who practices parrhesia is freed from previous experiences, prejudices, and forms of control imposed on him/her through the ‘common opinion’. In this sense the parrhesiast is constantly subjected to self-transformation and/or self-de/reconstruction.

In Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (1991), Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis defines public time in a historiographic sense and discusses parrhesia in relation to the ‘project of autonomy.’ Two roots exist within the Greek word autonomy: autos (εγώ ο ίδιος = myself) and nomos (law). An autonomous person creates his/her own law. Castoriadis argues that the first political society in which the citizens took the responsibility for their way of living and for legislatory regulations of social relations was in Ancient Greece. He posits that the possibility to ask questions as an individual or a group regarding social institutions occurred for the first time in Athens in the fifth century BCE. In this tradition, citizens contribute to the creation of public space (and public time) through the co-existence of three necessary and decisive phenomena: courage (parrhesia), responsibility (euthini), and shame (aidos, aischune).

In my presentation at the Making Matters Symposium (November 2020), I considered Etherpad as a tool for co-creating public time. Between February 16 and March 21, 2021, Thalia Hoffman (TH) and myself (EK) further discussed the term.

 

Public

Who is the public? ‘Public’ here is an adjective defining the type of time. But indeed, who is the public in the case of a public artistic event? Is this type of open participation enough to create a shared sense of collectivity among the participants? What does a shared sense of collectivity contain? I suggest each participant needs to see/feel their contribution to the collective… which can be at the same time seen/felt/inspected by the collective body of participants, enhancing in this way an understanding of individual contribution as responsibility.

Time

The Etherpad is an open-source online text editor. Each user’s contributions are indicated by a colour code and are recorded onscreen in real time. Unlike discussions in a physical gathering (where unspoken communication expressed through facial expressions and bodily gestures accompanies words) or cloud-based platforms for video conferencing (where participants stare at each other’s faces, talking heads videos arranged next to each other) communicating through the pad takes place purely on the level of ideas and the ability to relate mentally. Do only words communicate ideas? Words communicate ideas on the pad, but also something about the thinking process, the doubts and the hesitations involved in it: the movement of the interactions between our words, the time gaps, the mistakes, the erasures and re-writings. So maybe the pad (public space) needs to collect these gaps, doubts, and hesitations, and not erase them? It is not the pad that collects the gaps, doubts, and hesitations, but all participants together that make use of it to create this collection. But this is also what makes the pad a vulnerable tool for collecting content; any participant can erase the content with one click. Everyone can see what is written at the same time. The thought process is revealed, how thinking takes shape through typing. Does the typing change the thinking as well? Yes, the typing may change the thinking, provided one enters the pad in a state of mind open to change/dialogue, not set on a prefixed message one wishes to convey. I agree, being open for dialogue is needed many times for the possibility of change. I wondered though if the actual physical act of typing also changes the course of thinking. If we had a conversation with spoken words instead, would this change our thinking about concepts and ideas? I am not sure it would change our thinking about concepts, but there is this mechanical, repetitive aspect within the typing process that might interfere with one’s course of thinking. It provokes people to react to each other on the spot. You type something and it is immediately there. Can this be described as performative writing? Yes! I feel we need to capture the ‘liveness’ of this performance. Something that reveals its becoming. Maybe recorded typing? Or performative co-typing that has the potential to be recorded? You can go back and erase it, but people can see this as everything is documented immediately. Online/digital media make it difficult to read each other, as the senses are limited to sight and hearing. Through this visualization of thought, it is feasible to collectively write and speak, to influence our thinking, to both witness and testify. I am interested in considering the pad as a tool for creating public time. Can it grasp collectivity in these times? Does collectivity need public time? or vice versa? Maybe they are interdependent? Collectivity needs public time to reflect on and inspect its own past actions, but also public time cannot exist without a collectivity. What do you think? I think there is an element of time that is always shared. What makes it public in the sense we are trying to capture here, is that the ‘public’ is doing something additional together during this time, something that is more than spending time together. Maybe we should ask what needs to happen in time to make it collective? I agree. Maybe it has to do with future decisions, actions, experiences that will have an effect on people, both individually and collectively.

Are we trying to create public space here? Since we are working on the same text but at separate times?
I think what we are trying to do here is creating both public space and public time. This is how I became interested in Castoriadis, because he brings public time in the conversation as going hand-in-hand with the creation of public space. He finds these two indispensable for what he calls ‘the project of autonomy’* of Ancient Greek democracy. I connect this with my suggestion to connect the personal to the shared, and through that define the collectiveness of this time.

Can time be private? Yes. When I am daydreaming, reading a book, or drawing, I withdraw to a personal sense of time, and I don’t feel the need to share this with others. But this happens within a ‘bigger’ time that is public and local. The personal sense of time is always part of the time of the day at the particular place where it occurs, meaning it is public and local. I also feel time is always private as much as it is public, even if I share time with others, there is always the way I sense the time we spend together. If ‘public’ goes hand in hand with being exposed/accessible to everyone, are obscure and concealed activities also part of public time?

zoöp

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer

Photo: Patricia de Ruijter – mediakaal.nl.

 

The concept and practice of the Zoöp were developed between 2019 and 2021 by a network of artists, designers, philosophers, ecologists, and lawyers, initiated and led by Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Zoöp is short for zoöperation, a combination of the words cooperation and zoë, the Greek word for ‘life’. Zoöp is a new organizational model or legal entity that allows organizations of many kinds to collaborate with other-than-human life in their own operational sphere. Zoöp is intended as an attempt to begin with the work of repair amidst the present-day climate catastrophe and escalating ecological degradation. It is a pragmatic answer to the issue of capitalist realism—i.e., the capitalist reductive understanding of the world as a collection of standardized commodities and scalable procedures. According to writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher and philosopher Federico Campagna this understanding has become a metaphysics, which led Fisher to the statement that ‘[i]t is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.

The sound of the desperate voices of collectives of animals, plants, and other bodies alive today can be harsh to the senses, and it demands an effort and dedication to take those voices into account. The Zoöp way of working aims to concretize this effort. It has three goals: firstly, to strengthen the political and legal standing of other-than-human life within human capitalist societies. Secondly, to support ecological regeneration, in Zoöp vocabulary: Zoöps want to develop the zoönomy (a regenerative economy that secures the quality of life of multispecies collectivities) within and surrounding Zoöps. Thirdly, the aim of the initiators is to make the Zoöp model widely adoptable and put into practice by a variety of organizations, from farms to municipalities, from hotels to cemeteries, from commercial enterprises to non-profit organizations. The Zoöp model is the centrepiece of the Zoöp movement and shapes anchoring bodies for the larger practice of zoönomy.

In order to facilitate the development of the Zoöp movement, two legal bodies have been founded in 2022. One is the Zoönomic Institute. Its task is to help organizations to transform themselves into Zoöps. It grants organizations the right to call themselves Zoöps. The other one is the Zoönomic Foundation. As laid down in its statutes, the Zoönomic Foundation has one task only: to articulate and represent the needs and interests of other-than-human life in the spatial and operational domain of Zoöps and to translate these into organizational decision making.

Organizations that turn into a Zoöp keep their existing function—a school remains a school, a farm remains a farm, a hotel a hotel—but set themselves an additional goal, which is to foster zoönomy. An organization can be be accredited as Zoöp by doing two things: first it grants the Zoönomic Foundation an observer seat on its board (or whatever body in charge of its policies). This seat is then filled by a human Speaker for the Living. The Speaker for the Living is bound to the statutes of the Zoönomic Foundation and acts as the speculative and political organ for other-than-human life in the Zoöp. Secondly, the organization commits itself to follow the Zoönomic annual cycle, by which it gradually transforms its operation, intervention

 

by intervention, into a regenerative practice that collaborates with other-than-human life and gives it space and opportunity to find quality of life.

The development of the Zoöp concept was inspired by the now famous Rights of Nature cases of Whanganui river, Mount Taranaki, and Te Urewera forest. These three collective other-than-human bodies are the living ancestors of different New Zealand Iwi, tribes of the Maori, New Zealand’s indigenous people. The river, mountain, and forest were granted legal personhood in the New Zealand jurisdiction between 2014 and 2017. In legal terms, they became incorporated other-than-humans. Whenever necessary, they are represented by human members of their respective Iwi.

In Western cultural tradition, collective bodies of other-than-humans do not have the status of ancestors. In fact, they are not even considered subjects, but resources, which caused the ecological disaster we find ourselves in. Although there is a growing movement of Rights of Nature legal and other activists, the legislative reform by which living other-than-humans should gain rights will be slow and thorny.

The Zoöp organizational format does not require the legislative reform that rights of nature require, but uses existing instruments of private law. Zoöp does not grant rights or personhood to living other-than-human entities but operates on the premise of them already having rights. Zoöp is intended as a way of organizing, a practice, a procedure that actively acknowledges these rights and the subjective experience of other-than-human life. It is focused on collaboration between human and other-than-human life. In this sense, the Zoöp model is a pragmatic shortcut to a Rights of Nature

 

practice as it is established in the jurisdictions of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Uganda, India and many more countries, besides New Zealand.

With the governance structure and the Zoönomic Foundation in place, a Zoöp, commits itself to figuring out how its operation can transform itself into a regenerative practice, contributing to the quality of life of a human inclusive ecology. It does so by following the Zoönomic annual cycle of four movements, called Demarcating, Observing & Sensing, Characterizing and Intervening.

Demarcating answers the question: which (legal, human, organizational, and other-than-human) bodies form the Zoöp? Demarcating situates the Zoöp’s practice in its environment and articulates its locally specific questions for actual ‘collective bodies’.

Observing & Sensing is concerned with understanding the life-worlds of the different bodies that make up a Zoöp, and with the question of whether and how those bodies perceive and acknowledge each other’s Zoöp participation.

Characterizing involves asking the question how the different bodies enhance or obstruct each other’s quality of life. This will result in a first kind-of-diagnosis of the Zoöp’s ecological integrity and exploration of interventions.

Intervening, then, is the process of actually changing the spatial arrangements, organizational practice or relational fabric of a Zoöp. Its primary objective is a local, thriving, combined human and other-than-human community that provides groundwork for other, more global aspects of the transformation of economy into zoönomy.

At the time of writing, more than twenty organizations (farms, cultural institutions, holiday parks, educational institutions and others) have committed themselves to becoming a Zoöp. On 22 April 2022, Earth Day, Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam has become the first actual Zoöp in the world.

critique

criticality

Frans-Willem Korsten

Criticality has been defined first and foremost within Marxist and post-structuralist frames, as an attitude and a praxis that aims to scrutinize and dismantle the dichotomies and hierarchies set up by ruling powers. Whereas these frames were philosophically inclined, other forms of criticality were more practical. Often as a mix of both, distinct approaches were developed under the heading of, for instance, ‘critical pedagogy’, ‘critical geography’, or critical making. The following case offers different modalities of the term. The case concerns a public primary school, located close to a train station in Utrecht, a major city in the Netherlands. This had been the school’s location since 1883. Children from lower and middle social classes had attended it, from a distinctly multicultural populace in the last decades of the twentieth century. Then, in the late 1990s, it had to make way for an office building, the so-called Klundertoren, named after the architect who designed it. The artwork on top of it from 2003, by Jan van Munster, reads IK—Dutch for ‘I’.

The school was demolished and was offered a ‘new’ space in an old and decrepit building, classified as a ‘monument’ or listed building, opposite the original location. The renovation would partly be paid for by the real estate developer of the Klundertoren. After a disastrous process of moving the school into a building of which the renovation was not finished, the responsible councillor decided two years later that the school would have to move again, to make way for another X-tower. At this point, a group of parents said ‘no’. Without knowing it at the time, they opposed a development project that involved an estimated investment of around 50 million euros. In a sense,
they were critically unaware.

Klundertoren, Utrecht, photo: H. Boland, Utrecht Archive.

1. experiencing criticality

Battles like these take a lot of time. One question is how long people are prepared to keep on fighting and stick together. For a real estate developer, five years, or ten years, or even fifteen years is nothing. On the contrary, years may add to profit. Let’s call this the critical limit of perseverance. In this case, the battle would take five years.

Real estate developers may, on the face of it, function within the limits of the law, but are often closely allied with parties that do not. First, there were two clumsy, nightly attempts to set the listed building containing the school on fire. Then, during a gymnastics class of six- and seven-year-olds in the gym on the first floor, the stairway leading up to the gym was set on fire, as well as the doors to the emergency exit. An astute teacher grabbed a bench, pushed it through the window and helped the children escape via the roof of the neighbouring building. Let us call this the criticality of the situation.

In a civil society, this is serious business. Now that their children had been brought into a life-threatening situation by an unknown actor, the parents might have decided to give up. Yet the burned shoes of the children that had been left before the door of the gym inspired them to contact the mayor, who in the Dutch system is in charge of the police. When the responsible councillor told the city council what had happened, there was a strange, chilling silence that had its political effect. The school was granted the permission to stay, and the building would be properly renovated. A fourth attempt to set it on fire did not have the desired effect either. As the council had taken its official decision, the critical moment had passed.

2. practicing criticality

In the case at hand, criticality consisted in the determination to take everything that the councillor or officials were saying as a subject of research, and to follow the money. It took the collective of parents two years of in-depth research, involving all the legal possibilities to acquire the necessary information, to find out that this specific school had to be removed because it was part of a substantial number of public-school buildings that were going to be sold and converted into apartment buildings. The funds thus obtained provided the municipality with the money needed for concentrating the city’s entire vocational education in three new buildings. The latter may be a worthy cause. The question was why the money had to be found at the cost of public schooling, and at the cost of political and ethical transparency. The school buildings to be sold were often located in urban environments that over the past years had become impressively expensive, due to gentrification and economic developments. The municipality had to negotiate all sorts of agreements with real estate developers, who do not tend to spend public money cautiously and often operate in the shadows rather than in the full light of public scrutiny.

In response, the collective of parents decided to operate in the open. Every step they took was documented on a website: every plan, every letter, all arguments. When at some point the councillor tried to contact a member of the collective (me), and this parent engaged in a personal mail conversation, the parent was corrected by a good friend, also part of the collective, who was able to follow the conversation. And rightly so. It was a mail conversation that, because of its personal character, could easily lead to unofficial agreements, on the side, in the shadows, threatening the very transparency that was at stake. criticality involved the scrutiny of what others were saying and doing, and the attempt to be as open as possible to the critical assessment by others.

3. an ethics of criticality

Though the collective as a whole did not use the term explicitly, criticality proved to be a matter of defining it through praxis. During the height of the struggles, the collective would meet every two weeks, and discuss what to do, how to do it, and what not to do. Few parents involved had read Derrida, but in a sense,all were involved in a process of deconstruction since deconstruction is not something enforced upon something, but is always already at work in something, whether a text or situation. The doxa of real estate development and city council was already deconstructing itself through discursive cracks or contradictions that were made visible in the critical documentation process of the parents. It is helpful to re-read Derrida about the concept of deconstruction, here:

... deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique and its translation would have to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an indissoluble origin. … No more is it a critique, in a general sense or in Kantian sense. The instance of krinein
or of krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is
itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one
of the essential ‘themes’ or ‘objects’ of deconstruction.

The quote helps us first of all to distinguish between critique and criticality. The first connotes the ability to decide, choose, judge, discern. The second connotes the fact that decisions, choices, judgments, and discernments are precisely the object or theme of deconstruction. The core of the struggle for the school was not to prove the municipality or its real estate allies wrong, but to show how the process of decision-making had been full of uncritical decisions, choices, judgments, and discernments. Secondly, it is worthwhile noting that the quote comes from a letter addressed to Toshihiko Izutsu, an expert on Zen Buddhism and Sufism, with a great interest in Truth (Satori, or Enlightenment). This truth, according to Izutsu, cannot be grasped by reason or language, nor can it be taught or understood intellectually. It can only be a matter of praxis and process. Truth can never be discovered, then, although it can be momentarily experienced.

The fight for the school was not a spiritual matter. Or was it, at least in part? If criticality was involved, it consisted in the desire to work towards truth—
a truth that had two modalities. One the one hand it concerned a process of criticality during which, in a certain sense, truth was found: the financial reality of agreements between the municipality, big educational institutions and real estate developers. This truth does matter, as it may (but need not) increase the force of arguments. Yet it remains superficial without the veracity of a process, where truth is not to be discovered but to be experienced. Let’s call this the ethics of criticality.

4. the situatedness of criticality

The specific case stands for a more general state of affairs. On all levels of government, the Dutch state has retreated from public tasks in the context of neo-liberal deregulation, propelled by the idea that ‘the market’ (a fiction) will do things better (a lie).

Critical making, in this context, with its focus on diy modes of making, holds a promise and a potential to serve the needs and desires of a multiplicity of people. In a sense, the entire struggle for the school was a matter of a political diy. If the city council, if the councillor, if all sorts of public officials lack the agency or determination to adequately take care of public matters and public money, this provokes a diy response.

Situatedness is of critical importance. The current form of capitalism is interested in anything that can make the system even more flexible, resulting in less stability for citizens, fewer rights, less care for labourers of all sorts. What is called deregulation often comes down to fuzzy forms of responsibility that make it difficult to follow money flows. The history of the Italian precario bello has been considered as a case in point. When in the seventies ‘playing’ and ‘not sticking to the rules’ became an important tool to deregulate state power, the economic response was that, hey!, playing and not sticking to the rules can be used to reconfigure labourers or employees, demanding them to become ever more creative in ever more precarious circumstances. Consequently, if diy was an instrument of the empowerment of people in the first instance, it also is a form that, in certain situations, can be cheaply appropriated or used as an excuse for more deregulation.

Criticality, in this context, means the full awareness of a situation, an awareness of what is at stake, an awareness of the alternatives one is looking for in a forcefield dominated by others. It concerns the perseverance to critically assess what powers in charge are doing, and requires a practice of transparency that leaves one open to the criticality of others.

representation

Feral Atlas (Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou)

Feral Atlas sometimes uses the term ‘stories’ to refer to how we tell things and so form knowledge. Our use of the term is to open up a discussion of genre. What kind of storytelling is most appropriate for the Anthropocene?

Feral Atlas is designed as an exploratory and open journey through an assembled polyphony of materials. Hand-painted watercolours, hydrophone recordings, molecular diagrams, scientific charts, sketches, sound art, and maps made from satellite data and calculated projections sit alongside scientific writing, autoethnography, memoir, poetry, biological modelling, music, video poems, and song. Each element provides an account of the Anthropocene in its own right. Yet when they come together, these diverse elements perform an iterative, multisensuous, and multiperspectival account of how imperial and industrial infrastructures make Anthropocene worlds.

Feral Atlas tries to forge an aesthetic that asks readers to linger over the gathered materials; to tell stories so beautifully that people stop to pay attention to what is going on, and to hold their attention to the scenes of action in which feral ecologies play out. Presenting materials with such absorbing detail, passion, and care that readers might become curious to know more, and in doing so become attuned, able to navigate and orientate themselves within a multidisciplinary array of representational modes.

 

During the symposium Making Matters: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times, we (Feral Atlas members Feifei Zhou and Lili Carr) conducted a workshop in noticing feral effects in the area where you live. A screenshot of our collective online map of collated observations is reproduced overleaf.

Feral Atlas is curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou. It can be accessed online at Stanford University Press: www.feralatlas.org.

A collective work by the participants of Feral Atlas as a Verb at Making Matters Symposium: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times (Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, 21 Nov 2020) and at Driving the Human Opening Festival (ZKM Karlsruhe, 22 Nov 2020).

economy

business

Kate Rich

 

I would like to take up business as a term that regularly goes unexamined in the arts and humanities. Yet the idea of business could benefit from further attention, beyond its burnt-out definition of a site where entrepreneurs and workers transform resources into goods and services for profit. Some notions that I have scavenged from the margins of business discourse open up wormholes to new understandings. Management professor Martin Parker calls for an ‘insurgent entrepreneurship’ that could be critical, experimental, and playful with the economic status quo. Activist lawyer Janelle Orsi asks what would happen if we redefined enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’? Social innovation scholar Warren Nilsson offers a gravitational vision of ‘unbound’ organization: an alternative geometry where business could have ‘a centre but no sides’, its activities coordinated through human intentions and relations, not formal structures and agendas. And in the context of critical making, social entrepreneur Matthew Manos has speculated on ‘business as a medium for critical inquiry’ where the formats and materials of business could be refocused towards meaning-making rather than market-based success. A piñata of possibilities, yet the wider opportunity glimpsed in these statements is that business might not be a done deal, but open to interpretation.

In my own case, I have been working as an artist with business as my medium and material for almost twenty years. My first foray into commerce was with Feral Trade, a sole trader grocery business operating across mixed terrain of art, social networks, and the commodity sphere since 2003 (for a more detailed description, see the entry for feral in this lexicon). I am also a part of the Cube Cola manufacturing partnership that produces and distributes an open-source cola worldwide. The cola is produced in our kitchen ‘lab’ and mailed out to customers in concentrate form; the recipe is freely shared. And I am a member of the accounts team at the Cube Microplex in Bristol, an all-volunteer-run arts venue that makes its living from the bar and the door takings. These endeavours are not proudly independent but rather the opposite, they make and maintain their interdependence with a constellation of other enterprises, from corporates to colleagues. These are the waste collectors, the regulatory agencies, the flavour industry giants, but they are also the corner shopkeepers, smallholder farms, feminist server collectives and diy shipping lines. To mention just a few like-minded endeavours, Company Drinks in London describe themselves as ‘art in the shape of a community drinks enterprise’. They run a yearly production cycle making and trading fizzy drinks in their community, a form of collectivity in art and economy they claim as a new and vital form of public space. And there is the Sail Cargo Alliance, a Europe-wide gathering of wind-powered sailing vessels, ships captains, and cargo brokers who are assembling a grassroots freight system that challenges not only the fuel source but the logic of the whole supply chain, down to what would be traded and why. Critically, these endeavours are not doing art or activism ‘about’ business but are out there in the world doing business for real.

Taking business as a stage and site for experiments in ‘surviving well together’ (in the words of feminist economist J.K. Gibson-Graham), the kind that might open up routes into other possible worlds, may seem counter-intuitive. Those working in the arts or education may have experienced being swept up or perhaps dragged under by a tide of business vocabulary and values, encapsulated in the bonanza of the Creative Industries that reconfigures creativity as a driver of economic growth. At the same time, the uneasy covenant that ‘business as usual’ would maintain a habitable planet has unarguably failed. Yet these fractures and fissures also point to an uncommon potential. business is widely understood and accessible, it operates in and across wildly different collectives, shapes, and scales. It can act as a Trojan horse, an avatar or exoskeleton in which to navigate this hostile yet contestable space that we hazily call ‘the economy’. The sail cargo captains are negotiating with commercial harbours to bring their vessels into port alongside the container ships. The artist-led drinks companies are merging their recipes to produce a trans-national cola with the potential to take down a stickily secretive, world-dominating incumbent. An artist-anarchist farming partnership finds a route through the welfare system to secure the Farm Household Allowance, an income that will bankroll their agriculture experiments for years to come.

In the case of Feral Trade, a few years back I was fortunate enough to be raided by Trading Standards, the UK consumer protection agency. Trading Standards investigates commercial entities that trade outside the law, they have more powers than the police and can for example enter your home without a warrant. They spent hours swarming the Feral Trade website, then cornered me for an interview. After lengthy negotiations, finding no consumer as such to protect—these are peer-to-peer transactions, negotiated entirely through social routes and relations—I received a kind of de facto, state-sanctioned permission to continue trading, in this grey zone of business that Feral Trade has made its home. A tiny island of regulatory indeterminacy, where the relationship between the commercial and the personal is blurred to the point that the law gets a headache.

These are wildly local and contingent examples; they are not models for anything. They are all also imbricated, co-produced and co-dependent with a host of other elements and effects, including the systems they contest. Yet this is also the point. The prospect of business could not be more salient, viewed from the burning debris of a torched economy. We all already are, have, or are in a unit of livelihood, or many—to annex the words of artist Joseph Beuys: ‘everyone is a business’! The challenge, and the potential, is to bring our day-to-day subsistence in line with the meanings we want to make. business could be a vehicle for doing that.

workshop

Anja Groten

In 2018 my colleague Shailoh Phillips and I organized a workshop on ‘how to give workshops’ at the annual Summer Academy of the Amsterdam-based workshop initiative Hackers & Designers (H&D). The practices of participants joining H&D’s activities are usually situated at the intersection of technology, design, and art. H&D’s workshops take place in a non-hierarchical manner, meaning that participants become workshop hosts and vice versa. The ways in which the workshop programme unfolds over the course of the Summer Academy is put up for discussion.

Our motivation for hosting a workshop on how to give a workshop was mostly to pay attention to the format of the workshop itself as it, so far, has remained mostly unquestioned as a format, even though it is a substantial ingredient of H&D’s activities. H&D is only one of many similar initiatives that resort to the workshop as a format for organizing events. As an ambiguous format, not tied to a specific context, the workshop crosses many boundaries—between art and activism, between different disciplines and institutions, between commercial and educational contexts. My attempt at a definition is: a gathering of a committed group of people who want to learn something together in a set time frame. Workshops that I have been part of usually follow a hands-on approach to learning that can be traced back to the Bauhaus. Here, the workshop was the artisan’s workplace, a place that bridged the divide between making and thinking, as well as between disciplinary divisions such as sculpting and painting. The workshop brought together art and technology in an attempt to provide solutions for the social problems posed by an industrialized, capitalist society.

Workshops like the ones organized at H&D are not bound to any particular space. In this regard they differ from the artisan workshop, which is the site of material production. The workshop does not exclude the possibility for material production or skill transfer and there is a strong incentive to share knowledge and learning experiences through making things. However, making something is not necessarily regarded as a goal. On the contrary, a workshop may become an opportunity to escape the pressure of producing something final or instantaneously useful.

Despite these differences, both the artisan workshop and what I would like to call the ‘ephemeral workshop’ (as described above) can be seen as social spaces within which material-based learning can take place.

Besides methods, techniques, tools, and protocols, workshops also bring about certain social dynamics that evolve from the particular composition of participants, as well as the context and conditions they find themselves in. Such ‘moods’ shift and slide and cause particular forms of production and knowledge to emerge, intervene or evaporate. Workshop participants and workshop hosts together shape and reshape the dynamic present.

In the 1960s and 1970s the workshop evolved as an extra-curricular self-organized activity that resisted principles of art & design schools such as disciplined and canon-based learning, hierarchies between teachers (instructors) over students (apprentices), as well as the commercialization of workshops to produce ‘marketable’ goods.

Since the 1990s the workshop format regained traction with a renewed interest in educational experimentation in the arts. Inspired by movements of the 1960s and 1970s such as the ‘Free International University’, ‘Antiuniversity’ or the ‘Non-School’, the so-called educational turn drew attention to collective research, paying attention to processes rather than objects or final outcomes.

Today, collaborative learning, critical pedagogy, and self-organization are still key principles for collective practices that do not abide by the stiff structures of educational and cultural institutions. Workshops organized today for instance by H&D, Varia, Trojan Horse, Anhoek School, or Parallel School continue the legacy of ad hoc self-organization, defiant dilettantism, horizontal and collective learning-by-doing.

However, in our day, the workshop has also become a popular genre that functions well within the framework of a service economy. Situated between work and leisure the workshop’s commercial potential is explored in the context of conferences, incubator programmes, and creative retreats. Taking place outside of the daily work routine, workshops ought to be fun while valorizing the participants’ CV. The workshop has been co-opted by innovation labs and creative agencies and turned into a product itself. For example, Next Nature, a speculative design studio, sells a workshop-in-a-box. Here, the workshop takes on the format of a card game and is described as a ‘2-hour dynamic crash course [that] helps you to better understand and discuss technology’. It might not be intended as such, but in my view this workshop-in-a-box could be read as a satire on workshops, as an ironic commentary on compulsive self-improvement, learning-by-doing and the pressure to participate in one workshop after the other. The implication of presenting a workshop as a product is that the workshop in and of itself is a highly productive format. What a product like the workshop-in-a-box lacks to address is the unpredictability of a workshop context. Workshop moods that are essential to any workshop experience cannot be predetermined thus, cannot be turned into generic instructions that fit on a card.

In my experiencing there is no such thing as a guarantee for ‘a perfect workshop’. Workshop chatter and workshop moods—either friendly and warm or grouchy and agitated—are core ingredients of a workshop situation, but hardly predictable. Still, I do believe that the workshop can be a meaningful tool.
The workshop brings about temporary learning environments, in which making processes but also modes of being together are put up for discussion. Workshop situations have challenged me in my lack of patience or my assumptions of what I regarded as productive or efficient. A workshop cannot be taken
for granted or defined as a given format or medium, and therefore cannot guarantee any outcome. The workshop comes with the potential for confrontation as much as it can lead to long-lasting collaborations and friendships. A workshop situation may produce disruptions and reciprocal challenging of assumptions engrained in disciplinary habits of how we are practicing. Specific moments of transformation are evoked by making things together, in the ‘here and now’.

zoönomy

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer

Photo: Patricia de Ruijter – mediakaal.nl.

 

Zoönomy is a proposal for an alternative to capitalist economy and an antithesis to any mode of thought according to which economy is capitalist by definition. The term was coined to address something that does not yet exist, but needs to come into existence: a regenerative economy. But as long as this not-yet-existing thing is portrayed as an economy, it will carry forward the sad genealogy of that word since the invention of mercantilism. Zoönomy intends to free ‘economy’ of its extractivist premises, both in language and in material practices.

Zoönomy makes no fundamental distinction between a human economy and economies of other-than-human life. It sidesteps the near-fatal historical mistake of separating human and other-than-human existence. Zoönomy deals with networks of exchange
of matter, energy, and meaning that sustain bodies of
any kind.

Human economic activity should be reconsidered and transformed into a functioning, supportive zone of a larger zoönomy. Consequently, it would no longer be capitalist. Zoöps are a testing ground for putting zoönomy into practice.

The practice of zoönomy starts on the inside of late-capitalism (as an outside presently only exists in theory). At the same time, it conceptually surrounds and exceeds the latter's notion of economy by paying qualitative attention to detail, to movement, to beauty, to violence, in short, to other things than quantity and currency.

Zoönomy aims to address the poverty of the capitalist logic, i.e., its metaphysics of one-dimensional quantification. But the issue is not economy per se. Zoönomy includes material exchanges. Like economy in its predominant understanding, zoönomy is a sphere of value. Contrary to mainstream economy, its concept of value cannot be reduced to single, quantifiable, abstracted commodities. Zoönomic value is rooted in a multiplicity of life-worlds, in notions and experiences of variety and richness in relations. Zoönomic understanding is about qualities of relation and form and pattern, aided by quantity only where relevant.

Zoönomic understanding does not operate from a preconceived distinction between physical, material exchange on the one hand and informational or symbolic exchange on the other. In other words, it is not performing any categorical distinction between theory and practice. Zoönomic knowledge lives in all semiotic hot zones: in the indexical exchanges of hormones and chemistry, in the iconic exchanges of empathy across bodies and species, and in the symbolic exchanges of stories and aggregated, distilled experience that, as it turns out, is not an exclusively human practice either.

There is not even a potential end state for the evolution of zoönomic knowledge, as it needs to work from the perspectives of ever more, always different bodies. By this principle, zoönomy is and will have to remain stubbornly open to widely divergent knowledge practices, including those from other-than-human life-worlds, whose realms of existence may only be accessible to human bodies’ experience by way of extended metaphor. (And who is to deny the vital role of metaphor in knowledge practices?)

The reason we need zoönomy is that under the pervasive semantics of capitalist economy, bodies are only informed by financial signs, designating capitalism’s poverty. In opposition, the zoönomy of a place includes its material, thermodynamic, and trophic relations, it includes exchanges of materials and energy, it includes symbolic, aesthetic exchanges: the various ways in which bodies inform and impress each other; how that which can be exchanged, translates from some bodies to some other bodies.

The practice of zoönomy requires that all those proliferating relations are not separated from each other by jargons or institutional traditions, but are perceived and treated as part of the same ontologically flattened, but otherwise exuberantly multidimensional sphere. This means that zoönomy as a knowledge practice hybridizes (conceptual) tools, lenses, ways of doing—from ecology, thermodynamics, economy, cultural analysis, political science, the arts, design, indigenous cosmologies and practices, various older and more recent technologies—hell, even quantum physics! And not in any particular order.

The aim of zoönomy is to develop knowledge practice of bodies that are always collective bodies. Applying zoönomic tools and methods, these bodies will perform a local, distinguishable zoönomy. This zoönomy is both a network of actants, with no clear centre or border, as well as a finite volume, a sphere. Diverse bodies are enrolled in constituting a locally situated zoönomy. This zoönomy is not yet all-inclusive, it still has an inside and an outside. After all, we have to start somewhere.

Zoönomic knowledge is developed and aggregated in response to particular, motivated curiosities of certain collective bodies. Calling this knowledge an effect of curiosity is to say that there is no talk here of a grand theory of zoönomy. There may never be such a theory and certainly not in what is understood as ‘theory’ today. Zoönomy faces its questions in the field and in the flesh, where there are always open windows, ground fog, creaking hinges and funny smells, membranes, hair roots.

Zoönomy not only has no grand theory, it also does not have a language of its own yet, although it for sure has a liking for biological metaphor. Best we can say is that at the moment, it is in a state of critical making do—an ontological pidgin. The first actual Zoöps that will speak this pidgin, will grow it into a proud creole.

The concept, the practice and the language of zoönomy always have some particular task and are being shaped by performing this task. This task is always situated—it is always a task, an urgency at hand in one or the other Zoöp. The knowledge practice of zoönomy should be capable of adapting to this task at hand, while increasing its integrity, like bone, like nervous tissue. The work is to make it work.

The practice of zoönomy fosters ecological integrity of multispecies communities, of collective bodies. The practice starts with Zoöps and their surroundings, and from there intends to spread,
like a beneficial pandemic, across planet Earth.

making

artistic research

Janneke Wesseling

history

Artistic research is a major buzzword in the European art field, in education (art academies and universities) as well as in exhibition circuits (museums, galleries, and bienniales). The artist as researcher has become a commonly accepted figure, but was hardly known in the field of contemporary visual art some twenty years ago.

Recent as the phenomenon may be, its roots can be traced back to early twentieth-century art movements such as Surrealism (Bureau de recherches surréalistes founded in 1925 by André Breton) and Marcel Duchamp, and especially to the 1960s and 1970s. Artistic research in visual art is highly indebted to conceptual art as it manifested itself both in the US (Dan Graham, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, to mention just a few) and in Europe (George Brecht, Marcel Broodthaers, Hanne Darboven). In conceptual art, theoretical reflection plays a pivotal role. According to the early conceptual artists, the art work cannot not be separated from the context of history and politics and in order to produce art it was regarded as essential for artists to politically and discursively engage with society. Not only did conceptual artists reflect on societal and political issues, but on art and the art practice itself. They regarded critical reflection on one’s artistic procedures or doings as essential to the artistic process or as the artistic process itself. Language and text therefore acquired an important role in art practice and writings could be part of the art work
or even constitute the work itself (such as in the case
of Robert Barry, Kosuth and the early work of Lawrence Weiner). 

Another important factor in the emergence of theory and criticism as artistic practice were feminist art practices that aimed to reveal power structures
and patterns of hierarchy in society and in the art world (Elaine Sturtevant, Louise Lawler, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger).

For present-day artists, to position themselves as researcher rather than as a producer of marketable goods offers an alternative to the dominance of economic liberalism in the art field and to the capitalist exploitation that is tied to the production of goods. The artist-as-researcher problematizes, contextualizes, and re-enacts social, political, and environmental issues.

terminology

Artistic research could simply be defined as research carried out by artists (designers, composers, choreographers etc.) It is practice-based research that is carried out in and through artistic practice.

In artistic research, practical action (making) and theoretical reflection (thinking) go hand-in-hand, action and thought are inextricably linked. This type of research does not have a predetermined methodology. Like art practice, each artistic research project is idiosyncratic by nature, determined by the desire of the researcher to reflect on their practice, in collaboration with others. The artistic researcher works through theory-practice entanglements. This is to say, not by using practice as an illustration of theory or vice versa, but by exploring ways in which theory and practice are mutually implicated.

Of course, art by its very nature is intelligent
and cognitive: art practice aims to gain a better understanding of the world and to deliver new perspectives on reality. In this broad sense, for many centuries, beginning with Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance, research has been recognized as part of the work artists were doing. In our time, that is since the twentieth century, a large part of contemporary art production can, at least to some degree, be identified with critical (self-)reflection (as argued above). So, if research is a natural part of art practice, ‘innate’ to it, then why would we want to use the term ‘research’ at all when we speak about art? What does it add? Art in itself is not in need of the qualification of ‘research’. Artists are in no way required to demonstrate that they are doing research, neither are they required to account for or explicate what they are doing and how they are doing it.

In an academic context, artistic research has acquired a more specific, and perhaps more relevant, meaning. As a consequence of the so-called Bologna Agreements (1999), entailing a Europe-wide reorganization of education which aimed at establishing a comparable BA and MA framework for all European countries, it became possible for artists and artistic ‘makers’ to obtain the PhD degree. Here, doing research means referring to making a particular research project that is made public as research project, including the artistic process that underlies it. In this context, certain criteria will have to be fulfilled. Such as the requirement that the researcher seeks
the discussion in the public domain. The artist-as-researcher distinguishes herself from other artists by taking it upon herself to gain a deeper understanding of the production of the work and the thinking process through a continuous dialogue with others. The artist-researcher allows others (peers, colleagues) to participate in their creative process, entering into a discussion with them and opening herself up to critique. In this context, the public dimension of research, in the sense of making the artistic process public and explicating the so-called ‘tacit knowledge’ embodied in the work and the practice, is at its core.

destruction

Dani Ploeger

Industrial destruction of unused, 'off-spec' products at Northeast Data Destruction, Mansfield, MA.

 

At first sight, acts of material destruction often seem to take place outside the aura of newness that permeates the everyday and its representations in consumer culture. However, a closer look shows that, as a matter of fact, destructive processes are at the core of capitalist culture. Drawing from Marx, economist Joseph Schumpeter suggests that capitalist economies are driven by what he calls the ‘gale of creative destruction’. In order to generate new surplus value, the capitalist economic system requires a continuous process of destroying existing structures. This happens on a systemic level, as the continuous reshaping of economic orders, but also in immediate material confrontations of war, demolition, and wilful neglect. Demolishing old buildings and infrastructures is oftentimes promoted because it ‘creates jobs’ and the engineering of ‘planned obsolescence’ in commodities can be seen as the design of processes of auto-destruction.

In everyday life, the practices of destruction that constitute the ‘back end’ of liberal capitalism are covered up by an incessant stream of representations of the smooth, the shiny, and the new. The weapon trade fair may be the most radical manifestation of this dialectic. While the majority of commodities offered here are unambiguously conceived to enact material destruction, their modes
of representation as a rule exceed the visual languages of consumerism in terms of the prominence of clean and spotless, slick material surfaces.

Schumpeter’s ‘gale of creative destruction’ can be seen as part of a broader characteristic of capitalist expansionism. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore argue that capitalist enterprise is underpinned by a never-ending drive towards accessing ever cheaper resources in the form of nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. In the context of this process of endless cheapening, ‘creative destruction’ operates as a catalyst for the system’s incessant need for devaluation. As such, the destructive tendency that lies at the core of capitalist enterprise contributes to its character as essentially a ‘frontier technology’ that in its search for cheapness is in a very fundamental way irreconcilable with ambitions to establish a truly ecologically sustainable economic model.

There are also forms of destruction that exist beyond the logic of Schumpeter’s ‘gale of creative destruction’. Destruction caused by natural, non-human phenomena may nowadays occur as an indirect result of extractivist economic activity and will often quickly be subsumed in a process of commodification where ecological disaster serves as a cue for the development of new products, as is the case in e.g.,
the export of Dutch engineering systems to counter
the threats of rising sea-levels in Jakarta, Indonesia. Nevertheless, these forms of destruction that are not directly anthropogenic also fall outside the sphere of human control and are posing fundamental systemic challenges. Climate-change induced natural destruction will drastically limit access to cheap resources on a global scale. At some point the final frontier in the ceaseless quest towards cheapness
will be reached.

In addition to destruction caused by natural,
non-human phenomena, there is also direct, human induced destruction that takes place outside—
and in opposition to—the ‘gale of creative destruction’. Through acts of unmaking, the mechanisms of capitalist production and consumption may be sabotaged to promote interests beyond mere cheapening and surplus value optimization.

diy

Florian Cramer

Do-It-Yourself is a concept that has been (re-)invented multiple times throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Originally, diy is a North American term for home improvement that has been in use since the 1950s. Its close cousin is the French ‘bricolage’ both in its literal, everyday sense (‘bricolage’ hardware shops) and in its wider application in cultural anthropology and philosophy. The literal meaning of diy is a material practice of someone without professional training, typically in makeshift or even crude ways.

La Friche, former DIY space in Marseille, France, photo: Pascal Rey, 2008 (Creative Commons-BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Precursors to today’s diy culture include the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement and its self-built communities, Dadaism in Berlin in the 1920s with its slogan ‘Dilettantes—rise up against art!’, counter-culture experiments in the 1960s and 1970s such as the Survival Scrapbooks of UK artist/musician/
activist Stefan Szczelkun that taught readers how to build their own shelter, grow their own food and generate their own energy, and the media activism of the Raindance Corporation artist collective that published diy instruction manuals for building one’s own radio and television broadcasting technology (critical making). These diy poetics were continued, among others, by the UK artists heath bunting and Kate Rich in the 1990s and in the contemporary zine series Self-Reliance Library of the Chicago-based Temporary Services collective.

Counter-cultural diy became commodified as early as in the 1970s with the Whole Earth Catalog, an alternative lifestyle periodical and product catalogue. In the 1980s, the focus of its publishers shifted to home computing, early electronic social media and, ultimately, the Californian Internet economy. Around the same time, punk and hip hop gave new meanings to diy. In punk, everyone could be their own fashion designer, a musician by playing only three guitar chords, and a graphic designer and publisher by making zines. Hip hop’s early music production technology of scratching vinyl records was born out
of poverty and diy improvisation.

These subcultures turned diy from merely a poetics
(in the literal sense of poiesis as ‘making’) into a simultaneous poetics, aesthetics and—to some degrees—ethos and politics.

Suvilahti DIY skatepark in Kalasatama, Sörnäinen, Helsinki, Finland in June 2021, photo: Simo Räsäne
(Creative Commons-BY-NC-SA 2.0).

diy since punk

In understandings of the term since the early 2000s, diy stands for an alternative to industrial capitalism and its products, and for the convergence of what used to be called ‘alternative culture’ and ‘self-organized arts’.

As opposed to the more established terms ‘artist-run space’ and ‘artists collective/initiative’, contemporary ‘diy spaces’ (that exist particularly in the USA) imply no clear-cut separation between artists and non-artists, professionals and non-professionals, and include artists of all trades, musicians, community organizers, political activists, squatters, bohemians, artists and their audiences. ‘diy culture’ in this sense has the connotation of cultural work that can no longer be firmly placed under the moniker ‘art’, at least not fine art.

Between the two extremes of diy as (a) counterculture and (b) home improvement stores there is the technological diy of hacker and ‘maker’ culture (critical making). With the boom of fab labs and maker spaces, this type of ‘diy’ has become its
own industry.

Diy culture becomes problematic as a term if one extends the perspective to non-Western and non-industrialized countries where self-making and makeshift improvisation is not an exception, but
the rule.

present

The Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa has been characterized as being driven by ‘a strong diy ethos’, born out of the necessity of creating one’s own structures in post-dictatorship Indonesia and affinity and vicinity to ‘punk and street cultures’.

Subcultures and artist projects can converge in radical diy practices that are: self-taught, self-built, self-funded, happening in self-organized spaces using self-built infrastructure, with self-organized communication and distribution. ‘Self’ may refer to an individual, a collective or a community.

This makes diy a phenomenon that is concerned with autonomy. ‘Autonomy’, when translated literally from Greek to English, means ‘self-governance’. In the context of artists’ diy, autonomy is a poetics, and hence a categorically different notion of autonomy than that of aesthetic philosophy from Kant and Schiller to Adorno and Rancière. Instead of an idealist concept, autonomy becomes a material practice. Or perhaps more precisely: in diy culture, autonomy is being actively created—and permanently negotiated—in and through the material practice of its community members. Re-applied to art, this means, to quote David Teh’s characterization of ruangrupa, to further ‘autonomy of artists, singular or plural, but not necessarily that of the artwork’.

Building upon an Arts and Crafts legacy, diy culture is typically based on an explicit or implicit critique of disembodied and alienated industrial or institutional production for which it creates hands-on alternatives. This critique and practice can have Marxist, left-anarchist, religious-spiritual, green-ecologist, conservative, liberal, libertarian, and extreme right-wing ideological underpinnings. Racist organic farmers, for example, neofascist squatters, Nazi rock bands, motorbike repair shops of outlaw biker clubs, religious cult communes and Alt-Right meme collectives are among those who practice and make up radical diy culture. This renders political-ethical claims for diy culture just as dubious as any other fundamental political-ethical claim for subculture,
let alone any romanticization of minorities on the pure grounds of their minority position.

the not-yet

Frans-Willem Korsten

The not-yet is an intentionally anti-utopian attitude and mode of practice that anticipates future developments by realizing the potential in and of the ‘now’. As philosopher Hans Achterhuis noted, all utopian projects in a sense reject the present, or consider it as something to be destroyed in order to make way for the new. The not-yet, instead, suggests that a future is already here, as a potential to be found and cared for.

It considers ‘an effort to collectively inhabit alternative imaginaries’. Instead of destroying the present, it aims to interrupt present conditions in order to learn. If anything, the not-yet is a matter of
a ‘transformative practice’.

1. making a case for an alternative future

What potentials does a practice of the not-yet have? How can art’s critical potential be used to explore alternative possibilities in the present that materialize in a process of learning? The case presented here is a project that taught me a lot. It was called De vleesvrije stad, or The Meat Free City and materialized in book form, and digitally on the website of Drawing the Times, a ‘platform for graphic journalism’ initiated by artist and graphic journalist Eva Hilhorst.

Front cover of the book.

One of the drawings by Merel Barends that shows the Netherlands in the shape of a pig, as an alternative for the well-known Dutch Lion, symbol and icon for the nation; drawingthetimes.com.

 

The Meat Free City project had its inspiring source in artist-designer Mark Schalken, and became a collective learning process in which all participants—graphic artists, scholars, designers, journalists—discovered potentials in a present that might form the beginnings of another future. Tellingly, the project was subtitled: ‘in ten years’. Yet this did not concern a blueprint for a manageable plan with concrete steps to be taken. Rather, the participants were asked to think of possibilities existing in the present and how to hypothetically realize them—at a certain moment
in time, and within a time span of ten years. Each contribution focuses on an imaginary year, consequently, in which, for instance, schools host living animals and take them up in the curriculum; supermarkets no longer sell meat; municipal councils give one third of their seats to representatives of different groups of animals (zoöp). Thus, the idea was not just to imagine alternatives but to emphasize that these possibilities are already here, and could as well be realized now.

2. the principle of hope made real

The very phrase ‘the not-yet’ was coined by Ernst Bloch in an extensive study called The Principle of Hope, written between 1938 and 1947. Instead of resorting to the humanist origin of the term utopia as a product of the imagination, Bloch argued that throughout history, utopias have been everywhere, as materializations of hope that do not depend on an imagined alternative or a promise but on something to be done in the here and now. In contrast, the Enlightenment utopian/dystopian complex with figures such as the Marquis de Condorcet, depended on a historiography that depicts the process of mankind as progress, as a matter of growing complexity and improvement. The utopian future can be predicted and made top-down, not just as a matter of imagining a better or more beautiful world, but of managing a reality in terms of the probability to get there. The nineteenth century would come to witness what this meant, in the areas of urban planning and landscape design. This, however, paled in comparison to how in the twentieth century entire environments were imagined and built from scratch, and agro-industries and biotechnologies would start to reconfigure the entire idea of life—of all life.

In the project The Meat Free City, the hope for an alternative future found an anchor point in a collective process. This made the concept of hope materially real, through a mode of working together in commitment and solidarity. The project started in May 2020, smack in the middle of the Covid isolation, and would result in a publication of a Dutch book plus a digital version in English, in the spring of 2021. When publishers proved to be reluctant to bring out the book, or demanded the right to considerably alter its form and contents, the collective decided to raise money themselves, thus involving even more people but also safeguarding the artistic concept and process. The hope and reality of making this art piece in practice thus came to resonate with the hope and reality of an alternative future.

3. the not-yet as a commitment to the present

When the Meat Free City collective accepted its task

of making a work of art that would manifest an alternative reality, they decided to focus on the existing present. Obviously, this did not imply that they accepted everything the present had to offer. In fact, some of the contributors found out that the meat industry was even more abysmal than they had previously thought. For all participants, the project consisted of a collective pedagogical endeavour:
a process of learning together, sharing knowledge, and considering different forms of imagining futures that would do justice to both the present and the future.

In this light, Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto from 1985 still holds its force. In this manifesto, Haraway proposed an alternative future. The distinction between manifesto and utopia is pivotal here, in terms of function, style, and aim. The manifesto provoked its readers not so much to think of possible futures but to conceive of a better future as a possibility in the present. Like Marx and Engels, Haraway insisted ‘that possibilities for better worlds are born inside not outside the present relations of domination’. This is why the potential of a collective that Haraway provocatively located in the cyborg is ‘fully implicated in the world’. Or, again, instead of fleeing towards the future on the basis of a fictive blueprint, real improvement is only possible if people consciously ‘inhabit the despised place’. Or, it is within an existing mode of production where the potential for a better world lingers, not as an ideal but within the material givens of that very world, and in the nigh inexhaustible potential embodied in life as zoë (zoöp and zoönomy).

 

4. conditions of change:
interruption or arranging coincidence

In recent years, a popular term in artistic circles was ‘intervention’. The term means, literally, that artists ‘come in-between’, perhaps in order to change a given situation. With the not-yet, however, the focus on both the collective process and the commitment to the present implies that intervention is only viable when artists do not already know what needs to be changed, but intervene to make change possible. Another term introduced in this context is ‘interruption’, a term that is of special relevance in the context of a capitalist system that can only function on the basis of constant movement; a movement that also blocks the emergence of alternatives. With respect to this, artist Jeanne van Heeswijk, in cooperation with BAK-Utrecht, shifted the emphasis from ‘emergency’ to ‘the emergent’ in the project ‘Trainings for the Not-yet’. ‘The emergent’ aimed to underscore the possibilities in the now, or
the potential in the present, but also emphasized that the situation must be such that something can indeed emerge. The question then becomes what kinds of practices can make things emerge or coincide, in a process that time and time again asks participants to sense the implications of their practices or what the consequences of their actions may be. This is why the title of the project did not have ‘training’ in the title but ‘trainings’: practices. In this context, strategy has to give in to tactics. The tactic to make things coincide is
a tactic of arrangements, which can be transformative itself. Or, in working towards such coincidence, training for the not-yet will inevitably imply transforming one’s self.

unmaking

Dani Ploeger

In the practice of critical making, the focus is on the processes of making, rather than on the outcomes of these processes in the form of artefacts. This then forms the basis for critical reflection on creativity, production, and consumption (see criticality). If the aim of this critical engagement is to formulate alternatives to the mechanisms and cultural habits of endless accumulation and expansion—the backbone of economic liberalism—we must also consider material processes that take place beyond or in opposition to the making of new artefacts and look towards processes of deterioration and acts of destruction. In this, it is important to distinguish between the processes of destruction that are inherent in capitalist expansionism (see destruction) and those that destabilize or challenge the systemic status quo. The latter can be designated as acts of unmaking.

The study and exploration of these ‘outcast’ processes and the ways in which—and reasons why— they are excluded from dominant narratives in consumer culture could inform perspectives that challenge the myth of endless growth.

Unmaking may involve breaking technological devices, such as the Luddites’ attacks on textile machinery in the early nineteenth century, but it can also concern the creation of technological devices in order to destroy (part of) the domain of production and consumption. Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are an example of this. Such acts and technologies of unmaking are commonly dismissed as nihilistic violence aimed at the supposedly peaceful everyday of consumer culture. However, considering that destruction is actually an essential component of the very logic of capitalism—albeit often hidden below its shiny surfaces—processes of unmaking should rather be examined as transgressions of the inherent destructive violence of the ‘business as usual’ of production and consumption.

Practices of unmaking can be read in the context
of Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between subjective and objective forms of violence: ‘... subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal”, peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent in this “normal” state of things.’

Acts of unmaking form an explicit response to the often-overlooked objective violence of destruction-based economic activity.

As such, unmaking can be experienced as subjective violence from the perspective of regular consumers. However, it should rather be read as a form of unmasking, a pulling away of the shiny surface of consumer culture to bring the inherent violence to light. But in fact, what is indicated with ‘unmaking’ here, is more than what is captured by the notion of unmasking. It is an affirmative escape from both the opaque glitz of consumer surfaces as well as from the extractivist (i.e., extracting natural resources from the Earth) business-as-usual of the larger capitalist machine. Unmaking is to be understood as a combined material, creative and symbolic negation breaking matter away from its looming capitalist burden and making it available for other meanings, other appropriations, other play.

Dani Ploeger, Laboratory of Electronic Ageing, 2019. An industrial drop testing machine is exhibited in a museum. Instead of its intended use as a testing device in production and innovation processes it is put on display to endlessly drop an unused high-tech shaving device. While the shaver decomposes to a state of bare materiality, the industrial machine is symbolically disconnected from the realm of production and reintroduced as a creative instrument. © Dani Ploeger

Dani Ploeger, Laboratory of Electronic Ageing, 2019.

matter

feeding

Thalia Hoffman

To eat is a basic need for living. However, it is much more than merely a physical need. Feeding and eating have always been part of socio-political, economic, and cultural frames of thinking and of decision-making. The priorities of these frames, or belief systems, decide upon our eating habits, such as religious food traditions and regulations, the distribution of nutrition supplies around the globe or determine certain foods as expensive or cheap. Feeding and eating also play a major role in the construction of subjective identities. Personal selections of certain ingredients, specific cooking methods and ceremonial eating habits tend to characterize human beings, individually as well as socially. Therefore, feeding and eating are not only things one does to maintain one’s body, but a fundamental part of many aspects of life.

Feeding and eating is something one can do for oneself, but it is not an action that is possible without co-relations and interactions with others (animals, plants, the land, and so on). Today, after almost two years of a global pandemic, social distancing has forced people to stay apart and encouraged them not to exchange physical particles. I propose that feeding as a performative tactic of critical making might teach us something about how to nourish each other again.

In my artistic practice I use feeding and eating as performative research. I construct participatory meals as a critical reflection on and digestion of processes of socio-political constructions and individual choices. tactics are time-based opportunities that we can seize to change or influence the mechanism we are a part of. As such, tactics do not overturn the ruling system, but use opportunities to strike at specific junctures. Through the ongoing series of performances entitled To Serve You, I propose a critical performative tactic that explores the power relations between feeder and eater. It is an intimate performance series which explores elements of feeding and the power relations established in feeding through passion, pleasure,
and compassion alongside organization, supervision, and imposing.

To Serve You practices and examines feeding and the interrelationship it creates between feeders, eaters, and food. The performances engage all five senses—seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching—and the digestion and olfactory systems of the participants. Feeding as a performative tactic activates participants and viewers directly and physically, through the body. To Serve You addresses exterior as well as interior parts of the body, penetrating one’s physical experience in an attempt to raise a socio-political resistance from within. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘The perceiving subject is not this absolute thinker; rather, it functions according to a natal pact between our body and the world, between ourselves and our body.’ The performance series
To Serve You enters every gateway into one’s body to activate socio-political critical thinking.

Feeding as a performative tactic arouses direct and intimate inter-relations between feeder and eater, and between the members of a group of eaters. In agreeing to eat something, the eater accepts something foreign to become part of his/her body. ‘The classification of something as food means it is understood as something made to become part of who we are.’ According to philosopher Deane Curtin, humans have a physical understanding that anything they eat will become part of their bodily self. As such, according to Curtin, food holds a special relation to the Self. In the performance series To Serve You I, as the main feeder, draw attention to this physical understanding, while participants are challenged to respond and to interact with what might be transferred into their body and become part of them.

Feeding inherently contains power relations between the one who feeds and the one who eats.
The power relations can be found within personal relationships, as well as between humans and institutions, and people amid their socio-political community. Surprisingly these power relations are neither clear nor stable and tend to change throughout various feeding interactions. To Serve You seeks to explore the connection between food, rules, law, nationality, and security through the power relations between guest/host, feeder/eater and among the diners.

In a century in which everyday life is flooded with images, moving images and sounds, I choose to infiltrate all of the bodily senses, so that my practice can be experienced through the body as well as inside the body. To me this is especially urgent, since the local socio-political conflicts of the area east to the Mediterranean, where I live, are vigorously interpreted, visually and vocally. Between news, TV-shows, films, blogs, and academic research in various fields, endless information has been and is being communicated, documented, and recorded regarding the conflicts in this area. I experiment with senses and inner parts in order to explore the possibilities of embodying socio-political critical thinking and making. These experiences are a result of both dissatisfaction with communicating only through sight and sound, and of my eagerness to subversively interact and affect participants through my practice.

to serve you—a performance series
(2017–ongoing)

The first realization of the performance series was part of the exhibition ‘Motions for the Agenda’ (curated by Avi Feldman in collaboration with Vardit Gross, Artport 2017). First as a series of dinners with jurists, culture scholars, sociologists, and psychologists in which we talked about feeding while being fed by me, held at The Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon. These dinners were recorded, then edited and mixed into a sound work. The next step, inspired by the sound work, was an intimate dinner performance of
a seven-course vegetarian meal performed by three feeders to an audience of six eaters.

Since then, To Serve You performs in different venues, it continuously adjusts itself to the changing socio-political and environmental surroundings alongside the performance location and the number
of eaters and feeders.

Performers: Michal Samama, Carmel Bar, Ofri Omer, Shailoh Phillips, Thalia Hoffman.

 

To Serve You, HaBait Theatre, Tel Aviv, 2020,
photos: Uri Rubinstein. ▲ ▶

grounded

Femke Snelting

Yet another online meeting, in the fall of 2020. A festival will take place on the cusp of water and land, and the artists are preparing site-specific installations. As they present their projects to each other, one of them claims to be based in the particular area and persistently invites the artists calling in from remote locations to ‘come over for a boat trip, and stick their boots in the mud’. There is no doubt that the best way to get to grips with the shifting grounds of the festival location will be to step on site.

Physical presence, and direct contact with the specific muddiness of a terrain can be part of a situated knowledge practice, a powerful antidote to presumed positions of exteriority and views from nowhere. But it is also a proprietary gesture that essentializes territorial nearness. It counts on the privilege of individual experience, and relies on touch at first hand or boot, sticking to knowledge that can only be acquired by presence. Centring on what can be perceived from where one is standing is taking a risk to foreground what is here and now, and to negate interdependencies that operate at a distance. How long did it take for the sediment to be deposited? Where will the polluted soil from the estuary eventually end up? When did the seagrass become invasive, or start capturing carbon?

In their work on touch, feminist thinker Karen Barad propose that ‘being in touch’ is what allows experiments to become participative, rather than remaining at some remove. They invite us to explore queer ways of being in touch, which involve (other-than-human) others besides ourselves:

Thinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human activity. Stepping into the void, opening to possibilities, straying, going out of bounds, off the beaten path—diverging and touching down again, swerving and returning, not as consecutive moves but as experiments
in in/determinacy.

The kind of touch Barad propose is not counting on the legibility of what it steps into, nor on the reassuring effects of affection. As they remind us elsewhere, for a physicist, touch is but a sensation caused by electromagnetic repulsion.

How to be grounded, without getting stuck in the mud of personal experience? I guess I am trying to re-articulate ‘grounded’ as a ‘thinking-and-making-with’ that is always already part of what it steps into.
A grounded practice that does not depend on knowing where the ground begins or ends, and can let go of pre-established notions of fore-ground and back-ground.

Ground and feet, land and movement, verticality and time, situatedness and axes: the more of them we take into account when giving account of the spheres
we share, the more degrees of freedom we are going to endow

our deterritorialized and reterritorialized lives with.

To be grounded means to be porous to remote impressions, to trust the touching done by (other-than-human) others, and to take into account that which it is caught up with, especially when it is not understood, can not be felt or ever be intuited.
Because however distant, our deterritorialized
and reterritorialized experiences are simply always
in touch.

material practice

Janneke Wesseling

Over the past decades, a re-evaluation or even rehabilitation of practice in relation to theory can be witnessed in the field of the humanities. New Materialist modes of thinking are largely accountable for this change in perspective on the role of practice in academic research. In the humanities, ‘practice’ has long been, and often still is, regarded as subordinate and subservient to theory. Many scholars look down on practice as being merely the handwork in the laboratory that is needed to support or provide proof of theory. The truly important work is of a theoretical nature, that is, the work of the mind. The hegemony of theory largely explains the struggle of art academies in Europe to gain recognition for artistic research by universities (see artistic research).

From a historical point of view, the binary understanding of concept and matter, of subject and object, and the hierarchy of theory over practice in Western culture originated in the age-old tradition of valuing vita contemplativa over vita activa. The predominance of mind over body can be traced back to Plato and to Saint Augustine’s embracing of platonic thinking, as argued by Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind (1978). Like Plato, Aristotle held deductive thinking in high esteem and downplayed experiment. Aristotle’s Categories became formative of and canonical to medieval scholasticism.

According to American philosopher Ian Hacking (Representing and Intervening, 1983), the imbalance of theory and experiment was reversed with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, in particular with the thinking of Francis Bacon (1561–1626). During the scientific revolution, practical experiment ‘was officially declared to be the royal road to knowledge, and the schoolmen were scorned because they argued from books instead of observing the world around them’. But times have changed, Hacking tells us, and today the history of the sciences is almost always written as a history of theory rather than of experiment: philosophers of science ‘constantly discuss theories and representations of reality, but say almost nothing about experiment, technology, or the use of knowledge to alter the world’. Hacking also notes that the theory/experiment status difference is ‘modelled on social rank’. His Representing and Intervening contests the theory-dominated history of science. It is Hacking’s conviction that ‘a question posed in terms of theory and experiment is misleading because it treats theory as one rather uniform kind of thing and experiment as another’.

For Hacking, practice is characterized by experiment and by the intervention in reality (instead of the representation of reality). Hacking calls himself an ‘ontological realist’ who believes the entities, states and processes described by correct theories are real, and not mere ‘constructs of the human mind for organizing our experiments’. In a certain respect, Hacking’s Representing and Intervening anticipates New Materialist modes of thinking. Under the heading of New Materialism, a diverse group of thinkers is brought together who, despite differences in outlook, agree in one fundamental respect: the existence of a reality, or of a world, of objects out there, independent of our gaze and of our knowledge of them, independent also of our access to these objects.

These thinkers aim ‘to preserve the autonomy and irreducibility of substance’.

New Materialism embodies the attempt to sidestep the subject-object divide created by René Descartes and Enlightenment philosophers such as Hume and Kant. New Materialists aim to overcome the Cartesian worldview, that is, the subject-object distinction.

A leading proponent of the New Materialist strain of thinking is the American philosopher and physicist Karen Barad—even though she does not like to use the term New Materialism, preferring ‘agential realism’ in its stead. Agential realism is the attempt ‘to rethink fundamental concepts that support binary thinking including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time.’

Barad emphasizes that

agential realism does not merely offer a new framework through which to understand the roles of the human and the nonhuman, the material and the discursive, but inquires into the very practices through which they are differentiated.

It is not the scope of this text to offer an interpretation of Barad’s thinking. What is important here is that Barad does not refer to matter as a fixed substance, but rather as a process of ‘iterative intra-activity’. ‘Matter’, in her view, ‘refers to phenomena in their ongoing materialization’.

Now, how might this New Materialist account relate to what is generally understood as material practice in the discourse among artists? It must be noted that in artistic discourse material practice is not used in opposition to ‘conceptual practice’. Put otherwise, in artistic discourse, a practice that takes physical material or materiality as point of departure is not necessarily opposed to a practice that is guided by an abstract idea. For artists, material practice and ‘conceptual practice’ are multi-layered terms that do not exclude one another. More than that, from the 1960s onward, conceptual artists sought to connect or entangle matter and idea, image and language, thematizing this connection through their work.

Conceptual art practices therefore may be, and often are, rooted in materiality and in material processes. This is the reason why many so-called Conceptual artists (such as Lawrence Weiner) refuse to be categorized as such. ‘Conceptual’ here refers not so much to the ‘art work as idea’ but to art practices in which the process of art making is regarded as equally important or relevant as the eventual outcome of this process (Cf Weiner: ‘the piece need not be built’). There is no hierarchy here of ‘materiality’ and ‘conceptuality’, and no hierarchy of theory and experiment. In conceptual art (not only referring to American Conceptual Art form the 1960s and 1970s, but in the broader sense of the word), the role and importance of critical reflection in the making process, and of theory in the physical experiment, is acknowledged. One might even argue that nowadays, under the ‘postconceptual condition’ (Peter Osborne), the conceptual nature of art practice is recognized
as a sine qua non. Art practice is of a material as well as a conceptual nature at the same time. One might conclude that the traditional philosophical opposition of matter and concept, of practice and theory, is overcome or nullified here.

Examples in this book of the reciprocal entanglement of concept and matter are Femke Snelting’s project at the Bidston Observatory in Liverpool (see Snelting on embeddednes); Thalia Hoffman’s performance To Serve You (in feeding);
or Kate Rich on business (this book contains many more examples).

undisciplined

feral

Kate Rich

 

My interest in the feral comes from the vantage point of my own business (see the entry for ‘business’ in this lexicon, with which this account is entwined). Feral Trade is an artist-run grocery business and underground freight network, trading coffee, olive oil, dried bamboo shoots and other vital goods outside official channels since 2003. All the suppliers and all of the customers come through extended social networks. Goods hitchhike in the spare baggage space of friends, colleagues and passing acquaintances, while museums, offices, hotel reception desks, and other quasi-public places act as trans-shipment points and depots. An operation effectively like DHL, but without any employees, vans, facilities, or attempted delivery notes and without a business plan. While money does change hands, this is almost peripheral to the commitments and relations that keep the trade in motion. Instead, the core business of Feral Trade is in forging vivid, resurgent, and sociable supply chains, outside the logic of the market.

Calling this operation feral was initially a knee-jerk reaction to the excessive truth claims that ‘fair’ and ‘free’ trade put out. I took up the word feral as an act of triangulation, connecting ‘fair’ and ‘free’ to feral to complicate or scramble their confident affirmations. Beyond an easy play on words, I was also drawn to the icon of the feral pigeon, a well-known character that gets away with making a living in the margins of urban activity worldwide. It describes a way of operating that is wilfully wild or street-wild, as opposed to romantically wild (like the wolf). In terms of trade, what this approach amounts to is not some kind of heroic or folkloric revival of artisan trade practices. Instead, it is a diy endeavour with a scavenger’s attitude to infrastructure that is inquisitive, encounter-based, opportunistic, and boundary-disregarding.

I am also aware of the more troubled connotations of the term. Being feral is normally a status conferred from outside with a mixture of description and emotion. While its objective meaning is the gone-wild descendants of formerly domesticated creatures, it is also used as an expression of annoyance or dislike. Its characteristics include being invasive, causing disruption, being undisciplined and disorderly, ‘wandering all over the place’ as literary and historical scholar Alexis Harley puts it. By contrast, the Feral Atlas project (see this lexicon) does not make judgements of feral phenomena but considers them in context. In their careful reading, the feral is not inherently the problem but a descriptive characteristic of the unintended effects of human infrastructure projects, producing entities that thrive outside human control.

Yet it is in this mixed messaging, its ambivalent character, that the feral gets interesting. Engaged outside its usual stamping ground of the nature/culture divide, I am intrigued by its potential to run interference in that other super-naturalized domain of business. As a category that ‘puts pressure on the idea of nature’, in Harley’s words, it applies stubborn resistance to a naturalized business ideology with its jungle laws of expedition, competition, and Darwinian survival. At the same time, the feral also signals a departure from the weighty imperatives in social and ethical business to always be ‘good’ or do ‘right’. That an individual enterprise or even a sector could be sustainable or responsible in an unsustainable, irresponsible system is ‘implausible’, as ecological thinkers and action research business scholars Judi Marshall, Peter Reason and Gillian Coleman underline. We need some more down-to-earth assignments.

In this, I consider the feral as an opportune agent for our times: a scrappy role model, perhaps one-legged, poised to seek out the chinks in seeming impermeable yet arguably plentiful systems. An exemplar for living and working in the cracks—being wild amongst, not wild apart—with a management style that might be well suited for the troubled planetary relations in which we find ourselves. To further investigate this potential in company, I am starting up the Feral MBA, a radically reoriented training course in business for artists and others. Its founding intention is to enter and explore the murky territory of business in oblique, hopeful, hands-on and unstable ways, with the feral as its emblem.

feral

Feral Atlas (Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou)

Feral is not necessarily a negative or positive word; it has different meanings in different contexts. In Feral Atlas, feral refers to a nonhuman entity (biological, chemical, geological) that is beyond human control.

feral effects are all around us. Flora and fauna adapt to and transform ecologies in tune with their own cycles and rhythms beyond the anticipation and control of human activities all the time. An apple tree thrives after a forest visitor tosses the core after eating an apple, for example.

The feral effects Feral Atlas is concerned with are the unexpected, non-designed consequences of human-made imperial and industrial infrastructures, which materially transform land, water, and air with such intensity that shifts occur in formally stable nonhuman ecologies. These shifts can create favourable conditions for living or non-living entities to run out-of-control, whose feral activities tip these ecologies from one state to another. Jellyfish caused ecological disaster in the Black Sea after being accidentally brought there in ballast water in cargo ships, for example.

feral effects occur across multiple, overlapping, and uneven scales and often go unnoticed and unattended—a consequence perhaps of the hubris of modernizing infrastructure projects—and so feral effects pile up. This accumulation of feral effects shifts interactions between humans and nonhumans across scales, creating new, life-threatening ecological conditions. This, Feral Atlas argues, is the more-than-human Anthropocene.

In these critical times we argue that we need urgently to learn methods and practices of attention to what our infrastructures do. Rather looking at feral

 

effects as a result, Feral Atlas asks, what triggers and encourages them?

workshop: feral atlas as a verb

You are invited to explore the more-than-human worlds of Feral Atlas > www.feralatlas.org.

Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou

Making Matters Symposium 2020, 20 November 2020 | Driving the Human Opening Festival, 22 November 2020

introduction: feral atlas as a verb

The Feral Atlas concept of infrastructure-mediated state change is where ongoing human-made infrastructural processes radically change environments to the point where our social and ecological systems are tipped from one state to another. In Feral Atlas, we call these infrastructural processes Tippers. Tippers are a non-exhaustive set of verbs that express the transformative actions of human-made infrastructures.

This workshop is an experiment in noticing, recording, and expressing the actions of Tippers in our daily environments. Can we imagine ways of doing the infrastructural work we observe differently?

 

infrastructures

In Feral Atlas, infrastructures are technological apparatuses constructed to do kinds of work that
(at least some) humans want done. Feral Atlas defines infrastructures in relation to three conditions:

1. Infrastructures are material apparatuses that affect landscapes, waterscapes, and airscapes.
2. Infrastructures are ‘public works’ in the sense that they involve many people and projects, and are part of broadly imagined campaigns to change landscapes in the interests of some kind of governance programme.
3. Infrastructures are apparatuses created by human design.

See Feral Atlas and the More-than-Human Anthropocene at www.feralatlas.org.

tippers

To show how infrastructures create state changes, Feral Atlas starts with the kinds of work they are designed to do. We ask: In the process of doing that work, what gaps and rifts appear in the state of things? What disappears? What proliferates?

Feral Atlas expresses Tippers as eight one-syllable words, each derived from the early history of the English language, and, as such, at the base of English-speakers’ experience. Consider these words as verbs; they describe things that people—and infrastructures—do. By classifying infrastructures according to these verbs, we aim to make clear the rifts that can appear when imperial and industrial modes of work take over from other ways of doing things.

• Notice TAKE as the action of ‘taking’.
• Notice SMOOTH/SPEED as the action of ‘smoothing/speeding’.
• Notice PIPE as the action of ‘piping’.
• Notice GRID as the action of ‘gridding’.
• Notice CROWD as the action of ‘crowding’.
• Notice BURN as the action of ‘burning’.
• Notice DUMP as the action of ‘dumping’.

See Tippers: Modes of Infrastructure-Mediated State Change at www.feralatlas.org.

exercise

Take a walk outside in the area where you live. What infrastructural work do you observe in action? Which Feral Atlas Tipper(s) could describe this work?

Observe infrastructures working as they have been designed and built to do—not infrastructures that are being misused, or have broken down. Can you think of any other Tipper categories
—other verbs—that could also describe this work?

Using video or sound recording, written text or spoken word, drawings, or photographs, try to capture directly the sounds and sights of infrastructural work and the scene in which this kind of infrastructural work is being done.

 

Feral Atlas uses short videos

and sound pieces to convey something of the sheer power
of Tippers, that is, their ability to rip apart existing social and ecological systems and to create new ones. This is just one of the ways Feral Atlas has attempted to capture the direct sounds, sights, and actions of infrastructural work.
We encourage you to come up with others.

Please be prepared to share with the group your first-hand observations and recordings. Do you notice any feral entities that attune to the infrastructural work you observe?

Look together at the group’s collection of observations and recordings. Notice the similarities in infrastructural actions manifest differently across scale, duration, and place. Can we imagine ways of doing the infrastructural work we observe differently?

For more Feral Atlas exercises, see Feral Atlas Exercises: Connecting
the Material to the Place Where You Live at www.feralatlas.org.

The text for this brief has been adapted from Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. Curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou.

transdisciplinary

Feral Atlas (Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou)

The more-than-human Anthropocene is multiscalar, patchy, and overlapping. Its landscapes, its histories, its ecologies do not line up neatly. To study these more-than human worlds in active formation, Feral Atlas argues the need for multiple, multiperspectival accounts that are transdisciplinary in approach, method, and form.

Centuries of disciplinary precedent have siloed knowledge-making practices, making it difficult for scholars to study entangled Anthropocene histories that bring attention to humans and nonhumans at the same time. The following caricature is over-the-top, and yet there is a grain of truth in it: Humanists are severed heads floating in the stratosphere of philosophy, while scientists are toes grubbing in empirical dirt. Even in turning towards the concrete, humanists too often stop at an abstract discussion of ‘materiality’ before they even get to the material itself. Natural scientists ignore such discussions—but to their peril; uninformed by humanist scholarship on politics, history, and culture, scientists too often grab simplistic and misleading paradigms for measuring humanity. None of these habits allow much in the way of conversation. Without this conversation, the false dichotomy of subservient Nature and mastering Culture continues to be affirmed.

Feral Atlas argues that bringing theoretical studies and field-based practices into dialogue—often across lines of mutual unintelligibility and difference—is essential for studying the Anthropocene. Feral Atlas contributors describe feral ecologies based on firsthand observation and assessment (including archival materials) each according to their practice. They are biologists, historians, anthropologists, geographers, climate scientists, artists, poets, and writers; their witnessing comes in various forms, from poetry and natural history to the painting of an Aboriginal artist and the memoir of a British professor. Sometimes, several reports follow the activities of a particular feral entity, revealing moments of both accord and disconnect. Just as with Anthropocene landscapes, Anthropocene knowledge does not line up neatly either.

During the symposium Making Matters: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times, we (Feral Atlas members Feifei Zhou and Lili Carr) conducted a workshop in noticing feral effects in the area where you live. The workshop took place online and therefore each participant, all coming from different disciplinary backgrounds and based in their respective homes across Europe, observed and recorded feral effects around them, each according to their practices. Sharing firsthand observations formed the basis for a rich discussion during the workshop. A selection of recordings is reproduced overleaf.

 

 

Ann-Katrin Günzel, Cologne. A botanical greenhouse under renovation. Global transport and trade of plants and soils since the early eighteenth century has led to the spread of non-native plant species, pests and disease, many of which have caused world-ripping feral effects.

Kate Donovan, Berlin. A Detektor (by Martin Howse and Shintaro Myazaki) detects a cacophony of EM radiation beyond human audible range. There is some indication (yet still limited research) that EM radiation generated by human-made telecommunications infrastructures (such as transmission towers, antennas and cables) has a detrimental effect on certain bird, insect, fish, crustacean, reptilian, mammal and plant life, while the physical infrastructures themselves have been observed to affect migration patterns. ▲ ▶

Anthea Oestreicher, Karlsruhe. An increase in the variety of lichens observed during the Covid-19 pandemic indicates a fall in particulate air pollution levels. ▲ ▶

Amsterdam. The installation of EV charging infrastructure underground causes ground temperatures to rise, encouraging the proliferation of potentially harmful pathogens in municipal water pipes. ▲ ▶

Katharina Wilting, Copenhagen. Tropical fruits are sold at a street market in winter. The pallets on which they are transported overseas harbour non-native insects which, when introduced to new habits, can flourish and spread.

Zeenath Hasan, Copenhagen. The chemicals in rock salt spread to prevent the formation of road-ice is dissolved by run-off and leaks into the groundwater.

Amsterdam. A marker indicates that on this site treatment for the eradication of Japanese knotweed is taking place. Japanese knotweed was introduced to the Netherlands as an ornamental plant in the mid-nineteenth century and spread through Europe’s botanical gardens. It’s known to break through concrete and destroy roads, foundations, and in the Netherlands dykes.

underground

Janneke Wesseling

In a lecture delivered on 20 March 1961, entitled ‘Where do we go from here?’, Marcel Duchamp predicted that in the future artists ‘will go underground. The reason for this, Duchamp claimed, was that art had ‘degenerated’, as he called it, into a gigantic artistic production that was determined by supply and demand, rendering the art object into a commodity. This in turn had led to a dilution of artistic values and to the dominance of mediocre art. The response of serious artists to this deterioration of art would be, according to Duchamp, ‘an ascetic revolution’.

A short elaboration on the notion of underground, as used by Duchamp, is needed here. Two years after Duchamp’s lecture, the experimental film Flaming Creatures by American film director Jack Smith was first shown (at the Bleecker Street Cinema, on 29 April 1963). This film, which celebrates free and queer sex, marks the beginnings of the Underground Film Movement in New York, which would include artists and filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and the Kuchar brothers. The Underground Film Movement also developed ties with hippie subculture and is associated with the writers of the Beat Generation.

This is not the notion of underground that Duchamp was referring to. In my view, Duchamp talked about going underground in the sense of a secret operation, of disappearing from public view as an artist and going into hiding beneath the surface of the earth. How he dealt with his own last work, Étant donnés, over a long period of some twenty years between 1946–1966 during which he was believed to have stopped making art altogether, can be seen as an example. Underground is used here in a more literal sense, and that is how I will refer to the notion of underground in this essay. An early example is the case of Dick Raaijmakers (1930–2013), Dutch avantgarde composer, performance artist, and founder of Dutch electronic music in the 1950s. Raaijmakers once described his way of operating as follows:

I dig burrows underground and every once in a while, I stick my head above ground: hello, here I am! When I receive a blow on the head I go back into hiding, I dig further, and try again at a later point in time. If I am hit on the head once again, I withdraw again into the dark. Until finally somebody appreciates the value of my work and is willing to collaborate with me. That is the moment I can show something above ground.

Going underground enables the artist to retain a certain freedom in carrying out the artistic practice, by severing ties with art institutions and remaining at a distance from the marketing system and from neoliberalist cultural policies.

We find ourselves right in the middle of, in Duchamp’s terminology, such an ‘ascetic revolution’—although this revolution differs from what Duchamp had in mind, the main difference being that ‘the great artist of tomorrow’, as Duchamp called him (for Duchamp, the artist is male), is largely absent as an individual. Forms of collectivity and collaboration are at the heart of the present ascetic revolution. Artists join forces in collective endeavours and projects on a global scale. In doing so, values that traditionally have determined artistic production in the Western world are abolished, such as personal signature, copyright, property, marketing values, fame, and the individuality of the artistic genius. All of the contributors to the Making Matters symposia and to the present book testify to this ascetic revolution. These artists have gone underground by withdrawing from the traditional platforms of the Western art world and by rendering themselves and their art to a certain extent invisible, that is, invisible as manifestations of individual art practices.

Going underground might sound like a defeat to some readers, but in fact it means quite the opposite. Going underground is not an exodus from the art world and society, it is not a flight, a retreat, or a search for refuge. Going underground, in the sense it is used here, entails a refusal of solitary gestures, and it aims for a re-grouping, a re-assembling, a re-connecting of forces, a re-configuring of social bonds. It is about reaffirming relations, rather than about cutting ties. It is, therefore, a political act.

Politics of Withdrawal (2020), a volume edited by the Dutch cultural theorists Joost de Blooijs and Pepita Hesselberth, addresses the meaning of withdrawal as a political act. In their introduction, ‘Toward a Politics of Withdrawal?’, De Blooijs and Hesselberth suggest that withdrawal

is not a retreat from actuality per se, but from certain of its aspects: from our present-day ‘always-on’ culture, from surveillance capitalism, from neo-liberal management, and so on. …The gesture interrupts the forward motion of late-capitalism, as withdrawal is not oriented toward the future but rather invested in the possibilities of a different way of life …

Indeed, underground artists resist the idea of art practice as a form of commercial entrepreneurship aimed at maximum financial profit for the individual entrepreneur, and they refuse to define the value of art as economic value. They distance themselves from neoliberalist policies, and from Western post-colonial dominance in the fields of art and culture. The ways in which this happens are manifold and may include practices that adapt late-capitalist technologies and systems (such as business models, the logistic↵ of the warehouse and of digital distribution systems) to critically reflect on and inverse capitalist value systems. The distancing can equally happen as overt political activism or as a silent, un-outspoken way of operating that may lead to a certain degree of invisibility. Taking a distance therefore does not involve a negative act of withdrawal in the sense of refusal or seclusion (cf. Henry David Thoreau in Walden). Instead, it is a reconnecting that may take the shape of embeddedness, of communality or radical inclusivity.

The critique of global capitalist logistic↵ structures and the questioning of the place of technology in culture does not necessarily prevent a positive embracing of new technologies. In fact, a precondition for going underground seems to be an active engagement with the Internet and with technical infrastructures, enabling an opening up of new zones of global collaboration and political action. Thinking with, and through, digital technology and its role in the co-existence of humans and other-than-humans is precisely one of the focal points of the new underground art.

undisciplined

Femke Snelting

To define the term undisciplined is probably a contradiction.

Undisciplined practice is too busy with proliferating sensibilities, issues, demands, requests, complaints, entanglements, methods, and questions to bother with the inherent etiquette of disciplinarity. It insists on a
mode of thinking and making that is situated and
ad-hoc. It is anti-solutionist and motivated by the need for rigorous uncalibration and disobedient action research.

Undisciplined practitioners often operate collectively. They do not count on validated forms of expertise before interrogating existing ways of doing, and start experimenting with how to do things otherwise, right away. They smuggle techniques from one domain to another, contaminate ethnographic descriptions with accounts of software, mix poetics with abnormal visual renders and blur theoretical dissertations with case-stories.

Undisciplined practice materializes in the use of made-up terminology and uncommon writing, but also in a hands-on engagement with tools, merging high and low tech, learning on the go: active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, ex-titutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.