Notes on Dimensional Time [notd][2010-18]

I'm bopping around the AFH platform sprinkling the system with bits of axiom on Dimensional Time. Above are the images I selected from the big photoset [nodt][nyc2010] on AFH Flickr. Outside the virtual, softbox-life - IRL - I am hopping from task to task (e.g., offloading furniture, dialing in logistics, reading Walkaways, etc.) in preparations for my family's relocation to Astoria, OR from Bushwick, NYC. Today's exercise involves linking the beginning and end of our cycle as New Yorkers (2010-18, almost to the day), in the manner of a proof of 4D predictive processing. From another angle, I'm suggesting the all-at-onceness of existence within the parameters of 4D existence. From my point of view, that is a plausible enough conversation-starting contention, arising from a scan of the material in the documentary photoset. Living life in the spirit of 4D conjectures and projection amounts to stipulative gaming, as in playing through, or playing out. The archive is then a point of departure and a lens through which to view and interpret unfolding experience, as and after it happens. In Occupy, some of the occupational thinking swirled around the concept of pre-figuration. I would say that the energy invested in that thread conflated the macro-process becoming apparent, as convergent political, economic and social forces manifested their agendas from the inside out. [RE-]Distribution of resources, radical reformation of systems (mostly in service of consolidation, extraction and exploitation), and the coalescing of self-serving fictional narratives to rationalize destructive madness were already consuming the bandwidth of global/local networks. The technical means are marginally visible in the image, which itself is a function of the Big Tech Machine. The format is derived from codes, coding that is/was being disrupted, redirected and buffered into the Ubiquitous field blurring analog and virtual. If all of it is conceivable as energetic, the forefronted energy sizzling through the wires of 2010-18 is electrical. Given the array of content in the gallery above, the urge to misrepresent or -construe the nature of the natural (e.g., the effects of sunlight in a photo taken outside) is lurking not in the shadow, but in the artificial light present in the environments depicted, and also in the media (the screens and projections) themselves. Can it be any wonder that the definition of life itself remains in flux, when the manufacture of "life" is clickable?

Summer 2014

Installation documentation from AFH Gallery Chinatown (2007); week 1, "Super Lucky; Lula #1"

Between May and August 2014, AFH has generated a substantial set of projects that aggregated, present a spectrum of viable approaches to 4D practica. Some (e.g., "Kill Your Smartp hone [KYSP]" and "Prop-Art"), barely exist, except as concepts or proposals. Others, such as "The Artist's Zoo [TAZ]," have materialized, traversing the newborn stages of production. The continuing progress of Novads manifests itself in a range of actualizations, including literature (both in prose and poetic forms), social formation and integration, presentation and exposition (at Oxford and other forums), music, theoretical discourse conducted in analog and virtual mediums, art, and political action, plus, of course, games and gatherings or convergences. The greater proportion of my time and energy over this period has been devoted to preparations for "Code Duello, Old Hick & a Big Bang." On the advice of Geert Lovink, I chose to reduce by textual output to a minimum, in anticipation of commencement of dissertation writing this fall. I also have been engaged in a deep analysis and review of AFH online, siphoning off the corporatized, surveilled, highly compromised, even corrupted social media facets of this platform, minimizing the publishing of data to a trickle, compared to levels practiced over the past fifteen years +. In tandem with collaborators' efforts, I am formulating a new configuration for the AFH span of expressive means vehicles and tools. The process is surprising constantly. Much of the flux derives from the shifts that occur pretty much daily in the domain, in all areas: management, programming, interface, user profiles and experience. Ultimately, the questions reduce to Who is this community? What forces are intervening, and why? What is my goal in entering this network, for the purposes of sharing my creative production? How does my activity affect ________? ...And so on.

In the course of an AFH review, I discovered many previously published 4D material. Here are some samples:

1] From AFH Cursor (Section 9), an NEH proposal for programming for a rational, dimensional US arts system.

Here is the outline for my NEH proposal:

MISSION

To establish an international collective to support, document and nourish the visual arts by showing how valuable art and artists are to society.

VISION

We will build a community serving artists, using methods that maximize available arts infrastructure. These will include:

·      A web nexus founded on the principles and practices of Digital Humanities, applied through dimensional methodologies in a transparent, inclusive, high-performing sequence of actions
·      Exhibitions sited across the globe produced by the collective, facilitated by our web network
·      An oral history archive representing artists in their own words (Talking Artist)
·      A photographic artist portrait gallery (Portraits of the Artist in the 21st Century)
·      A historical database to educate today’s artist about her roots
·      A commercial store for distributing the collective’s artwork and services, providing artists with income
·      An information clearinghouse containing data on support services for artists
·      Partnerships with existing institutions, foundations, organizations, governments and businesses

o   To establish protocols for best practices for artists, and for the society that cares about art
o   To promote and enhance coordination among online and traditional (brick and mortar) libraries, collections and databases helpful for artist research
o   To enhance access to artist resources for the purposes of research and continued education
o   To encourage educational authorship by artists for artists and arts educational programs (K-12, Undergraduate, Graduate, Post-Graduate)
o   To develop governmental programs promoting visual arts and artists
o   To foster media (TV, Radio, Film, Literary) programs focused on visual arts and artists
o   To create a worldwide network of exchange for art, artist and arts education, such as exhibitions, seminars, conferences, workshops and residencies
o   To secure life-care for artists
o   To promote the preservation of art and a sustainable community of artists through public policy

· A major study on the effectiveness of artist education programs that rely primarily or exclusively on critique, rather than demonstration
· A web-accessible database project to facilitate and preserve the artist-to-artist craft traditions, containing

o A digital archive of artist studio/shop demonstrations (video)
o How-to procedures (audio or text)

· A comprehensive listing of fine artist support services by region and specialty
· A sequence of surveys asking participants key questions, such as

o   How has America failed its artists?
o   What art is relevant to people and their communities?
o   Why are no books published about bad art?
o   Who is an artist?
o   What is art?

· A vibrant and dynamic discourse among art professionals and the communities they serve about art’s meaning, definition, purpose and value

With the Lady MacLean at Duart Castle (1995)

2] From AFH Transthesis:

Without equality and free speech, art does not exist.

The analogs for choice in art are plenty, but the most representative is color.

3] Repost at AFH2011 Tumblr {which I noticed for some reason lost its falling cyclops banner somewhere, sometime} of Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown production notes (7/9/2007):

ART FOR HUMANS GALLERY CHINATOWN is approaching the midway point on the project timeline. The following is a relatively brief account from the Lead Artist, commenting on developments here pertinent to the original vision for AFHGC as outlined in the Project Paper, and in the Call for Submissions for “HUM 10 + 1,” the foundation text for the sequence. Please keep in mind the anecdotal nature of the transmission.

Some Random Introductory Thoughts: The Hypercube Unfolded, Quadrants and Programming

I proposed that the geometric model we would use for AFHGC & HUM would be the Hypercube Unfolded. One of the most curious phenomena I’ve observed as our project has progressed is how this conceptual facet has surfaced in our daily production quandaries. Essentially, AFHGC is a white cube, and although the HU was described and projected in the production schematic, I doubt that many of those involved actually are considering the form before or during their interactions with our project. Nonetheless, I have (with some surprise) noticed anecdotal evidence that somehow the dimensional geometrics of the HU do impact the actual events taking place at AFHGC. I’ll give some examples of what I mean.

On a regular basis, I’ve encountered programming overlaps, which would be easily solved by the availability of extra rooms. The original concept designs for the AFH multi-use facility (as described in the HUM Call for Submissions) included three exhibition spaces, as well as rooms for performative works, AV presentations, lectures, etc. Regularly, artists involved with our current project have proposed exhibits, performances, events and installations that would not be best served by our single white cube. Of itself, this is the sort of logistical problem that most people face in their interface with architecture. Optimizing usage of available space is an issue for almost everybody. What is noteworthy about our situation at AFHGC is that the expandable concepts multi-media artists generate routinely point to multi-room configurations for related aesthetic facets. In other words, a contemporary artist now will often build a body of work that includes audio elements, moving images, 2D or 3D objects, web-based components and supporting texts. As is borne out by the integrative approaches of preparators the world over, seldom is it possible to present these diverse expressive modalities in a single room effectively. Further, a combinative exhibition approach involving multiple or sequenced rooms often harms the particular pieces, or subtle content of artworks, which require a viewer to engage in contemplation. Instead, the practical effect is akin to a typical haunted house production or even a keg party. This is true for large-scale museum exhibitions (such as the Guggenheim’s Brazil show, or MoCA’s “Ecstacy.”

In the AFH format, this problem can be solved easily by staggering the presentations in realtime, while unifying them in documentation. Back to AFHGC: an anomaly early in the production points to another sort of solution. One afternoon in our second week, a neighbor gallerist (from Europe) entered into the space to find several of us typing away at laptops and desktops, and a musician making sound art on a synth. The gallerist asked me if this were our installation. It was a lovely moment for me, because it indicated that we had immediately established our operation as one in which the most delicate aesthetic/conceptual frameworks might be attempted here. I re-visualized the gallery through his eyes at that instant & realized that indeed the array of people and gear and audio could fairly be construed as a certain type of happening. In retrospect, though, I surmised that the project ultimately would be best served by having a gallery containing an “ART” array, a performance space (where the audio could be produced and experienced), a production studio (where our computer tasks/experiments could be executed and/or observed), and a “society room” (where our brilliant and hip crew, friends and visitors could discuss and be aesthetics and aesthetes).

At this writing, our current exhibit is Dane Carder’s “CiVil war.” Over the first few days of his short-run exhibit, including the reception night, it became apparent that Dane’s paintings were hot items. His one-week show would not be adequate to properly present and sell his works. “civil war” needed the standard month-six week run to succeed in commercial terms, but also, to put it in poetic terms, actualize in the gallery. Due to our high-intensity exhibit turnover/schedule demands, this was out of the question. Again, this is a problem that must be addressed in the next production iteration, for several reasons. The first is that paintings require time, space and access. Repeated visits are optimum. Paintings require conversations, which make more sense in the presence of the art. The typical retail gallery exhibition presentation format is normative because it works as a happy medium for aesthetic/commercial purposes in the white cube world. The second is alluded to by the content of Dane’s paintings (Civil War photographs) and the music he chose for the exhibit (Mozart’s Requiem), and the concurrent production developments (Shane’s LA optical feedback experiments) unfolding at AFHGC. All these components should be properly accessible elsewhere in our imagined multi-use facility, in the same production timeframe. Finally, the exhibits that follow “civil war” for various reasons cannot be pushed back a month to allow for Dane’s show to be extended, but the exhibits in the progression all raise questions about Art and Free Speech and Technology and so forth that the others comment on or answer. It would be helpful to make a visit to AFH a comparative exercise, especially in terms of our potential educational functions.

Excerpts from the AFH 2012 Transmediale Proposals [6]

[CONCEPT]

NOT BEGINNING WITH WORD IS VISION WITHOUT COMMAND AS BEING IN THE WORLD, GENERATING

SECTIONS

1.” The Void Is Not Empty, Is Not Nothing, Still or Moving,” she didn’t say.

2. Can this Image for Justice Just Be [Not OBEY]?

3. Who Wins When the Multiplicity of Selves Fights Over One Name and Loses to the Other?

4. & We Thought I Was Precarious When You Lived in Paris, During the War!

SECTION 1

A. What is in the Nothing that insists? What’s the point of resisting Everything, if one is a Nothing to begin with? Is the Event of Creation Real, or is its out-of-nothing-ness attached (like a virus carried by a host, though not as a manifestation, except as a secondary effect on someone or -thing the host touches or contacts)? Is being a Nobody conceived of words, even as or when the words emit from another as a command that the Nobody be Someone, with a Naming, which is not only False, but a divorcing of the Nothing-ness-virus from its original “state” or status as/of Void? With each burial of a world formed of word-thoughts, when No one dies, is the apparatus of Man’s nothing fertilized?

B. Is the insistence of Nothing Freedom? Is Everything an absolute conception of Nothing’s shadow, which is to say, Nothing’s immaterial nature, necessary when the Absence of All encounters the stuff of Real Life, or the World of a Nothing, imagined as something, positioned in perception, as an impression that cannot approach the Total, and therefore is an invitation to the curious Nothing to submit to melancholia, to tragedy, to the loss of everything, on a finite timeline, not actual but virtual, since the dream of Everything in a Nothing is no more or less Nothing-ness than the next thing….and the next thing…. and the next thing (N + 1)? Is *The Event No One Attends* the Void? What game does the Void play to entertain Nobody in his repetitive finitude as such? Would that game be the representation of “Yes” in a medium of “Choice” intertwined with Command, the measurement of repetition? Does the Real referee this game, and prove the Laws governing the encounter (the model being DNA) in the form of animation, or animal-motion, in ana-history, as a string of ana-me(me) drawing tightly two points on the line of birth-to-death, the brackets of mind, with some blurring permitted, which is like the Judge’s leeway in sentencing, after the prisoner has been condemned for the “offense,” which is applied in either case to guilt and innocence, as we have seen? If Nobody touches or contacts another Nobody - which defies already the perception of sameness, since only one Nobody can exist in the singular as himself, if we stick to Naming as a sign of uniqueness, or revert to or maintain the praxis of carrying names like a virus from one generational iteration to the next, preserving the Name, even as we are not preserved, as if a Name is an object, like a work of Art - is it a foul against the Void, or against Creation (this is most definitely a trick question)? Is any Event as such - a touch, for instance - of Creation, or is it of Nobody? Who owns the encounter of One to the Other, if One Is One, if Everyone’s a Nobody, if the Nobody encounters the One, which is the seed of Romance, as misperception of Self as an idea for replication, if not reproduction? Does Being-In-The-World remain Nobody, if he does NO-THING, or is this doubling, or second negation, or representation on parallel lines between the same two points, a sharing, or a disappearance, One within the Other, in The Same? What of the Line, in Movement, as an indicator of Direction? Is Direction then a Command, as just another absurdity in the One Schema, the Singular Pycho-Schematic when contained in Nobody, who then is a functionary for Destiny, a Robot, a Nomad with only one way to go? Will the Nobody yanked in a single direction twist and turn comedically, will Nobody go limp and OBEY, will Nobody grapple with the magnetism, the attraction of Destiny, even as Nobody is drawn to the direction of predictable end, when Nobody’s heart stops, when the last breath is exhaled, when the thunderous thoughts beget of the synaptic lightning cease their storming? Is Destiny anything more than a proposition of Type? Is one Nobody’s Destiny any more worthy of History than any other Nobody, history being a world of worlds formed of word-thoughts, rolling up behind Nobody, and falling down on Him like a Mountain at the same time, where the two loops of the Sideways 8 meet, in the Now, the only infinite Nobody will ever never know? If the interstices as punctum separating yesterday from tomorrow IS NOBODY, then is Nobody then valuable, at least as a unique-ing phenomenon, situated as Nobody is in the ever-not-this-spoken-moment-past and always-clandestine-element in a future unrevealed as Now, though perhaps only a Not-Yet-Now, projected by Nobody or a few somebodies in-the-know, or fore-dreamed by the Visionary, as a lucky or unlucky imaginary, possible future, one that is fed by 7.5 billion threads or more of Nobody-ness, living, breathing as a tomorrow unseeable before our eyes, the Nobody we could be, if only…? Surely this is for Nobody the Deus Ex Machina, but more like the Chronos Ex Nihilo Ex Deus Ex Machina, or some thing like that, an Artwork, in the Greek meaning, meaning DEAD & GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN, LIKE A ROCK’N’ROLL SONG made of fire-embers and smoke, in which Nobody burns his bodies, and into which conflagration of creation he gazes, alone with his thoughts, or in common with a few Nobody friends, warming hands close to the fire-heat, against the Night behind Nobody’s back, the History of Nobody, still represented now in some things, but not Others, creating not a discernible present but a puzzle insoluble for Nobody, or Anyone Else, whatever One might say about it? This is the Text of our Play, our play’s apparatus, the stink of our shit collective of Nobody Now, making the Garden grow and grow and grow. A pair of dice the Chorus, a pot of rice the Kairos, a war in the streets of Cairo, with media raped and Nobody’s story worth reporting…. Isn’t it?

C. Where might the Void be going, still, in all its empty pertinence? If One asks another, have you seen the Void lately, can she say “Yes?” Is the describing of the Void, silence? If so what is the language of nothing, but possibly poetic, without type? A non-ontology for Nobody, with no object and a non-subject for a subject for nothing, but again, is it moving, In its non-repeating, non-extant non-self for Nobody, or is the Void the first Lie, the Big Untruth, that nothing existed first, before all and in so not-doing made space for the event, even though Everyone knows Void and Space are not the same no-thing, not equal to each non-other, that Void does not equal Space, space being not only a distance between and among objects, as such possible to indicate with a bracketed line, if an object can be represented by a point, ONE point, as the estimation of a margin, a Void-stoppage, in fact, where space ends and a Volume commences, a Form ends its interiority to meet the external, which is not the same, is it, as the eternal, especially if the eternal must contain object and space, since the eternal is about Time, or the Void of it, the cancellation of finitude time with All Time, not as a bracketing system enclosing, but as a what without a when? In this conjecture, Nobody is eternal, since the nameless is what waits for the Creator’s naming, after which may commence the name-calling, among the vocalized, in particular, in the asymmetrical veering to the real that the eternal necessitates always, where Nobody says, “The ‘Me’ I thought I was never existed.”

SECTION 2

“Arrived at this point, I confess to having little or no desire to continue. In spite of its legend, there is nothing more structural and, in the last instance, nothing more impoverished than the imaginary. It is true, there is also nothing more obviously necessary.”

What is Truth Art in an era of institutionalized criminality, when immunity is afforded those who torture with impunity, spy on citizens in so-called “free society,” wage wars of aggression costing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives for the implicit purpose of creating “boom times” for extraction and exploitation industries, when millions of people are imprisoned for infractions that half the world has legalized, when education is attacked and designated to be subject to cost-benefit analysis, when the “free press” is converted to a profit machine that fails to hold accountable the worst transgressive behaviors of elites while spotlighting the suicides or “moral failings” of celebrities or the bizarre, depraved and desperate activities of lunatics, driven mad in a civilization with no overarching narrative besides “productivity” and “consuming” and wealth aggregation, when the dignity of any life – as work, as community, as memorial – is degraded or undermined to the point of extinction, when all resistance to global plutocracy is managed by police, military, political or diplomatic intervention, when movement or migration is impeded or induced by force of arms or economy, when Nature is deemed expendable, and food contrived as an artificial resource nearer to poison than sustenance, when human ties to ancestry, to nation, to a commons are assaulted relentlessly in the name of vague “progress,” when the most egregious, even murderous industrial or governmental malfeasance is “settled” with cost-of-doing-business cash payouts, applying price tags to any consequential suffering…?

What can an artist do in this historical moment, to be relevant, to fight for humanity, to set precedents – to create art for truth and or freedom, for wisdom - for himself and others, especially when there exists no clear, rational architecture for such an art? What is an “austere” art? What is its antithesis? When the bills at the end of the month arrive in the mailbox, for an artist, like every other indentured servant of the Managed Society, how will the artist gather himself to generate an object beyond desire, beyond waste, beyond Self, beyond gratification, an art un-consuming? When the inducements to conform or self-censor are so mighty and pervasive, or when the artist is so marginalized that nothing he can make will reach the people whom he serves, from what source can the artist draw to energize his insistence on liberty, equality and brotherhood of Man?

Who exactly are the beneficiaries of this global society of “shared values?” Where and how do they live? What are their immunities, their weaknesses, their fears, their entertainments, their religion, their motivations, their visions, or their narratives? How do they justify the expansion of disparity between the richest and poorest? What “reality” must they create, in order to establish borders between themselves and the masses they impoverish? What chemistry or biology - what medicines - do they purchase, so that their bodies may remain distinct from those outside the boundaries of the plutocratic commune? What is the medium of globalist “success?” What art do they buy, which “artists” do they patronize, and why?

>

We must examine here the protocols of Selection, as opposed to Election. We must curating, as artists and as a commonwealth. We must re-envision technology, not in terms of “could,” but also in terms of “should.” We must explore the Zombie and/or Monster and/or Serial Killer and/or Disaster and/or Rampage Spree, not as ticket-selling devices of global Hollywood media monopoly enterprises, but as modes of education. We must seek immunization from de-sensitization, from dehumanization, from normalization, as instruments of mass-management. If we fail to resist, we must insist on humanity, even under the regimes of corruption, duress, and exploitation. We must identify the neo-colonialization, the neo-slave trades, beyond the Lies of Image, Text and Context, beyond Content, beyond the seduction of our individual and collective imaginations, by what essentially is a parasite-class of Top-Feeders, whose influence corrodes all efforts to be human, to be natural, to be free and true.

We must as artists insist that Money cannot rule us, that there is no price tag for this art. We must start with nothing, and get to everything(s). We must reject the Authority, the Command, and the Other-designed Self. We must adhere to the pre-cursor of Word, only, the only safe place in a world the word has debased, and will destroy, unless we insist, Otherwise. We must be Homo Indomitus, and not just Homo Generator.

[Acknowledgements: Badiou, Ronell, Agamben, Schirmacher, Hegel, Debs]

SECTION 3

Dear Great White Father,

More than two centuries ago, the American people, hardly a coagulated type then, waged wars of liberation to free themselves from colonial tyranny. We succeeded, along with others, including Haiti, and, at least for a moment, the French. Through the messy process of systematic progression, by the recording of documents for the maintenance of the revolutionary gains, America has over the course of decades (counting fingers and toes), released some vestigial organs of oppression, while inventing and nurturing some new ones, Trojan horses in effect, for the “same old same old” models for top-down extraction and exploitation praxis.

The War Between the States nominally, but significantly, ended literal slavery. The Suffrage Movement afforded women the right to vote, to participate in democratic processes. Child labor laws, for instance, rescinded the power of industry to exploit the young for profit, and Social Security provided some measure of protection for old and the infirm from predators and neglect. Throughout the evolution of the United States of America to the present crucial or pivotal moment, malevolent forces have sought to muster their considerable powers against the deconstruction of tyranny in its manifold iterations, against the formation of bottom-to-top commonwealth. Public education, the freeway system, the progressive tax code, the encoding of civil liberties for all, the maintenance of a strong non-interventionist military to protect commonly shared freedoms, National Parks, communal arts programming, a free press, have waxed and now waned, usually under duress from the Ravana-like syndicates that oppose any common good in favor of the One-Over-the-Many proposition. What are the most pressing problems democracy must insist on defeating, now? The most entrenched problem America faces today is the myth of Economy, a false ideology masquerading greed and its attached consequences. Economy is intricately enmeshed in property systems, systems of ownership, by which the means of survival are distributed throughout society. In America, greed and poor distribution of the means of survival, combine to make precarious the liberties that generate all civil society, including art. The primary agent by which inequity is fomented is the corporation, the artificial personhood, whose powers to infinitude were established in 1825 by the SCOTUS, and, through a sequence of ever-expansive enactments, embodying the abstractions of greed and ownership in the unaccountable and risk-averse corporation, the corporation has flourished in general at the cost of democracy, and the dignity of the American people, and our “homeland.”

This open letter is addressed to “The Great White Father.” The nomenclature references missives sent by Native American leaders to the President of the United States, during the Indian Wars. To explain, it is the premise of this open letter that all Americans “are Indians, Now,” to paraphrase post-9/11 news headlines. The author would suggest that all humans are, indeed, Indians now. That the President of the United States, Barack Obama, is not “white,” that “red Indians” were never in fact of India, points to the strange ironies of contemporary assignation, especially in light of the realities “on the ground.” For context, some contemporaneity can be presented within the text to frame the proposition to follow below.

This open letter is being composed at this moment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York City, USA, in the closing days of August 2011. The author has just returned from the Alps, in Switzerland, after several weeks’ training in Philosophy and Media. An earthquake shook the Eastern U.S. Seaboard the day the author arrived home. Tomorrow, an historic storm, a hurricane of formidable power, will strike land nearby. The nation is mired in political deadlock, economic morass, endless war, and judicial corruption. The rule of law in America is a commodity, like oil, like water, like wheat. The modern infrastructure of the nation is crumbling, while major multinational corporations horde massive caches of cash. “Free Market” fanatics conflate their contrived ideologies with democracy, using media instrumentally to shape the imaginations of citizens, by means of increasingly sophisticated techniques of “mind control.” People are reduced to isolated instances or separated Self-lives, designed or adjudicated for them, and enforced through a dimensional matrix, consisting of repetitive messaging, constant real or implied surveillance, threat of incarceration or obliteration, either virtual or actual, and asymmetrical assault on extended ties, either familial or communal, political or material. Terror is the overarching narrative dispersed in the American imaginary. The proclamation to OBEY, to conform, to be a “ditto-head,” to “not rock the boat,” to resist the rational urge to rebel against the tyrannies prevalent in our so-called civilization at this moment, is piped through every available channel into the consciousness of every American, 24/7/365. The technologies of the command and control complex, the wired networks of electronics have successfully been grafted to every available fixture or movement within the architecture of our democracy. A handful of huge multinational corporate entities determine the great preponderance of data accessible to any citizen at any given moment. A new “Robber Baron” class of media moguls has migrated into democratic power-positions. Men like Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch wield disproportionate authority in the functions of our democracy, bending or breaking laws to suit themselves, to enrich themselves, to gain unprecedented access, even management of, the “halls of power.” To say that these neo-American media aristocrats use their authority, their wealth, their media platforms to nurture globalist corporate power and influence, to protect the interests of the Super-rich, to crush opposition, to undermine representative democracy, to redistribute wealth, to wage class warfare, to perpetuate systemic corruption, to further the aspirations of the new and old tyrants, is to state the obvious.

That this open letter is concerned essentially with art may not be so obvious. What does Bloomberg LP have to do with art? Bloomberg in his manifold iterations owns an international or globalist art gallery in London. Bloomberg has invested significantly in the promotion of some artists appearing, for example, in the Venice Biennale, over the past decade. Bloomberg, as a distributor of charity, or “strategic philanthropy,” emphasizes his investment in art and literature. Bloomberg as Mayor of New York, appears to support the art industrial complex operative in the city, and seeks to align himself with the arts, as a benevolent contributor (even as his educational policies diminish the presence of art in the public school system). The summation of Bloomberg, as an art phenomenon, however is much more complex and subtle. Bloomberg exists as a form of free market artistic enterprise, closer in actuality, by dint of his dimensional construct (dot gov, dot com, and dot org + 1 “real” person), as a brand in the new schema for “art,” as typified by Lady Gaga, in the paradigm ratified by former New Yorker, now Eli Broad-supported MoCA director, Jeffrey Deitch. Bloomberg is the prototypical “work of art,” to re-assign the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts’ Rocco Landesman’s forgettable campaign, and to parrot the BRAVO Network’s lamentable program starring Jerry Saltz. As Lady Gaga asserted during her 60 Minutes interview, Bloomberg’s art is a manifest of the “art of fame.” Unlike Gaga, though, Bloomberg’s art seeps into the applications of power and political influence, empowered by a CIA-connected police machine that over the past decade has become increasingly militarized and largely unregulated, for reasons of “national security. The configuration, in itself, of Bloomberg’s multiplicity of Selves, is, as a result, much more ominous in effect and implications. Gaga, to demonstrate, does not own the means of propaganda by and through which her art of fame is distributed, and her fans are not her constituents. Gaga was selected, not elected. The immanence of enormous funds for use in projecting Bloomberg into the public sphere does not exist at the disposal of Gaga. Her entourage is not capacitated to administer deadly force upon threats to her “Brand,” an asset available to Bloomberg in his political office.

The notations relevant to Bloomberg, with respect to Obama, wind towards Shepard Fairey, he of the HOPE print, which created a powerful meme, both visual and worded, for the rise of Obama to the Presidency. The election’s aftermath, for Obama and Fairey, can be considered as a set for evaluation. What of the HOPE that elected Obama, as represented in Fairey’s image and text? What to make of the travails that struck Fairey, consequent to his artistic intervention in the Campaign of 2008 for Obama? What lessons is an artist to glean from the convergent phenomena, and the subsequent, related stories? The author has followed the trajectories of both Obama’s dashed HOPEs and the legal problems of Shepard Fairey, deriving from his re-sampling of an AP-owned photograph, and the infringed rights thereto, extending not only to the corporation, but to the originating photographer. The case was settled, evidently. The problematic wrinkles in the law, associated with digital usage, artistic interpretation of source material and the mechanical question of copyright for camera-output, among other issues, have been left for now unresolved. Ultimately, though, the tale may boil down, like soup in a pan, to the one word, OBEY, not HOPE. For if one word can characterize the Obama Presidency, it is the word OBEY, not HOPE.

As Dick Durbin, the U.S. Senator, quipped, to paraphrase, the Banks own American democracy. Fraudulent foreclosures aside, “Too Big To Fail” aside, bailouts, insider trading, complicit ratings agencies, the derivatives fiasco, war-profiteering aside, the subjugation of the United States to un-elected finance industry operatives is now not just a farce of occupational fungibility, as the revolving door separating business and government spins its counter-revolutionary web of deceit, misdirection and outright larceny, it is a tragedy of broken dreams and embittered futures for most Americans. The U.S., at Obama’s direction, not looking backwards at Bush Administration war crimes or Wall Street treason (during-war crimes, endangering the Republic), and being shoved forward into destitution by corrupt Republican (and Democrat) politicians, is morally devalued, if not entirely debased. The torturers got away with murder. The murderers (British Petroleum, Massey Energy) got away with a small-change wrist-slap. The firms of Wall Street, the $600 Trillion hedge fund magnates, big pharma, the insurance industry, the exploiters of undocumented workers, etc., etc., have preserved their evil modus operandi, business as usual, as it has been for the better part of four millennia, from State, to Church, to Corporation.

What, pray tell, is an artist to do, an American artist, an artist in a democracy, more or less, give or take, at least for the moment. Will it come to bloody war again, one must wonder? Art and war course through us like DNA strands. Which will it be, this time? The endless war on the Other is one thing. The commencement of war upon ourselves is a different kind of proposition altogether, especially now, that we, art and man, and our nature, are on Deadly Ground (Sun Tzu). The storm is coming, and it is already upon us, it is us, as Pogo might say.

Dear Great White Father. You had better get your shit together, in a hurry. If y’all thought the debt ceiling pantomime was awful, tension-wise, wait ‘til this crazy next phase of Time Madness kicks in, beyond the telling and tolling of clocks, those funny machines of death-fear.

By the way, I won’t be voting for you in 2012. I don’t vote Republican.

PS: There’s still time to sign an Executive Order for a new WPA, New Art in Action project, for America.

Yours truly,
An Artist in Bushwick, NY

SECTION 4

“While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages, and wrote poems with all our might.”
— Jean Arp, as quoted by Harold Rosenberg in The De-Definition of Art

“It always was this way” never even existed. The stark realization that a coming insurrection might not materialize as a sufficient resistance movement is not so much an artistic problem, as a problem of perception. The perceptual defect is rooted in the failure of language to adequately express or articulate 4D reality. If anything, we must insist, not resist. Sure, we can map effects, we can harness the predictive qualities of the new mode of vision, but our shared language, with its defective shared values, will not suffice to enunciate what needs to be said, which is fine. What needs to be done does not need to be said first, if at all. Nobody needs to take credit, nor blame. We don’t need another hero, as Tina Turner sang for the Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome soundtrack, and, to quote another movie’s memetic derivation to the vernacular, “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”

In this we are like the early-adopters of 4D, the business/science/political complex, which after nearly a century of extensive testing has developed extravagant, proven, programmatic systems as dimensional apps, currently of tremendous value to the war machine, the command and control matrix, the extraction and exploitation schema and syndicates, the thought police and industrialists, and the psych-business complex, to name only a few beneficiaries. Sure, Muybridge and Eakins have been cited as the visionaries, without any amplification of their ingenuity or innovation. After all, they were only Americans, not critical, and not secondarily revolutionary. In the Marxian art-historical complex, Muybridge and Eakins remain in the blur behind Deleuze, behind Richter, behind a standing army of continental theorists and late-comers. Which is not meant as a diminishment of any accomplishments the post-Pollack, Judd contemporary Europeans have earned, in the long shadow of T.C.Cannon. Remember, we are all Indians, now. Still, the ridiculous adulation for posers like Duchamp, Warhol, Koons and Hirst is too debased by Super-class affiliation to warrant the Serious Consideration these second-rate functionaries generate endlessly among the elites and their wannabe Dark Matter minions. With endless war, we also get the endless war on art. In a dimensionist framework, each of those named, and we can toss in Benjamin and now Seth Price, presents some modicum of positive contribution to the progression of perception, as a 4D phenomenon. The same can be said of Beuys, but the same can be said of Thomas Kinkaid, or Thomas Hirshhorn, for that matter. As such, the citation of anyone can serve as point of origination for a meaningful dimensionist discourse. Critique, as a trope-machine, can only pretend to such utility.

Which brings us to the eruption of technology, as The Event of the 20th Century, when, after two World Wars, and the explosion of two atomic bombs in Japan, humanity’s bearings shifted irreversibly. Murakami and Godzilla are products of the conflagrations Over There. To recognize the emergence of the wired networks of Turing Machines, as an extension not of Man, but of man’s destructive power, is to discern the artificial future from the real, or natural, one. Both are imaginary, at this point. The reformation of mankind by the sender-receiver configuration positions Claude Shannon as one of contemporary art’s great progenitors, if not projectors. The Cogito of Descartes is no longer a solution enough, as reason, when the existence of man is so much a function of searchable databases, contained in storage, in a so-called Cloud, somewhere outside of one’s mind and thoughts. The cybernetic model for human consciousness, for nature, has not only did not disambiguate our new circumstances, it somehow morphed with the Freud/Lacan/Bernays/Freud complex of Self, generating a mutinous hybid-ology displacing humanity with a dominant Other. Defenders (or careerists) of the anti-human monster being, the cyborg, the zombie, the golem, the drone, the clone, the robot, and the automaton – all variations of the same construct – are like Dr. Frankenstein in “love” with their creation, or at least its imaginary. Even Derrida had his cat moment.

And as if this weren’t enough, there is the conundrum of pollution, of waste: the penultimate Godzilla problem of the “Free Market” extraction and exploitation machine, as demonstrated by the BP oil spill recently, or over centuries, the example of Cerro Rico. We are living with this cancer, the metastasis of the status quo of business as usual, which threatens each and all with catastrophe on a progressive scale, from one to Everybody, to Nature itself. Even those handy mobile communication devices, with all those apps, conspire with the Telecom industry, the same one that conspires with the post-9/11 government to access every user’s thoughts and transmissions, to create disease in the very brain that generates Cartesian reason. Enlightenment is displaced by a sick radioactive illumination, spreading epidemics of tumors and other types of malignancies, both psychic and physical, among the populace, especially the Creative Classes, the Knowledge Workers. These beloved cogs of the Druckerian management elites, from Florida (the man, not the state) to Bloomberg, have discovered their precarity is not so much an external phenomenon, as an internal or biophysical one. Economic adaptation has proved no insurance against the ills of contemporaneity. Embodiment is still hedging the game with existential risk, and HR has no long-term concern with it, beyond the cost-benefit analysis for the corporate bottom line. Austerity is no answer to the plagues descending upon us, borne of the blinding desires to satisfy the Greed Drive, which Freud sublimated to an imaginary Death Drive. Every living thing will die, but for a Christ, or so that story goes. Of what solace is that in an anonymous hospital or hospice bed, in a second-rate, for-profit medical scheme?

If we as artists, and humans, cannot produce a vision for this age, we are grossly incompetent. The Mountain, the Sky, the Ocean, the Desert of our Dreams, of the Real, have never been closer to the bone. Can we not at least paint a portrait of man on the verge of extinction? Do we not see the Lightning and Sun anymore? Do we not hear the Thunder and feel the heat anymore? Does not the touch of a trusted lover inspire us anymore, or the gaze of a stranger, or the cry of a child? From all the photographic iterations of the Matterhorn, of the setting sun, of the crowd, of the waters of the “Blue-Green Planet,” of Joshua Tree, or the caves of Lascaux, can we not deduce and then produce an object, create one, maybe even an image of Justice? Are we not enough for our own imaginations, anymore? It is not just a question of representation, now. It is a matter of survival - for if we artists can no longer paint justice, as free men and women and children, of and for nature and ourselves, mankind is doomed, and neither God nor the “Free Market” will save us, and our home.

February 2014

Scanning the web on a 4d-related search, I happened upon a presentation by Tim Maudlin, who is a distinguished member of the NYU philosophy department faculty. Dimensionality is important to some areas of his work/research/thinking. I want to share a presentation he made in 2011 at an FXQi conference on time. If you search for Tim, you'll find some really fascinating essays, interviews and presentations that touch on many of the questions we raise in the course of our explorations in dimensional art. If you check out the class he's teaching at NYU this spring, you'll note Tim is considering "the possibility that space-time is a fundamentally discrete structure rather than a continuum."

UPDATE: On March 12, I had the opportunity to visit Tim at his NYU office. We discussed his work for an hour, and ranged a bit, covering some territory re: 4D art and more. It was (for me) a truly fruitful and inspiring exchange. NYC is an amazing place. One day I find a powerful lecture online, and a few days later I'm in a face2face conversation with the presenter. This is definitely not a minor advantage to one's being situated in the BA.

I also came across two archives that I believe will be important to my work in coming months. One is the online William Blake archive. Another is a new online database hosted by Stanford University in partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de France, focusing on the French Revolution. I am thinking of the two phenomena (Blake and the French Revolution), and by extension, the American revolution, as a triangulating set. The three subjects (WB-FR-AR), which produced many culturally important objects and narratives, can be examined as periodic concurrencies, with reaction and intercourse evident, along with variable features - obviously. In America, for instance, we didn't much use the guillotine, as far as I know. Blake was inspired by both revolutions, as demonstrated in his work. In the technical, artistic aspects, there is much rich stuff to be mined. The significance of the printing press to all aspects of our data-triangle is worth a look. I am looking forward to sampling textures from the prints contained in the archives, and reformatting them in various digital applications, and some analog ones as well. In the past I've appropriated images of Blake for animations and digi-paitings, and worked with a few iconic images from the Revolutionary Era. These visions (Blake's, the revolutionaries') remain vital and relevant. Moreover, I'm very impressed by the influence of the variety of systems (ideological, aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual) that inform the technical expressions and representations we see in our 3-point database. It seems to me that the disruption of the reign of kings and queens precipitated by the revolutions (and by the artists who were contemporary to them), heralded a new expressive arc and age, one in which style was dictated less by the crown and more by the artist, that is until the market arose to its current dominance, to some extent attaining to the power formerly enjoyed by monarchs. Some of these topics (like "style") I've frequented before, elsewhere. To consider the state of the style now would be an extensive project, yes? Such a project would be pointless if we chose not to point to the fracturing of style from the dictates of the kings and queens' courts of Europe, and its relocation in the masses, or the imaginations of makers. I'll leave it at that for now.

∞

In the course of preparing for my interview with Tim, I happened to come across and reread an essay I found immensely rewarding the second time round: Christoph Wulf, "The Temporality of World-Views and Self-Images," Looking Back at the End of the World (p.49). If you get a chance, I encourage you to check it out. Here's a quote:

“Time is the medium that binds a man’s view of the world with his view of himself. It follows, then, that alterations in man’s view of the world and of himself are to an essential degree alterations in his perception of time. The dimensions of time connected with the world at large differ from those connected with the individual. Our concern is to establish the difference between the two.”

— Christoph Wulf

Endtime Transmissions
By Paul McLean

PREFACE: The following travelog was composed under the auspices of Mercury Retrograde. If you don't happen to know what MR is, the Google can help. The occasion was a trip to Nashville, Tennessee, to dodge through winter storms and deliver art for the opening exhibit for David Lusk Gallery. The journey was infused from start to finish with the theme of re-visitation. I reconnected with some friends from "a previous life" in that city. I encountered dozens of people with whom I was to varying degrees familiar, but each relationship was, I soon realized, in the interim, profoundly shaped by time's passage. Time unfolded in each individual's past decade in unpredictable ways. In no instance did I feel that I could have predicted ten years ago what the person in front of me now would be doing today. Appearance and appearances hardly meshed with any assumptions I might have entertained back when I moved away from Nashville in the early 2000s. The socio-organizational dynamics of Nashville have shifted significantly, since I left. As with any change on that scale, whether the changes are good or bad depends on whom you're asking. Our (thinking of collectives DDDD and 01 and the circles they touched) old haunts no longer resembled themselves, except superficially, or in a durational sense, as a function of prevailing structures, in their cultural container capacities, not necessarily as expressions of architecture and design. The housing itself could not dictate the internal content of those for whom it had been erected. Over a two-week+ visit, I felt more each day like "a ghost in the machine," the mechanism being time (past-present tense, with a nod to possible futures). My apparitional state was probably partly derivative of my own memories, tied to habits and patterns, established over years of usage, and made obsolete by prolonged absence. People make fun of the Civil War re-enactors, plentiful in the South, but I had the prevailing awareness that we all were to various degrees living in Creative Anachronism. In my displacement from Nashville to many points on the globe, I had made few adjustments to evolve with the community here. My network of relationships had largely dissolved, and my efforts to perpetuate them did not match the inertial and entropic forces that frayed and then broke my ties within the communities I inhabited in Nashville, in the past. A few times during this trip, I set out to find some of my old pals. The searches were fairly successful. Then was the general scan of the cultural configuration, the production map. Figuring out where the points of convergence are now for the creative class, its meeting places and hangs, didn't prove too difficult. I just had to ask around. I discovered through a few conversations with knowledgeable folk that my sense that the city had transformed, due to certain factors (political, cultural, and economic) was on the whole, accurate. The web, ubiquitous mobile devices, social media and other e-communications tools had impacted the scene powerfully. The evaporation of daily and weekly local print news coverage in Nashville has dramatically changed the movement of info in Nashville. Trends in the demographics of the city have played a role, when combined with the emerging topologies of population locus and makeup. The interest in and attention paid to fine art in the Music City is moving in a trajectory that reflects national urban planning ideas for establishing Creative Class-friendly culture. Cost of living as a strategy is a subtle leverage for the reformation of Nashville (as it is elsewhere, like Downtown LA for example, or Williamsburg in Brooklyn). Entertaining knowledge workers involves regular, safe artsy happenings. On a side note, I had a poignant moment when I juxtaposed the tenements nearby, such as the ones on Edgehill, to the condo and rental loft complexes lining Nashville corridors like Wedgewood. Making a list of differences between the two types of residences leaves one a disturbing set of similarities. Anyway, to summarize my evaluation of Nashville's cultural landscape, leaving many details out here in the interests of brevity, the fundamental casualty of the city's management scenario is the face-to-face public encounter at the local cafe, restaurant or bar, which served as the best kind of production lubricant. Between 1996-2003, the Nashville scene was a facilitator and percolator of juicy good horizontal dimensional art collabs. I am guessing the processor has enforced adjustments to the froth, and like a flower that blooms only under optimum circumstances, that phenomenon I was most fortunate enough to experience, is reformed. I look forward to further learning more about the new forma. I recognize the program might be for me uncomfortable at times, but that is the thing about witnessing, through a lens of love, minus nostalgia, the once-beloved.

∞

I don't want to live in any time other than now. Really. It is not an
option, in fact, but that is immaterial. I don't wish to replay my
early 20s, for example (for a few reasons, which are not pertinent here). I
wouldn't prefer to open my eyes one morning to discover I've awakened
in the 1700s, either, or be magically beamed ahead in time to the
2400s. Can anyone with certainty forecast what the future of 2443 is?
Will it be "better" or "worse" than now? Anyway, the dream of time
travel is a vacuous one, at least as it is projected in general, as a
vehicle for a person, along the lines of Dante' Divine Comedy.

We can look at the notion through a different lens and assemble a more
interesting conjecture. Why not begin here: All of us are traveling in
time, the only object. "Traveling" may actually be an incorrect way to
think about our condition, relative to time. The relationship may be
existential. Man's coordination with time may be multi-faceted, if you
will, objective, since we are to a degree physical entities,
manifestations as such, if not creations. For beings so situated,
wrestling with the nature of our functional consciousness, attached as
it to flesh, we will have to confront the difficulty of perception, in
its contemporaneity.

It's difficult to obtain a decent perspective on the subject(s)
pertaining to time, as an object, or even a concept, since our point
of origin is within time. Part of the comprehension problem involves
physicality and attachment to its sensations. To illustrate: How can
one comprehend a mountain, while standing on it, without supplemental
awareness that affords one perspectival multiplicity and assorted
other superpowers for comprehensive perception?

If one could access universal or infinite vision, that would solve the
problem, I suppose. Perhaps that's why we all long for perceptual
totality, for omniscience. Or perhaps omni-science is exactly what's
necessary to achieve total awareness of one's situation in space-time.
At what point can mankind hope to achieve *that*?! This is more the
case, if we address time, time as the only object, and/or time as
object-force.

[All command is time-based.]

Today we have a lot of mapping tools, some of which are sophisticated.
Most of these instruments are rooted in the third dimension. We can
create prodigiously detailed cartography for form and volume, as long
as the form we are representing remains static, is changeless. What in
the universe stays put? That is the problem with realism. A perfect
picture, a perfect documentation of a thing is true only for an
instant, if ever. Then there are other problems. The universe a thing
inhabits is moving. The thing itself consists of particles that are
moving, that can hardly be defined as "solid" in any meaningful
manner.

We also have attained sophistication in our counting machines. The
Turing devices we employ in a host of tools and toolsets has greatly
expanded our capacity for calculation. They have not produced an
artificial intelligence that might serve as supplemental to man, in
the kind of co-sentient arrangement described above as perspectival
multiplicity and omni-science. Just as AI has resisted manufacture by
counting tool, what if real space-time is insoluble through science
rooted in the numerical, or at least 1,2 or 3 dimensional number
systems? What is the point of counting infinity by assigning numbers
for counting space-time, as in 2D cartography? What if man must
develop a new way of representing reality, such as space-time. No one
can with certainty can contradict the statement, "Space-time is
infinite." For 4D science, perhaps we must imagine other means than
those science developed to solve tasks in 1-3 dimensions.

∞

Why this dissatisfaction with our state in time? Why entertain the
desire to escape the time program? Time is unerringly beautiful,
harmonious and perfect, at least it seems that way to me. I am
comfortable with bending space and other kinds of phenomena that
resist simplification, like turbulence, especially when holistically
the system the phenomenon appears to be indicative of is a system that
resists simplification, while exhibiting cohesion, which is simplicity
itself, a kind of unity. Why not accept it? Why try to make it into
something it is not? Why, for example, try to make the universe adhere
to the rules of zero and one?

First of all, attempting to get around or get over on time will not
work, at least for us finite folk. Time rolls up behind us. Time comes
at us like a massive wave, to crash exactly on us, in every instant.
To play at beating time is a folly. That said, man is defined by his
follies.

Man will never end time. Man may invent a folly. He may pretend the
end of time is near, is coming, has arrived, is bound to happen,
unless we do x,y or z. Who knows, if time will actually end while any
people are alive to witness it. What difference would it make? You
could not discuss the event after the fact, or remember it later.
Everything would be over, finished. Without time, nothing exists. Or
to put it another way, does nothing exist outside of time?

Is timelessness a virtuous quality? When does one not have time? The
mundane fallacies involving time are plentiful. Language dances around
time all the time. What word exists outside of time? I believe that
one of the great powers vested in the God of the Bible is the power to
create man and his universe with commanding words, but this God still
is accomplishing those feats on a daily timeline. I can understand why
any analyst concerned about time might be skeptical about this
Creation story, and its particular orientation to and in time. At any
rate, this story is certainly not the only one.

Man has invented his own conceptions of time, and timelessness, and
his relativity to time or its absence. Man thinks about time and has
questions about the nature of time, of nature relative to time, of man
in nature, with respect to time, and so on. "Time" may not even be the
correct term for what we are addressing here. What exactly is time,
anyway? Show me the person capable of answering this question, in its
totality, in all its implications.

What is Greenwich Mean Time, but an invention, made normative by
usage? The arbitrary traits of GMT and all its derivatives and
contingencies are legion, compounding and subject to mechanical error
in applications. Man has gauged time by rising and setting celestial
bodies, which operate in cycles, resistant to exactitude.
Object-attached time is demonstrably problematic. Aging as a process
tells us little about time itself. We can conjecture the passing of
millions and billions of years, but what universal meaning does such a
conjecture exhibit? The unfolding of time in the domain of objects is
anything but conclusive. Such conjectures provide some measure of
practicality in certain applications, but something like carbon dating
cannot possibly exhaust all questions about all phenomena in every
quadrant of existence. Science in this aspect must be satisfied with
incremental, limited progress. At present time itself is incalculable.
Time is mysterious still. Why?

Maybe we are looking at time the wrong way. Or maybe we are looking at
ourselves relative to time incorrectly. What if we have gotten time
all wrong? That would certainly explain a lot.