Hasta La Creative!

One day after an epic press conference during which President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized and diminished long-respected media outlets such as CNN as purveyors of “fake news,” his still-operating campaign arm and the Republican National Committee have reinforced their media-as-opposition message by disseminating a “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey” to supporters.

Some professional market researchers and GOP pollsters suggest that despite its appearance, the survey is nothing more than a means of egging on supporters to cough up more data, and questioned its validity.

“You would never use data from a biased sample of email list subscribers as a replacement for traditional public opinion research, and that’s not likely what they’re using it for,” said Patrick Ruffini, co-founder of Republican research firm Echelon Insights and former RNC digital strategy director. “Given the fact that Trump can’t stop talking about the ‘lying media,’ I suspect this is one of the better tools in their arsenal to land people on a donation page after taking the survey.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Public Servants. Art and the Crisis of the Common Good, edited by Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Willsdon. Foreword by Lisa Phillips.

On amazon USA and UK.

Publisher MIT Press writes: How should we understand the purpose of publicly engaged art in the twenty-first century, when the very term “public art” is largely insufficient to describe such practices?

Concepts such as “new genre public art,” “social practice,” or “socially engaged art” may imply a synergy between the role of art and the role of government in providing social services. Yet the arts and social services differ crucially in terms of their methods and metrics. Socially engaged artists need not be aligned (and may often be opposed) to the public sector and to institutionalized systems. In many countries, structures of democratic governance and public responsibility are shifting, eroding, and being remade in profound ways—driven by radical economic, political, and global forces. According to what terms and through what means can art engage with these changes?

Mel Chin, Safehouse, 2008-2010. Part of Operation Paydirt and Operation Paydirt Headquarters in New Orleans. Photo via Jan Rotschild

Simone Leigh in collaboration with Stuyvesant Mansion, Free People’s Medical Clinic offered a “limited array of homeopathic and allopathic services ranging from yoga instruction to community acupuncture, all offered by Brooklyn-based practitioners”. Photo via A Blade of Grass

I’ve long stopped counting the number of books dedicated to art&activism that i’ve read and reviewed over the past couple of years. Socially-engaged art practice is a tremendous art crowd-pleaser. It is catchy, slightly subversive and easy to label and package to avid audiences. <a href="http://www.artnews.com/2016/11/30/basel-goers-greeted-by-giant-sam-durant-proclaiming-Besides, the rapid erosion of the structures of democratic governance and public responsibility makes a direct engagement of art with the public sphere seem unavoidable.

Public Servants. Art and the Crisis of the Common Good collects existing and newly commissioned essays in which artists, critics, curators and historians interrogate the definition, purposes and reception of socially engaged art. The authors reflect on questions such as: Can art projects efficiently respond to concrete community needs? How much of an impact can they have? And how do you measure this impact? According to which criteria? Does it make sense for a socially engaged work to last only a couple of months, until a biennial or festival closes? How do you sustain a longer term engagement with a particular issue? How embedded do artists have to be in communities in order to see change happen? Is a new aesthetic vocabulary arising from these practices? etc.

I wasn’t expecting an explosion of optimism and brashness. I’ve often found artists and curators quite lucid about the real impact that art can have on political, economical or social issues. Public Servants confirmed the diffuse awareness of art limitations. Still, there is also a lot of energy and determination in these essays. The authors, especially the artists, believe in the importance of weaving together the symbolic and the pragmatic, of using art to build platforms for nuanced debates about complex problems, of collaborating with communities and harnessing their knowledge and skills.

I think that this sentence that artist Pablo Helguera wrote in his essay sums up quite adequately the spirit of the book:

“Artists seldom have the resources to create societal change on a grand scale, but we can produce pilots, models, or smaller gestures that, if expanded, could truly effect change.”

The book is divided into six ‘departments’ that echo the divisions of governmental oversight. There is also a portfolio section in which a series of artists have been invited to articulate their own relationship with the themes explored in the book.

Here’s a quick walk through the 6 departments:

Forensic Architecture, Gaza Book of Destruction, subtitled A Verification of Building-Destruction Resulting from Attacks by the Israeli Occupation, is a people’s archive in which every building destroyed or damaged in Israeli attacks has been chronicled

The first department, Public Works, shows how artists are constantly re-imagining the public sector and submitting it to a bit of DIY action in order to breathe new life into abandoned buildings and areas (while juggling the need to avoid gentrification.)

Photo Requests from Solitary. My Auntie’s House on the Block. Photo by Chris Murphy

Photo Requests from Solitary, Unfulfilled request

Josh Begley, Prison Map visualizes the architecture of the American prison system using aerial images

Ashley Hunt, 94 boys and girls, ages 9 to 18 | Miami-Dade Juvenile Detention Center, Miami, Florida, on 13.5 acres, the third largest youth prison in the U.S.. Part of Degrees of Visibility which records how the spaces that surround prisons and jails show and conceal the scales of mass incarceration in the U.S.

The Department of Security looks at artistic initiatives that contest rather than reinforce current governmental notions of security. With a particular focus on mass incarceration in the US, brutal police system, racial terror in the US, criminalization of poverty and vicious forms of militarized repression on black youth, etc.

W.A.G.E., Artist Payment Graphic, excerpt from W.A.G.E. graphic poster of artist survey results, 2011

The Department of Labor and Economy reflects on alternative modes of value and the social sustainability (or rather lack thereof) of art practices.

I was particularly touched by the contribution of Lise Soskolne from Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), an activist group and non-profit organization whose mission is “currently focused on regulating the payment of artist fees by nonprofit art institutions and establishing a sustainable model for best practices between artists and the institutions that contract their labor.”

The editors of the book offered a small fee to include a 5,000 word essay written by W.A.G.E, but asked her to wave the fee ‘due to the scholarly nature’ of the project. Soskolne wrote a considerate answer in which she explained that it wasn’t possible. She had to chose between rejecting the significant career ‘opportunity’ of having her work included in an important publication and sticking to her ethos and values. She chose ethics and only her answer to the editors’ request was published. Smart!

Pablo Helguera, Libreria Donceles, 2015. An itinerant, Spanish-language second-hand bookstore, created in 2013 out of a desire to address the lack of outlets that serve the growing Hispanic and Latino communities in the United States

The Department of Education engages with the State’s sharp disinvestment in education (and particularly art education) and the concomitant neoliberal corporatization of the sector which makes access to education anything but democratic and egalitarian and opens up the gates of research funding to the poisonous influence of the oil, bank and pharmaceutical industries.

Tue Greenfort, Exceeding 2 Degrees, 2007. The temperature inside the museum was raised by 2°C. The money saved on heating costs was used to purchase an area of Ecuadorian rainforest

Alan Sonfist, Time Landscape, 1965-1978-Present. The artist created a forest with plants that were native to the New York City area in pre-colonial times. Photo via issues and images

The Department of Health and Environment looks at the well-being of the citizens and of the planet they inhabit. It is probably the chapter in which the expression ‘symbolic gesture’ came the most frequently to my mind.

Pedro Reyes, The People’s United Nations (pUN), General Assembly, 2013

The Department of Culture reveals how little the state can be trusted when it comes to administering culture.

Project Row Houses

Monica Villarreal, MIGRATION IS? at Project Row Houses – Round 41: Process and Action An Exploration of Ideas. Curated by Ryan Dennis

Book review – Public Servants. Art and the Crisis of the Common Good is obviously very US-centered. However, drastic cuts in the public sector and other austerity measures adopted in many European countries mean that the issues and questions investigated in the book pertain to the old continent as well.

If you can’t afford the book or wonder how pertinent it might be to your own practice or research, have a look at the essay A critique of social practice art. What does it mean to be a political artist? by art critic Ben Davis and at the series of responses that the article generated. These texts are part of the book and i found that they illustrate very well many of the debates and questions raised in the MIT Press publication.

I should probably publish a kind of shortlist of books, magazines and online resources dedicated to art and activism soon. And when i do, Public Servants. Art and the Crisis of the Common Good will definitely appear among the first titles i’ll recommend if the theme interests you.

Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good is part of the New Museum’s newly relaunched publication series, Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture.

There will be a book launch slash panel event titled Public Servants in the Future Imperfect. A Double Book Launch Co-presented with A Blade of Grass at the New Museum on 26 January 2017.

Image on the homepage: Sam Durant, End White Supremacy. Via artnet.

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One day after an epic press conference during which President Donald Trump repeatedly criticized and diminished long-respected media outlets such as CNN as purveyors of “fake news,” his still-operating campaign arm and the Republican National Committee have reinforced their media-as-opposition message by disseminating a “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey” to supporters.

Some professional market researchers and GOP pollsters suggest that despite its appearance, the survey is nothing more than a means of egging on supporters to cough up more data, and questioned its validity.

“You would never use data from a biased sample of email list subscribers as a replacement for traditional public opinion research, and that’s not likely what they’re using it for,” said Patrick Ruffini, co-founder of Republican research firm Echelon Insights and former RNC digital strategy director. “Given the fact that Trump can’t stop talking about the ‘lying media,’ I suspect this is one of the better tools in their arsenal to land people on a donation page after taking the survey.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl, Plastic Imaginaries, 2016. Photo: Anna Autio

Finally! A few notes from what might very well have been the most exciting and eye-opening conference of 2016: the HYBRID MATTERs symposium that took place in Helsinki over a month ago. As Erich Berger (an artist, curator and the director of the Bioartsociety) explains in the video below, the symposium was the conclusion of a 2 year project that used artistic and scientific research to look at the material conditions and transformative power of human activity over the environment.

This research focused on hybrid ecologies, the convergence of our environment with technology and essentially the intentional and unintentional transformation of our planet through human activity. Hybrid ecologies unfold through complex interactions between actors and elements: human, non-human, biological, mineral, robotic, artificial, etc. There has always been some forms of interaction between humans and their immediate biological environment (through agriculture, bee keeping, fermentation techniques, etc.) but contemporary science is speeding up the synergies and frictions. To the point that the biological itself becomes technological and technologically-altered and the result begins to feedback in the environment.

HYBRID MATTERs not only registered these interactions but also questioned their meaning and implications. The program also attempted to delineate the position of mankind in these new ecologies. Should we keep on thinking of nature as something independent from us and from our activities? Or should we recognize that we drive much of this process and need take responsibility for it?

HYBRID MATTERs by Erich Berger on 25 November 2016

What made the event so interesting for me was that it suggested a new perspective on the Anthropocene discourse. It looked beyond the usual (and of course justified) alarmist attitude and proposed other approaches to this new geological age.

Not only are we starting to realize that we can’t fully control the planet but we also have to come to terms with the fact that the life that we’ve created (almost) from scratch is being slowly released into the world, interacting with the environment in sometimes unpredictable ways and becoming an integral part of it. We need to start thinking about how we, the humans, can co-evolve in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with other living entities and global phenomena.

The symposium also reminded us that the environment is not just a passive victim of human greed and foolishness, it is also a sophisticated assemblage of interconnected, highly adaptive systems and entities that can work for us, with us but also without us. Maybe the time has come for us to broaden our definition of the environment and accept that nature cannot be contained into a romantic ideal of a pristine, untouched, virginal world.

The most inspiring day of the short symposium was Day 2, the panel day. Artists, researchers, curators, biologists, bioroboticists, archaeologists got together and discussed passionately about how we should start developing a language to visualize, narrate and understand eclectic but interconnected topics that range from plant awareness to big bacteria, from autistic conception of the economy to plastic trash on beaches, from de-extinction to tulipomania.

The videos of the whole symposium are online so my notes are not going to cover everything that was said. Instead, i’m going to adopt a very subjective approach, recording few key ideas and concepts, a few artworks and research practices that i believe deserve to be highlighted.

HMs panel on Plant subjectivities, assemblies and assemblages with Kira O’Reilly, Laura Beloff, Jens Hauser, Monika Bakke. 25 November 2016

The panel on plant subjectivities was composed of artist and leader of the MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance at the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki Kira O’Reilly, artist and researcher Laura Beloff, art curator and media studies scholar Jens Hauser as well as writer and editor Monika Bakke from the Adam Mickiewicz University, in Pozna?.

Together, the panelists discussed the natural and post-natural hybridity of plants.

Monika Bakke talked about plantoids, plant farming in space, plant sexuality but i was especially fascinated by her brief introduction to plant intelligence. In 1880 already, Charles and his son Francis Darwin were talking about a ‘root-brain’. Contemporary research confirms the existence of this root brain, it is a decentralized communicative network that enables plants to behave as multitude and manifest a kind of swarm intelligence. They also exhibit a certain awareness of the world around them.

Cunninghamia, one of the Eocene trees, growing in Oliver Kellhammer’s garden on Cortes Island. Image: Daniel J. Pierce. Photo: motherboard

Another remarkable feature of plants is that they are more resilient to events leading to extinction than animals. Artist Oliver Kellhammer is looking at this resilience. His project Neo-Eocene focuses on plant species that have survived through multiple geological periods. Charles Darwin called them living fossils. The artist is trying to recreate forests made of living fossils trees in Canada. These trees used to be native to the area and they thus connect distant geological epochs with a future significantly modified by global warming. The future after all may belong to those species that have already proved to be able to overcome extraordinary climate conditions.

I bloody love that project, by the way!

Jens Hauser talked about microperformativity, a term he has been using since 2010 to describe a shift in scale towards molecules, cells, proteins, bacteria, viruses, etc. This shift away from the human body redefines what we consider to be a body and can also be interpreted as a blow to human narcissism.

Yann Marussich, Bleu Remix, 2007. Photo by Isabelle Meister

Petr Stembera Graft, Graft, 1975. “In a manner customary in fruit-farming, I grafted a branch taken from a shrub to my arm”. Photo: Kontakt

Hauser also discussed plantamorphization, another ‘bioart trend’ which consists in adopting characteristics of the vegetative at large, shifting the attention from movement to growth. An example of this type of practice is Yann Marussich’s iconic performance Bleu Remix. I was less familiar with the work of Petr Stembera who, in the 1970s, grafted a bush sprig into his arm.

Titled Survival of the Prettiest, Laura Beloff‘s talk explored evolution: from natural selection to artificial selection and towards aesthetic selection. More precisely how biological organisms are being designed and selected based on aesthetic criteria that are deeply intertwined with our capitalistic world. An early example of that is the 17th century tulipomania in The Netherlands.

DSM SalmoFan™. Image via Quartz

A contemporary occurrence of this new spin on evolution is farmed salmon. Clients visiting a farm are invited to selected their ideal salmon colour flesh from a DSM SalmoFan™, a colour card specially developed by a pharmaceutical company for Salmonids. Depending on the precise hue the clients want the flesh to be, the farmer will adjust the colouring added to the food given to the fish which, in turn, will determine how orange or red the salmon will be.

HMs panel Hybrid Growth with Jonas Jørgensen, Merja Penttilä, Paavo Jarvensivu and Maarja Kruusmaa. 25 November 2016

The Hybrid Growth panel explored the hybrid nature of the term growth and its meaning in nature, technology and economics.

In her talk Living Factories: Synthetic Biology for a Sustainable World, research biologist Merja Penttilä explained how synthetic biology could enable us to replace petrochemicals with renewable raw material, while retaining biodiversity and genetic diversity and using contained production systems.

Post-doc researcher in economic culture and member of Mustarinda (a collective currently focusing on post-fossil fuel culture) Paavo Jarvensivu believes that we need to get rid of the current abstract, narrow and autistic conception of the economy. Currently, society has to match economic indicators (inflation, budget deficit, employment rate, etc.) and this is wrong.

We seem to think that there is lack of money but no limit of resources. What would happen if we took things upside down and assumed that there is unlimited money but limited resources?

Professor of biorobotics Maarja Kruusmaa looked at Growth and Information Technology. It was brilliant and often funny. The growth the title of her talk alludes to is the growth in data. From people who don’t seem to get tired of measuring themselves (a trend called quantified self) to robots (‘they are just sensors with hands and legs’), data multiplies fast.

Growth in data means bigger and bigger server farms and other heavy material infrastructure to preserve it.

Kruusmaa (half-jokingly) suggested that maybe people are going start thinking of saving energy by creating less data or by being more creative with the way they produce this data. For example, by taking black & white pictures rather than colour ones as they are less pixel-hungry and thus consume less bits and bytes.

HMs panel In the Aftermath with Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Thora Petursdottir, Björn Wallsten. 25 November 2016

The panel In the Aftermath was another brilliant one. It invited us to look at technological development under a new perspective. Not the prevalent one that champions ideas of progress and novelty but one that considers processes of decay, erosion, breakdown and mouldering. I’ve already written about Björn Wallsten‘s introduction to the world of urks and i mentioned Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl exploration of plastiglomerates and styrofoam-eating worms in my review of the Hybrid Matters exhibition. I still had to talk about the equally fascinating work of Þóra Pétursdóttir.

Drift Matter. Photo: object matters

Drift Matter. Photo: Þóra Pétursdóttir via CAS Oslo

Pétursdóttir, a postdoctoral researcher at the Arctic University of Norway, is an archaeologist from a branch of archaeology that looks at the recent past and the contemporary.

An interesting point that she made was that archaeology has always been about the anthropocene. It is completely reliant on our footprint, on our pollution.

A particular focus of her research is the phenomenon of “the drift beach“, the marine debris that drift and cluster along the Arctic coastlines. Drift matter is a one of the most urgent environmental problems across the world. It is particularly interesting to study its history and meaning in Northern Norway and Iceland. Both have a long heritage of using this material and until recently, this drift matter was considered a natural resource and also a part of the environment. It used to include a lot of wood which was collected and used by the inhabitants as these regions are sparsely forested. The composition of the material has changed drastically over the last century and so has the attitude towards the drift material and the drift beach. It is now regarded as a hazard, an intrusion on the environment.

Marine debris is an environmental problem but, Pétursdóttir argues, it is also part of the environment, it cannot be eliminated from it. This material has never been considered of archaeological interest because it evades the kind of logic that archaeologists expect from their material: they are only interested in waste that has been intentionally deposited, that relates to specific culture or group of people, waste that is traceable, that construct a progressive human history. The drift material doesn’t comply with this nice, linear history.

The interest of drift material is that it suggests unexpected alliances and other notions of environment. It endlessly wanders, gathers and bonds outside our control and may thus contribute to a less anthropocentric and more ecological heritage conception.

HYBRID MATTERs Response to the day by Oron Catts. 25 November 2016

Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator. He is the director of SymbioticA. Together with Ionat Zurr, he is also a visiting professor of Contestable Design at the Royal College of Art in London (head to this video if you’re curious about Contestable Design.) Catts wrapped up the discussions of the HYBRID MATTERs symposium. His closing remarks were incisive, and appropriately provocative. I’ll just point to a couple of them:

“We try to rationalize things but we are totally irrational ourselves so how could we design rational independently autonomous system without fucking it up? We can’t!”

“Any attempt to try and assert control over autonomous system is a violent act. And we are all engaged in this violence.”

“Hybrid might not be right metaphor. Maybe parasite would be a more appropriate one.”

“Europe is increasingly scary. The kind of funding that is currently given to artists to engage in crossover between living systems, technology systems, society and culture are neoliberal and driven by bankrupt political systems.”

At that point, he also mentioned that a few art and technology festivals look more like trade shows than art events. I just wanted to jump on the stage and hug him!

“Maybe we need less white people. The world has been repeatedly fucked over by middle aged, middle class white men. I’m one of them so maybe you should listen to other people.”

The HYBRID MATTERs symposium was a collaboration between the Bioartsociety and the MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance, Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

The event was part of the HYBRID MATTERs Nordic art&science network program which investigates the convergence of our environment with technology and essentially the intentional and unintentional transformation of our planet through human activity. The program took the form of a series of researches, encounters, art commissions, exhibitions and a symposium.

Previously: From animal sensors to Monet as a painter of the anthropocene. 9 things i learnt on the opening day of the HYBRID MATTERs symposium, HYBRID MATTERs exhibition: when biological and technological entities escape our control and transform the planet, Albedo Dreams. Experiments in DIY climate manipulation, HYBRID MATTERs: The urks lurking beneath our feet and The Christmas tree, your typical postnatural organism.

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“Prepare for a future in which the only way of making a living is to ‘lend your lung’ to filter heavily polluted air. Clean Air International Inc. is looking for suppliers for its first Organic Clean Air (TM) retail store.”

Air Slaves. Image courtesy of Let it Be! art agency

Air Project. Work-in-progress demo on 25 September 2012, Labor, Budapest

Visitors of the Air Slaves exhibition which opens next Monday in Berlin will be invited to cover their mouth with a mask and walk around the space freely.

Throughout their stay in the gallery, their expiration will slowly inflate and fill in the plastic container attached to the mask. As each visitor exits the space, their bag will be sealed, carefully labelled and stored inside the Organic Clean Air depository along with the exhalations of previous visitors.

Hanging side by side, these “second-lung air” containers will build up a “lung-print” of human presence in the space.

Air Slaves is a speculative art installation that uses air as a metaphor for access to natural resources and reflects on a future in which good quality air has become so rare and valuable, it has become a commodity, not a basic right and necessity. A suggestion that appears to be a reality in some of the most polluted cities in the world.

Family sell British fresh air to wealthy Chinese elite for £80 a jar

A Chinese woman wears a mask and filter as she walks to work during heavy pollution on December 9, 2015 in Beijing, China. Photo: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images, via Mashable

This project is thus not about the quality of air as such but about access to it. It points to a future in which natural resources are being commodified and privatized. Just like what happens in certain parts of the world where the answer to water scarcity or poor quality is market-driven. You bottle the water, rather than tackle the problem to its roots.

Air Slaves. Image courtesy of Let it Be! art agency

The members of Let it Be!, the art agency behind the work, found a moment to answer my questions while preparing for the opening of the Air Slaves show in Berlin:

Hi Attila, Melinda, Andrea and Zoltán! Air Project ‘reflects on a future in which fresh air has become extremely rare and valuable.’ I was wondering if you could be more specific and tell us about the kind of concrete future the project is referring to. Do you see signs of this rarefaction or maybe even privatisation of air in society?

Attila Bujdosó: For me, this project is not really about air. We use air as a metaphor to resources, be they natural and social, in general. Also, this project is as much about our present as it is about our future. But talking about the future seems much easier to me because it allows speculation and playfulness without the need to prove our every step scientifically.

Melinda Sipos: Sometimes you feel that the human effects on the natural environment are so extreme that you can imagine this as one final phase before it collapses. We also often spoke about drinking water which is already a product and is an expensive commodity in some areas. And even though light is not crucial to life to live or work in a bright space, especially in a megalopolis, is a sign of wealth.

Air Project. Work-in-progress demo on 25 September 2012, Labor, Budapest

Air Project. Work-in-progress demo on 25 September 2012, Labor, Budapest

You had a first experiment with the project in Budapest back in 2012. How did visitors react to the idea behind the work? Were there surprising ways in which they reacted to or engaged with the work?

Attila: One thing which we anticipated beforehand and turned out to work really well is that participants indeed developed a personal relation to the air they exhaled and we encapsulated. We also took portraits of them, proudly posing with their plastic bags.

This air, however, is not any different biologically from the air they exhale at any time of the day. What the installation showed so well that collecting it and putting it into a plastic bag made them feel a sense of ownership over the air they exhaled. Ownership, thus, is socially constructed, and surprisingly easily constructed.

Melinda: Moreover, we also got into the situation or illusion that people left something valuable behind, a part of them. Before the experiment we concentrated more on the visualisation side of it and when we were left there with all the bags we felt a little embarrassed I think.

And what about their personal experience of the whole process? To me, the plastic mask looks claustrophobic and borderline suicidal but maybe i’m a bit dramatic?

Melinda: No, it does for sure. The whole instrument looks scary and weird. But surprisingly, people’s experience was rather intimate and relaxing. Many of them told us they felt encouraged to slow down by wearing the mask and be conscious about their breath. Breathing is something we don’t pay attention to it usually but the fact that the air was collected plus seeing the plastic bag growing gave it so much attention.

Air Project. Work-in-progress demo on 25 September 2012, Labor, Budapest

Air Project. Work-in-progress demo on 25 September 2012, Labor, Budapest

Could you tell us about the ‘data embodiment’ dimension of the work? We don’t normally associate data with exhaled air so why was it important to you to put a physiological function into a data perspective?

Zoltán Csík-Kovács: That was the first idea where the project originated from. It was on a data embodiment workshop organized by Baltan Laboratories and Kitchen Budapest in 2011. We got inspired by the idea of somehow making the volume and weight of exhaled air from all the people in the room visible and tangible. So we started to think about collecting the exhaled air into plastic bags and the possible ways this could be managed in a framework of a participatory exhibition. A lot of aspects, layers and unique expressions come into view while drafting afterwards like “air as a metaphor of sharing”, or “second-lung air”, or “lungprint”, and of course the question “where is the last breath of Elvis”.

Melinda: To me the fascinating thing about data visualisation in general is that you start seeing and understanding things which were invisible beforehand. Doing that in three dimension makes it even more compelling (this is why we initiated the whole Beyond Data project Zoltan mentioned). And with the air (exhale) it just seemed so impossible and so much on the border of something that can or cannot be shown that we really felt the urge to work with.

What are the little texts at the bottom of the plastic tubes we see in the video?

Zoltán: We asked the participants to write down their own thoughts on a paper that would go along with their packed exhaled air. We sealed the handwritings into the plastic bags so other visitors could read them. What I like the most is the intimacy it creates. While reading their thoughts you can’t help personalizing these empty-like plastic bags and feeling a kind of vacuum that the person left for you. In this way the installation space also gave room for a constant and silent conversation where thoughts followed thoughts within a loosely articulated theme.

Attila: But for the upcoming show in Berlin this will change.

So the project in Berlin will be different from what you presented in Budapest? The text on the facebook page is a bit different, it sounds a bit more radical “Prepare for a future in which the only way of making a living is to ‘lend your lung’ to filter heavily polluted air. Clean Air International Inc. (CAI) is looking for suppliers for its first Organic Clean Air (TM) retail store.”

Zoltán: Yes, it will be different. We will experiment with putting the visitors into and reflecting to well recognized situations in today’s consumer world, like being in a retail shop or being a donor of some medical institute. So consuming goods and being the goods. This time we play a role of a huge company, Clean Air International, that is the only choice for most of the people in a dystopian world to make a living. The whole situation is imaginary but it more accurately reflects upon critical debates of today or approaching in the near future like ecological crisis, artificial intelligence taking jobs from people, wealth inequality, unconditional basic income, etc.

Attila: Yes, the installation will be more radical in Berlin. The world has become more radical, especially since last year, so we reflect on that. It addresses issues on how we will deal with mass-unemployment, ecological change or economic and political shifts.

I’m also quite curious about Let it Be! art agency. What is it exactly? Are you a group of artists? a kind of go between agency that facilitates relationships between artists and tech companies or other private or public entities?

Andrea Kovács: Budapest based Let it Be! art agency is developing new interdisciplinary forms of co-operation between different areas of art and creative industries by exploring possibilities in innovative collaborations. The agency is engaged in managing and initiating cross media and urban city projects which focus on new synergies of art and technology. Our projects are inviting for explorative city journeys, virtual adventures in the augmented reality and offer unique interactive installations and performances.

Air Slaves Berlin is a work-in-progress presentation. It is included in the official program of transmediale and CTM Vorspiel 2017 as part of Collegium Hungaricum Berlin’s Human Signals event series curated by Andrea Kovács, the founder of Let it Be! The thematic programs are focusing on the interactions between human body and different kind of physical and digital surroundings. Human Signals provides interactive installations, biofeedback performances and creative coding workshops such as a pop up exhibition. The invited Hungarian artists are working on methods of data visualisation in different creative fields by using sounds, movements, breathes, heartbeats, memories, touches and feelings. They experiment with possibilities of making visible biological processes and activating our perception and instinct in unique ways.

Thanks Attila, Melinda, Andrea and Zoltán!

The Air Slaves show is open on 6 to 8 Februrary at Collegium Hungaricum in Berlin.

You can register to participate.

Related story: Who owns the air?

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We will create a subjective figure, one who seeks to go beyond the domination of globalized capital without falling into nihilism. And in order for this to take place, peculiar alliances must be forged; we must think on another scale. Intellectuals, and different segments of youth, must become organically linked by experiments at first local, and then wider. What matters is that youths and intellectuals of every provenance make a gesture, carve out a path, and take a step.

There is an urgency here, but it is a strategic urgency.

It is a task, a task for us all. It is a work of thought, but it is also the work, the path, of going to see who is this other of whom you speak, who they really are, to gather their thoughts, their ideas, their vision of things; and for you to inscribe them—them, and you yourself at the same time—within a strategic vision of the destiny of humanity that will try to change the direction of our history and away from the opaque misfortune in which humanity has sunk.

But time is running out. Time is running out…

–  Alain Badiou, Our Wound Is Not So Recent

The post Put up a Fucking Fight appeared first on Adbusters | Journal of the mental environment.

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This excerpt from Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory was featured in the latest issue of Adbusters. Adbusters #130 takes an in-depth look into the disturbing philosophical roots of the growing Alt-Right movement. Alexander Dugin is a Russian political scientist known for his fascist views.

Modernity and its ideological basis (individualism, liberal democracy, capitalism, consumerism, and so on) are the cause of the future catastrophe of humanity, and the global domination of the Western lifestyle is the reason for the final degradation of the Earth. The West is approaching its terminus, and we should not let it drag the rest of us down into the abyss with it.

Tradition (religion, hierarchy, and family) and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. All three political theories were conceived as artificial ideological constructions by people who comprehended, in various ways, ‘the death of God’ (Nietzsche), the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Weber), and the ‘end of the sacred.’ This was the core of the New Era of modernity: man came to replace God, philosophy and science replaced religion, and the rational, forceful, and technological constructs took the place of revelation.

When we use the term ‘modernization’, we mean progress, linear accumulation, and a certain continuous process. When we speak of ‘modernization’, we presuppose development, growth, and evolution. It is the same semantic system. Thus, when we speak of the ‘unconditionally positive achievements of modernization: we agree with a very important basic paradigm – we agree with the idea that ‘human society is developing, progressing, evolving, growing, and getting better and better: that is to say, we share a particular vision of historical optimism.

This historical optimism pertains to the three classical political ideologies (liberalism, Communism, and fascism). It is rooted in the scientific, societal, political, and social worldview in the humanities and natural sciences of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, when the ideas of progress, development, and growth were taken as axioms that could not be doubted. In other words, this entire set of axioms, as well as the whole historiography and predictive analytics of the Nineteenth century in the humanities and the natural sciences, were built upon the idea of progress.

Adbusters #130 hits newsstands worldwide Feb 21.

The post Modernity has been a disaster for the Western Mind appeared first on Adbusters | Journal of the mental environment.

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Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Rosa Menkman for Sonic Acts

Last year, while i sat down listening to the speakers of the Open Fields conference in Riga, i learnt about the existence of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest man-made hole ever dug into the Earth crust.

Lucas van der Velden, director of the fantastic Sonic Acts, was presenting Dark Ecology, a three-year art research and commissioning project which invited participants to re-evalute our definition and relationship to the environment. One of the works commissioned was Justin Bennett’s Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, a sound walk that takes us inside the now abandoned and very decrepit research station in the company of the last worker still living there.

Justin Bennett – Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains. Video: Sonic Acts

The U.S.S.R. started the Kola Superdeep Borehole project in 1970 for geological research but also because when the work started, it was the height of the Cold War and the Soviets wanted to show how superior they were to the U.S.

The researchers were also hoping that the Borehole could become part of a transcontinental network of seismic listening stations that was to function as an early-warning system for imminent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other natural disasters but also for picking up on enemy nuclear tests, missile launch, etc.

The team had planned to drill as deep as 15,000 m which would have meant working at a temperature of 300 °C, where the drill bit would no longer work. But the temperatures got too high much earlier than expected and the researchers had to stop in 1992, when they were over 12 km into the Earth’s crust (and when funding dropped due to the fall of the Soviet Union.) At this depth and location, it was 180 °C.

The Kola Superdeep is drilled at a spot called Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi, or ‘Wolf Lake on the Mountains’, near the town of Zapolyarny, Russia.
The borehole itself is all rusty and strangely unspectacular:

The borehole (shut.) Photo by Rosa Menkman

Photo from the official website documenting the KSB

The Kola Superdeep Borehole is still is the deepest artificial point on Earth. The site has been abandoned since 2008. Only Viktor lives there now….

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Michael Miller

Justin Bennet spoke to Viktor, the last geologist living there. Viktor worked on the Kola Superdeep project until it closed and has stayed on-site long after the drilling tower fell apart. He lives there alone and unofficially. Bennet recorded their discussions. They are wonderful. Viktor is a charming narrator and his lively stories give a nuanced and intelligent perspective on the motivations and dreams behind the whole project. He recounts the history of the Kola Superdeep, talks about the equipment used to create this ‘acupuncture point in the body of the earth’, his everyday life with only radio and wildlife as company, Sami shamanism, Syrians on bikes and Dante’s circles of hell.
At some point, he also explained how while listening to vibrations deep within the Earth, he sensed that some terrible catastrophe was going to happen around the Coast of Japan back in 2011 (that was the T?hoku earthquake and tsunami.)

Bennett’s Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains is an extraordinary work. It’s a documentary piece, a sound art work and probably the most interesting and easily accessible source of information about the Kola Superdeep project.

All the recordings are worth listening to but if you are in a hurry, do at least make some time for the last one which allows you to listen inside the borehole:

For more background and info, check out this Dark Ecology article as well as some of the photos i stole from Sonic Acts flickr album of the project:

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by BJ Nilsen for Sonic Acts

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Rosa Menkman for Sonic Acts

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Rosa Menkman for Sonic Acts

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Rosa Menkman for Sonic Acts

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Michael Miller

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Michael Miller

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Michael Miller

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Michael Miller

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Michael Miller

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Lucas van der Velden

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by BJ Nilsen for Sonic Acts

Justin Bennett, Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains, 2016. Photo by Rosa Menkman for Sonic Acts

Vilgiskoddeoayvinyarvi: Wolf Lake on the Mountains is part of the exhibition The Noise of Being by Sonic Acts. It will be on view as a three-part audiovisual installation in which the sound piece is combined with footage taken at the abandoned Kola Superdeep Borehole.
The Noise of Being exhibition speculates on the strange and anxious state of being human. With works by Justin Bennett, Zach Blas, Kate Cooper, Joey Holder and Pinar Yoldas. The piece is on view until the 26th of February at Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

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