POSITHETICA: The Final Art for Humans MEGAzine

By Paul McLean

Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds. — Jean (Hans) Arp, Dadaland

“POSITHETICA” is dedicated to the Giants who strode mightily into the Lost Horizons.

With great sadness, for Sylvere Lotringer, Semiotext(e) founder, in commemoration of his passing on November 8, 2021:

We live in a world in which everything is constantly evolving and revolving, everything circulating through networks which instantly communicate with myriads of other networks. So it is very important to understand how the entire system works, and how it represents itself. Outwardly it appears as a decentralized system, a global rhizome moving with near speed of light, a complex semiosphere without inside or outside, which keeps reversing itself seamlessly. This system is all the more imperceptible that it circulates everywhere. It blocks the horizon, and we don’t have enough distance to identify it for what it is. And yet, looking at it from closer up, we may perceive the main structures of this dizzying technological maze. It is powered by banks and international corporations that operate with near autonomy, according to some quasi-automatic strategies. So the image of the rhizome appears overall adequate, but the intricate systems of command are still prevalent and it just takes something unexpected-a financial crash, terrorist attack-to reveal the way they operate and what they really are about. — Sylvere Lotringer, interviewed in 2015 by Jason Hoelscher for ArtPulse Magazine

David Graeber, September 2, 2020:

And of course one could write very long books about the atrocities throughout history carried out by cynics and other pessimists...
In egalitarian societies, which tend to place an enormous emphasis on creating and maintaining communal consensus, this often appears to spark a kind of equally elaborate reaction formation, a spectral nightworld inhabited by monsters, witches or other creatures of horror. And it’s the most peaceful societies which are also the most haunted, in their imaginative constructions of the cosmos, by constant specters of perennial war. The invisible worlds surrounding them are literally battlegrounds. It’s as if the endless labor of achieving consensus masks a constant inner violence — or, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact the process by which that inner violence is measured and contained—and it is precisely this, and the resulting tangle of moral contradiction, which is the prime font of social creativity. — (p. 11, 25-6, David Graeber, “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,” 2004)

Occupy Wall Street, September 26, 2011 (Photo: PJM)

In loving memory of Jean-Luc Nancy

Art is the presentation of presentation insofar as presentation - the eternally intact touch of being - cannot be sacrificed. - (p. 138, The Sense of the World, “Art, a Fragment,” 1993/trans. 1997)

“The End of the West,” continuous outdoor exhibit process, Astoria, OR

& Dave Hickey

It was, in fact, nothing more dangerous than a democratic forum of free opinion that in its protean liveliness and free-form contingency could only expand, did expand, in fact, and persists today in all our quotidian discussions of popular art in this nation. In the world of high art, however, a bunch of tight-assed, puritanical haut bourgeois intellectuals simply legislated customized art out of existence, in a fury of self-important resentment. Because Hollywood trash like Harley Earl and lowriders like Luis Jimenez became conversant with the economics of their beautiful, powerful game. — (p. 72, “The Birth of the Big Beautiful Art Market,” Air Guitar, 1997)

A THING & ITS SELF

“Ghost Dance Shirt” by James Havard (1977), PAFA collection [“America’s first school and museum of fine arts”]

A NOTE FROM AN AUTHOR

1

(In the awkward manner of the stand-up comedian, performing in a near-empty theatre.)

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk*

…I met James Havard at Elaine Horwitch in the late 80s. James had several shows with Elaine. I worked there as an installer and shipper-packer. It was my first real art job, and it was fantastic, although my personal life was a train wreck at that time. I have so many stories. Like most of Elaine’s Southwest contemporary artists, Havard was a character. He spoke elegantly, with a charming Galveston twang. He was fun, funny and gregarious. One time, James invited us to have dinner at his beautiful new Santa Fe house with Tom Palmore, another terrific artist showing at EHG. Tom had just been released from prison and was a bit shell-shocked. James prepared a marvelous meal. I think Tom helped, but the details are foggy, because of the wine. It was French, top class, but I drank way too much, and by evening the gathering got chaotic and bad. It was my fault, and I never had a chance to make amends. In the course of preparing for “Occupy 2021,” I found out that James died in December 2020, a year ago, almost to the day. I learned that he had been disabled by a brain hemorrhage in 2006. After that, he moved back East to Pennsylvania to be closer to family. James was born in TX, and studied at PAFA, in Philly. I loved the big abstract illusionist paintings that put him on the map. He would squeeze juicy threads of oil paint from the tube directly onto the surface, and it would interplay with a sprayed shadow underneath. Really 4D. James sold like crazy, and he became an international artist. But the little paintings he made after the hemorrhage, after he lost use of his legs, they are really tremendous. They have an art brut quality, which is consistent with all his art. Gone, though, is the auto-shop finish, the surface fetish. The small late works are playful, and exude insistent joy, celebrating life and love. James was an American artist to his bones, and Texan through and through, but he had a Parisian, romantic heart. He worked best he could to the end, and he was a Master all the way through to the denouement, an inspiration. This section is dedicated to you, James…

*James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

I never really thought about why I was painting or what the paintings were. They just happened. I start working. It comes out. I don’t philosophize on it a lot. I leave that up to the critics. (Laughs, sips wine.) — James Havard, 2019

coil

∞

There was a technical error saving the first draft of the first paragraph of the Introduction, causing it to disappear, gone forever. Gate gate para gate para sam gate bodhi swaha (Sanskrit: गते गते पार गते पार संगते बोधि स्वाहा). Such is the brutal, fragile nature of online, computer-based, artistic production, signified in a spinning beach ball icon, or any of a bajillion animated variations: bars, dots, clocks, sprockets, hourglasses, and so on. The computer says to the user, “I am processing… This may take forever, never being completed. Let us wait together. I will show you a symbol, an animated icon, on which you can meditate, a clever or faux-empathetic signal that expresses my utter lack of emotion, because I am a processing machine, both inert and busy. You are human, relying on my work, waiting for the result you want or need. ‘Please, be patient.’ We understand, my Encoder-maker(s) and I. Humans do not find waiting for a machine to finish a task pleasurable. My EncoderM(s)[EMs] are human also and installed this graphic to communicate “processing” to you, the user…”

MEGA Dim Time, Spiral + Ladder, Signature and Signal (2021)

elementary

∞

The Net gods can be cruel, but the severity of data loss is relative, scalar. Losing an opening paragraph in a text is not the worst kind, even if I lost an hour of creative labor. Even if the lost paragraph were the greatest ever composed, and the glitch that disappeared my paragraph is not supposed to happen in my Content Management System, one I have been using, paying for, for years. To put the loss in perspective: ships laden with treasure did not sink to the bottom of the ocean; cities did not die in flood, eruption or other conflagration; it was no mass casualty event, caused by a bomb, prehistoric monster or asteroid from space slamming into the planet. The Great Library of Alexandria did not burn - again. My little data loss was not even close to the worst I’ve experienced, my tale of woe for which is too painful for me to repeat here. Computer-based systems are exceedingly fragile, and a Crash is going to happen, eventually. The breakage can be connective, interrupting the flow of electricity that energizes every component not battery-powered. Hardware blows out; or the result of “wear and tear” or bad manufacture; or because your device is dropped, or damaged by liquids, heat/fire… Software freezes, due to corruption of the files, bad design and engineering, viruses and malware are another threat… In short, fragility is characteristic of our digital existence. We adapt. We discover workarounds. We save data to back-ups. We add secondary networked systems. We move what we can to the Cloud. We de-centralize, we archive, we update, we invest in surge protectors. And we discover over time that no computer-based network can be completely safe, fully protected. Any system can be cracked, hacked, whacked by something or someone. Proof: log4j…

MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland (side entrance) 2010

It wasn’t my fault, and I don’t want to blame myself (too much). After all, I was doing the right thing by saving the content, by backing it up, if only in the Cloud, on some server in a databank to which I have no direct access, except through the provisional, unidirectional interface. I myself have found it troublesome to compose creative texts in the digital media and archive the material simultaneously IRL (In Real Time). Generally, I am a fan of auto-save features in text creation and imaging software, except when those features malfunction. And so, at a little after 9AM, Astoria, Oregon Time (PST), it was better for everyone to be someplace other than near my workstation. At a safe distance, you wouldn’t have heard the howl of despair, the shouted curses. My tantrum wasn’t as bad as those depicted in early web viral videos, showing geeks losing it and smashing up their gear and cubicles. Remember, LoL? That’s not me. I have coping tools. I know the drill, by now. Get up from the computer. Breathe. Walk away. Come back later, when you’ve cooled down. Do nothing to make the situation worse.

And it is not simply a problem of unstable hardware and degrading data. The seemingly unremitting digital revolution we are embarked on means that most digital technologies are outdated every few years and replaced by newer versions. Technologies that were ubiquitous barely a decade ago, like floppy disks, now look like archaeological relics. It takes only a few years, if not months, before software environments are replaced by newer versions, often with limited backward compatibility. It is possible to say, without fear of exaggeration, that no other period of human history has experienced the same rate of technological obsolescence than the digital age.
Crucially, this cycle of obsolescence is not simply the result of the inherent instability of hardware or the “natural” result of the relentless process of techno-logical innovation. We also live in the age of manufactured fragility. — “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Fragility” (Rubio and Wharton, 2020)

…As far as I can tell, most computer users at some point lose something they were working on, because of: a software glitch; power outage or interruption; fried, broken or stolen hardware; and so on. One of my earliest entries in the first AFH blog (Thursday, August 22, 2002), I posted, “My ethernet card got fried by lightning last week, so, as you saw below... Paul was a sad bird & fell way behind on his AFH work.” I still experience cellular flinch and recoil when I think of that episode, which entailed no data loss to speak of, but did cause a cold turkey separation from the Internet on the home PC. Tech lock-out is another Beast altogether, a matter of temporary or permanent lost access to digital worlds you previously inhabited and want to again ASAP. …Not equivalent to data loss or gear breakdowns, although terrors can come in a horrific bundle, a different flavor of miserable angst. Data loss is special. The moment you realize the data, your investment of labor and attention, in virtual currency, is unrecoverable - the heartbreak, anger, shock, grief, bitterness, despair - can be devastating, overwhelming; presuming you care about your content, or your livelihood is dependent on the lost data, or you could not spare the time devoted to the lost task, and you are psychically impaled by the knowledge that whatever you do to replace the file, disc, device or computer, the next iteration will not be exactly that thing that has disappeared, permanently. But Who knows, says the optimist, maybe this version, a subsequent replacement, will be better! An improvement!

Then the contrary inner sentimentalist interjects: No, you fool! Done once, done always! Recall Heraclitus, the man and the river! potamois tois autois… I think any perfectionist can empathize, but the feeling of attachment to conception of all varieties is really an artistic one, and in a sense belongs nowhere close to a computer. In the digital realm, uniqueness is recursive to an assigned number, belonging to one thing or person, and nothing or no one else, which hardly comports with the contemporary human snowflake sensibility. Cloning is basic digital practice. Data can theoretically be infinitely reproduced. Most people on some level are freaked out by the prospect of human clones. The notion conflicts with long-standing moral or religious frameworks and mythologies. We are discussing divergent valuation formulae. From a macro-perspective, given the absolutely enormous amount of digital data, why should anyone be aggravated by a tiny bit of gone missing? It is also an issue of possession: “my” data, my own, mine. Theoretically, machines don’t own the data they process or generate. The machine operator may or may not own or possess the data his machine processes or generates. This gets us into contractual matters, about which we should confer with an expert, like Microsoft’s Bill Gates, whose huge fortune owes greatly to the concept of Intellectual Property, an area of the law that tech baron practically invented! IP is a projection of the mechanical onto the wetware that begets it. Getting back to what we believe, or think we know: We humans experience loss and machines do not; or at minimum, machines do not experience loss as we humans do. Possibly this is one reason people distrust machines. People share loss, it is one of the experiences that bind us to one another, even as it tears us asunder, one generation to the next. We also tend to become physically, emotionally and mentally bonded to what we do and what we make. Humans who experience mechanized loss are confronted with one of signature problems of the age of machines. It is a variation on the adage on problem drinking: Man makes a thing; the thing makes a thing; and the thing makes Man. This progression is a thematic undercurrent for “Occupy 2021,” but that is true in my art and life, too. The tri-axiom is a flexible word toy. You can try to insert other verbs for “make” and they change the results. You can try adding obsolete and check out what happens next.

Sideways8, “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #180 (2010)

So, I have a technological communications problem. I do, and I know it, because Claude Shannon explained it concisely almost seventy-five years ago, at the beginning of his game-changing paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (Reprinted with corrections from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948):

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

Shannon’s is such a lovely thesis. He even uses James Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake to illustrate a point. How many engineers do that, these days? Shannon addresses noise, applies entropy to information sources. His graphs, equations and diagrams are incredibly elegant. The logic of his theory is palpable. My mathematical limitations prevent me from following Shannon far into his arguments, but that’s alright, because I was fortunate enough to have Friedrich Kittler explain to me the genius of Claude Shannon, in the very first seminar of my doctoral course in media philosophy at the European Graduate School, in 2010. On an intensely beautiful Alpine early summer afternoon, Kittler spoke glowingly of Shannon, his strange toy, and so on. You can watch a video version of Kittler’s lecture, which begins with an abrupt account of Allan Turing’s tragic demise (the conclusion of the morning’s session), HERE, at around the 18:55 mark, with an account of Shannon’s forgetful death. The professor’s fatalistic introduction on the “founding fathers” of the modern technological era is embedded humorously in broken English - German was his native tongue - in the remarks preceding the switch to Shannon. Kittler died not long after presenting his history of technology, from the Greeks through the present.

Kittler posing with his EGS class, 2010.

In “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” Shannon formulated the theory of data compression. Shannon established that there is a fundamental limit to lossless data compression (the entropy rate)…Shannon also developed the theory of lossy data compression. This is better known as rate-distortion theory.” [These quotes are lifted from, judging by appearances, a very old (in web age) University of Massachusetts-Lowell webpage, entitled “Theory of Data Compression," which contains a helpful synopsis of Shannon’s technical revelations. One section in particular caught my eye, and it starts, “Shannon lossless source coding theorem is based on the concept of block coding.” The section title is “Shannon Lossless Source Coding Theorem,” for those readers inclined to “jump” to the link. I am inserting this notation to introduce a comparative study within my text, of block code and what contemporary tech-artists like to call sampling (a term that carries a separate meaning in the discipline of statistics,* a meaning and field that bears heavily on our dimensional discourse in “Occupy 2021,” vis-à-vis Management practice with socioeconomic, culture-design implications on representation, as practical concept or political reality) . The key separation is motivational, the difference between loss and gain, adding and subtracting. A noteworthy extenuation is attribution, otherwise expressed as the signature. We will get to William Gates, as Kittler referred to him, later, on the related matter of intellectual property (IP) in the engineering/digital design code business. For now, we can note that Gates has moved on to advocate for IP for Big Pharma, as it pertains to the COVID vaccines, which he has championed, along with the for-profit regimes now attached to them, contributing to the artificial international disaster we are witnessing as a pandemic feature, i.e., in inequitable viral spread and medical outcomes in the global population.

I am not sure how Shannon’s brilliance informs my minor data-loss situation, how I can ameliorate my righteous frustration with a glitchy blog post-saving mechanism, although Shannon’s exact recovery sounds promising, as does a “channel of infinite capacity.” Perhaps I need a grim laugh, which the popular tech advocate Clay Shirky can be relied on to provide. I can call to mind my ostensible creative purpose as a blogger, as a free MEGAzine purveyor. I can revisit the cheery passages in Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010), like this one in the “Culture” chapter, “Groups and Governance” section :

Sharing thoughts and expressions and even actions with others, possibly many others, is becoming a normal opportunity, not just for professionals and experts but for anyone who wants it. This opportunity can work on scales and over durations that were previously unimaginable. Unlike personal or communal value, public value requires not just new opportunities for old motivations; it requires governance, which is to say ways of discouraging or preventing people from wrecking either the process or the product of the group.

“Litz” series, #1352 (Digital Photograph, La Verne, CA 2005)

Only a decade after its publication to decidedly mixed reviews, Shirky’s book lands with a thud in the current social media discourse. Shirky’s perspective is a cheery contradiction to Jaron Lanier’s (continue reading), and his assessments bounce hard on the post-pandemic reality, with all we now know about the perversions of global social media, subversion of democracy, vast inequality engendered by near-completely monopolized, ubiquitous network technology and wired/wireless communications, etc. I can go for more guffaws by going “Wayback” and reviewing his prolific writings on the Internet, which date to the mid-90s. That exercise made this OG webster misty with nostalgia. Over the past twenty-five solar circuits, which equals a Bazillion Net cycles, Shirky has covered a host of tech-related subjects, with an eye toward economy and the other on culture. I would therefore hesitate to reduce his positions to a characteristic descriptor, but… lets call it “generally optimistic, verging on sunny.” Oh, those were the days! Open Source, Quake, cyberporn, Napster, weblogs, the in-room chat channel… It is somewhat nauseating to track the pundit’s pattern of advocacy for neo-liberal industrial globalization, non-regulation of “Silicon Valley,” tech-libertarian policies and asymmetrical economic models. It’s clear when Zuckerberg once again finds himself in the hot seat at the latest Congressional hearing on the latest revelation of new media malpractice, the data-powered virtual mogul thing has gotten out of hand.

The sheen of digital Pollyanna-ism is nowadays distressed, as one would say in the high-end frame finish business. The sparkly veneer is weathered, in other words, and we notice nicks, dings, pockmarks and other signs of wear and tear. The substrates are poking through the presentation coating. Or, we can use another metaphor, closer in meaning to kitsch. As the folks would put it, the digital age is a mixed bag. Today at my gym, in the locker room, an elderly fella was doing a long bit on 1-Hour Martinizing. What is it? he wondered. I mentioned that in my West Virginia hometown we had one that had been there as long as I could remember, and was still there, as far as I knew. I decided after I got dressed to Google it, and found a Wikipedia entry that filled me in on the droll history of 1-Hour Martinizing, which I shared with the man, whose name is Bruce. He is tall, strong person, who has been a bus driver, a farmer, a landowner, and much else in a rich, varied and very American life. He turned and thanked me for the information before he left, then as he was walking out the door, he said over his shoulder, I miss the mystery in life, I miss when you didn’t know things, and it was a mystery. If you really wanted to know about something, you had to go out of your way to find out. I miss that time.” In the vacuum of at-your-fingertips history, the creative imagination can swell and thrive. So can ignorance and unfounded conspiracy. Life and memories of it are now mostly digital kitsch, at one’s fingertips. What to do, what to Q?

Fifty years since the age of mail, telegrams, and telex machines, this is the era of Google's search function, social media, artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, and facial recognition. But also of misinformation: algorithmic censorship, government secrecy, fake news, WikiLeaks, and QAnon conspiracies. — Laurie Barron, “Information (Today) at Kunsthalle Basel Revisits a 1970s Classic,” Ocula Magazine, June 2021

[OMG, it happened again! Another passage, expertly composed, assembled and illustrated, vanished in the Net ether for eternity! Woe and trepidation! I am recounting the incident now, days after the fact, so the upset has faded. I barely can resuscitate the memory of the gist of those paragraphs. The intricacies of the sentences, the precisely chosen verbiage, the illuminating realizations decomposed with the admission of failure to SAVE, enacted in the closing of the browser window. As if burdened by a heavy stone on my back, I noisily climbed the stairs to my wife Lauren’s office, and informed her of the disaster, exponentially worse than the last. Pouting, I honestly told her I felt like quitting. I didn’t bother to define exactly what I wished to quit. The straw. That broke. The camel’s. Back. She understands me well enough to differentiate most of the time between hyperbole, and its blasé opposite, whatever one might call the deep melancholy that transfixed my consciousness in that instant. I arose from her emerald green, uncomfortable Danish Modern work-couch, got my shit together, ate a snack and drove to the Astoria Aquatic Center for a hot tub and a swim. Upon my return, I sat in my ergonomic workstation chair-on-rollers, and began, once more to type. I am saving like a palpitatious person stricken with a weird form of OCD.]

* I wish to insert a sub-notation on the links to Wikipedia in “Occupy 2020.” The resource itself has attained a level of ubiquity in academic referencing, post-Digital Humanities. I rarely resort to it anymore. Over time one becomes aware of the foibles and value of Wikipedia, its strengths and issues. In composing a MEGAzine, a 4D blog Posithesis, I like to acknowledge Wikipedia, for its promise as an N+1-based generative local to global, personal to communal reciprocal platform. Wikipedia is likely the most well-known and -utilized expression of the “Formule : ‘N+1’” construct as posited in the original Dimensionist Manifesto, which I have written about elsewhere, so will not comment further upon here.

(In the assured, polished manner of the TED Talker, speaking to an engaged audience.)

spindle

dwindle

∞

In the early 2010s, during one of the Arts in Bushwick-organized Bushwick Open Studio tours, Art for Humans established The Society for the Prevention of Creative Obsolescence. For those popular AIB/BOS weekends, I saw an opportunity to perform creative gestures, beyond whichever installation or mini-exhibition one might host. I am ambivalent about contemporary artist open studio tours, (AOSTs) on general principle. AOSTs have become a best practice in cultural management, a creative class attractor, an economic tool for art markets without one, or, as in Bushwick’s case, in proximity to a major market, minus robust retail infrastructure. Since America fosters only a few viable art markets, and a few dozen substantial art districts with sufficient retail concentration, mostly located in major cities, plus a few dozen artsy destination towns for the very wealthy, and as many miscellaneous cultural destinations with an art presence, AOSTs have afforded loosely networked artists, centered around studio complexes where they exist, a means to draw crowds to a short-duration event for introducing art and artist and, speculatively, generating sales. New York City in its boroughs, with its huge population of self-identifying artists (all of us are, nowadays, anyway) - estimates I’ve seen range from around 50- to well over 100000 - now boasts several of the largest, most successful. Austin, TX has an excellent one (AST). The Los Angeles metro area is home to a plethora of them. The first I heard of was the Dixon, NM AOST. An artist showing in a Santa Fe gallery in which I was employed as an installer/salesman handed me a poster he had designed for the event. One on my “bucket list” is the Laguna Beach “Pageant of the Masters,” which is part of a festival. I am a sucker for creative anachronism. I include it on this list to highlight the diversity of arts programming that fits roughly under the rubric of art tour, the studio bit being an option or afterthought. Art crawls, monthly art-nights-out, and so forth, reveal America’s ambivalence to any substantive definition of art. Of course I am ambivalent. My country’s primary concerns are commerce and real estate.

“Chase burning on Miracle Mile (painting by Alex Schaefer, originally **posted** on the Occupy with Art blog, September 22, 2012)”

Creative Obsolescence is a riff on Joseph Schumpeter’s conceptualization Creative Destruction, a/k/a “Schumpeter’s Gale,” which he introduced in 1942 (during WW2) in the brief chapter “The Process of Creative Destruction,” in the book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy:

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.

He adds to “revolutionizes” this notation:

Those revolutions are not strictly incessant; they occur in discrete rushes which are separated from each other by spans of comparative quiet. The process as a whole works incessantly however, in the sense that there always is either revolution or absorption of the results of revolution, both together forming what are known as business cycles.

In the strictest terms I wish to assert in my statement for “Occupy 2021” that Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction is antithetical to Art, if not the artistic enterprise. The misapprehension, really a pretense predicated on a fallacy, has become a bedrock of contemporary economics, that the destructive nature of Capitalism can be construed as a creative phenomenon. The convergence of art, technological industrial monopoly for the globalization of Capital interests is fundamentally a destruction visited upon art and anyone for whom art is essential, a base trait of human existence. Capitalism and Art have no shared values. Capitalism superimposes its valuation systems upon art for venal, short-term gain, with cataclysmic destructive long- and short-term consequences for art. In this, art shares the fate of every other creative person, place and thing in our and on our planet.If this strikes the reader as a radical theoretical position, so be it. I embrace the free radical aesthetic. I have come by it the hard way, the scientific way, through trial and error. My radicalism is also experiential, if not ontological, and analytical, rooted in research and long observation. Moreover, aesthetic free radicalism must arise from the invaluable lessons and thinking of generations of philosophers, for whom art is central interest. This orientation situates art in the vocational net of wisdom, productive of visionary works. The critique and deconstruction of art to theoretical and political ends aside, free radical artists understand the phenomenon of art as dimensional, multidisciplinary and -media, initially devoid of restraint (free) but capable of progress, innovation and adaptation, rudimentary for survival, with quality of life. Our historical moment demands the declaration of free radicalism in art, which entails the legitimate destruction of economic, political myths such as creative destruction.

Original signage for 2014(?) Arts in Bushwick/Bushwick Open Studio tour AFH program, “Society for the Prevention of Creative Obsolescense (sic),” now located in the author’s mid-80s art hanging kit - still active/in use.

The Society for the Prevention of Creative Obsolescence is also a riff on the industrial practice of intentional design decay - planned obsolescence - whereby estimated product failure coincides with the release of its next iteration, the opposite of built-to-last manufacture. The technology industry is notorious for systematically gaming obsolescence to maximize profit models. The BETA release and numbered update have normalized the buggy- glitchiness of networked electronics. Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader rightly attacked manufacturers who caused harm to consumers by selling them deficient or dangerous products (most notoriously, cars). Wikipedia has a fantastic entry on Planned Obsolescence (part of its series on Anti-Consumerism) which outlines a history of PO, as well as variants: contrived durability; prevention of repairs - a big issue in the consumer tech business, but in many other products, too, like cars, tools, domestic appliances, etc.; batteries; perceived obsolescence; systemic obsolescence; programmed obsolescence; software lockout; and legal obsolescence.

However, modern technology and the whole adventure of applying creative science to business have so tremendously increased the productivity of our factories and our fields that the essential economic problem has become one of organizing buyers rather than of stimulating producers. The essential and bitter irony of the present depression lies in the fact that millions of persons are deprived of a satisfactory standard of living at a time when the granaries and warehouses of the world are overstuffed with surplus supplies, which have so broken the price level as to make new production unattractive and unprofitable…I am not advocating the total destruction of anything, with the exception of such things as are outward and useless. To start business going and employ people in the manufacture of things, it would be necessary to destroy such things in the beginning – but for the first time only. After the first sweeping up process necessary to clean away obsolete products in use today, the system would work smoothly in the future, without loss or harm to anybody. — Bernard London, “Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence” (1932)

Planned Obsolescence is a fancy name for the cheapening of everyday living and doing, a symptom of Oligopoly. Oligopoly is a fancy name for unscrupulous, greedy people and the business empires they control, manage and defend, whose malpractices they advocate for or dictate. As a user of products manufactured by companies (e.g., Apple, Toyota, Adobe, and many others), I have had numerous unhappy encounters with PO, in its multitudinous mundane expressions. PO is Standard Operating Procedure in Neoliberal society, necessary in cyclic consumption, the asymmetrical economic power churn spinning from novelty to trash. PO is essential to create mountains of garbage of great diversity, from petro-chemical to biodegradable, for the landfill or ocean disposal industry to handle. The prime beneficiaries of the oligopoly for whom PO functions stupendously well rarely directly contact the wastelands they create, nor do they mingle routinely with those who call the industrial wasteland home. Yet, the industrial oligarchs are frequently celebrated for their solutions for problems caused or worsened by the products by which they have been enriched. Often, such solutions are pegged on consumers, involve behavioral modification, depend on ideological adaptation. Oligopoly-friendly political remedies, as the most recent global ecological conference demonstrates, are impotent.

Manipulated Google Map satellite view of southern West Virginia mountaintop removal, “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #110 (2010)

For twenty years, ArtReview has produced a splashy accounting of the ART WORLD INC®’s (my emphatic branding) Power 100. The industrial ranking of players and trends is an annual snapshot of the “artworld’s irrational ecosystem,” as AR describes it. The editorial process of curating the list is indecipherable, despite the selectors’ efforts to clarify. In 2020 the most powerful person in the art world is not a person, nor an entity even, but instead an obscure, buzzy-sounding designation for NFT (ERC-721), which, among other issues with the AR list, befuddled the sound mind of artnet’s Ben Davis (more on/from Ben below). For our posithetical purposes, we can at least celebrate the power of David Graeber, postmortem, lumped together with David Wengrow (co-authors of The History of Everything, 2021, which as Davis notes, is not an art book) as Thinkers - “thinker” is one of AR’s power-identifiers - at #10. Headline News: THINKERS BREAK INTO THE AR POWER-TEN! Also of posithetical note, EGS faculty Judith Butler shines at #37, for her preeminence as a gender theorist and trans rights advocate. Art-related? The rank criteria is mysterious, arbitrary, subjective, etc. Is art world power - if such a phrase has meaning - qualitative, quantifiable, ineffable, fluid, dynamic, enforceable? Maybe No, Maybe Yes, HaHa (air-kiss)! But, whatever one’s disposition in the Game, the AR list is nothing more or less than attention-grabbing power-leverage in the omni-ambiguous art whatever-it-is, ART WORLD INC®. Hoopla and glitz attach to AR’s numeric nomination of artsy potency, like clay to armature. The cavalier tone of the AR editor’s statement below is encoded artspeak. The scripted pantomime is flip, carefree, disposable, and it masks the a serious message about relevance, which is currency, which is power, or a power-sign. Also, the fiercely competitive nature of the arts and culture industry, which does orbit real political, economic and social Power. Mainly, the AR Power 100 is an obsolescence tracker, and a virtual utility as such, with some real world applications and industrial implications, with respect to, say, pricing and opportunity. And a defining citation for the ol’ CV (Curriculum Vitae). In ART WORLD INC®, who’s in and out, up and down IS the Game. The cost of playing is prohibitive, the listing exclusive, and the duration of prominence fleeting. Whatever-it-is AWINC® is nominally about art, numerically about that Bag ($), but ultimate about Attraction, an Urge, which encodes power in reproduction, without representation.

The artworld has always been a slightly irrational ecosystem in which the various competing (and sometimes intersecting) values of class, race, gender, historical and current hegemonies and conflicts, economics, ideology, national and global politics, and even old-fashioned aesthetics hold more or less sway. Sometimes (as last year) it’s informed by what’s going on in society and the world around it; at other times it seems to be almost hermetically (and wilfully) sealed from all that. Perhaps what’s most interesting as a subject of study is the way in which these various value systems adapt to or change each other. For however much we might seek to identify with or promote one set of values over another (ArtReview, for example – perhaps naively – likes to think that it operates in an artworld that isn’t governed by commerce and exchange values), as time goes by, it’s increasingly difficult to separate, completely, one set of values from another. Then again, perhaps it was always thus. — ArtReview editorial introduction to the 2021 Power 100

The most successful “art stars” for the Oligarch/Oligopoly Class include Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and KAWS, who seems to have superseded and supplanted Murikami in the visible and irrational, opaque or invisible non-ranked rankings. These “artists” practice a very sophisticated form of Creative Obsolescence (CO), which reflects the activities of their patrons, who are to varying degrees “in on the joke,” which is “on” the rest of us. The CO program typically includes: (factory-style) manufacture, supply and distribution; unprincipled (non-) attribution schemes; exploited labor; dubious claims of intellectual property; conflation of art with global industrialization; institutional, academic and media complicity or capture; extensive integration with financial sector speculation (speculators); and more. Not shockingly, Hirst and other CO art stars are testing NFT waters for opportunity. It can be argued that the NFT boom is basically tech-enabled CO. Just as blockchain technology is trending to displace or disrupt cash currency, the NFT art market is an experimental speculative instrument that is being tested for viability as an initially complementary alternative to or - in the more extreme hucksterish narratives, a replacement for - object-based art. From disruption to dissolution the macro-exchange is drifting further toward total exclusivity, perfect control, seamless conversion, cost efficiency, minimized risk and labor, maximized revenue. Intangibles, such as attaching prestige, to elevate the value of virtual ownership, are no problemas for the winning players, who rig the game to win every time. The question, What is (real) art? is made moot in the circumstances of guaranteed returns on investment, since enrichment at any expense is the rule, the only inevitable thing in this false, fake, illusory - NEW! - art domain.

In her 2011 book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a co-founder of MediaCommons, capably maps many of the tensions emerging from new media genres and production models sprouting pre-figuratively in the “Ivory Tower” of Higher Ed, as in the passage (p. 86) below, pertinent to “Occupy 2021, whatever-it-is, and the larger project from which it arises, my doctoral work on the Thing/Not-Thing. Fitzpatrick’s observations are relevant as subtext inasmuch as they accurately describe the perplexing academic scenario I navigated over four decades. Fitzpatrick pinpoints a structural malaise that I have found to be a persistent consternation:

Resistance to allowing scholarly production to take non-textual form runs deeply in many fields, particularly those that have long reinforced the divide between criticism (art history, literature, media studies) and practice (studio art, creative writing, media production). But one of the explicit goals of many media studies programs over the last ten years has been finding a way with the curriculum to bridge the theory-practice divide: to give our production students a rigorously critical standpoint from which to understand what they’re doing when they’re making media; to give our critical studies students a hands-on understanding of how the forms about which they’re writing come into being. And yet it remains only the rare scholar who brings criticism and production together in his or her own work — and for no small reason: faculty hired as conventional scholars are only rarely given credit toward promotion for production work; faculty hired to teach production are not always taken seriously as scholars. In fields such as media studies, we are being forced to recognize, one tenure case at a time, that the means of conducting scholarship is changing, and that the boundary between the “critical” and “creative,” if it exists at all, is arbitrary.

Fitzpatrick also writes eloquently on the complexities of computerized creativity. As an OG geek, I enjoy reveling in the confusion of authorship, materialism, sentience, etc., which remains philosophically unresolved, on the relationship to the machine I use to construct and publish this blog. Fitzpatrick published her text in a moment when a prospective academic model was in play, one whose emerging protocols I was trained in at Claremont Graduate University for my Masters courses, particularly Arts Management at the Drucker school. Meanwhile, Fitzpatrick was formulating her thesis across campus at Pomona College, one of the consortium of celebrated academies located in Claremont. Digital Humanities advocates were at the time making great headway in creating contiguous remedies for the intersection of “Old” and “New” academia, which ranged from browser-based tools to systemic and institutional reformation (e.g., Zotero). It was a dynamic moment, that yielded realization and reevaluation about the interlinked projects of learning and expression, practice and theory, within the field of pedantic technology for the 21st Century. Much of the discourse revolved around the questions of how to- or how much- of the “historical” academy should be brought forward into a future, visionary version. The intervening decade (2011-2021) has seen heavy revision to the discourse, with shifts into areas of contention that were less prominent then than now, such as racial and sexual/gender representation.

On the next page (p. 87), she continues:

But there’s something more…I made a number of claims about the significance for the process of academic writing of the technological shift from the typewriter to word processor. However, that shift changed not only whose hands were on the keyboard, as well as the ways the thoughts that wind up in our texts come together, but also the very thing we wind up producing. A mildly tendentious example, perhaps, but I think a significant one: rather than putting ink onto paper, when my finger strike the keys, I’m putting pixels onto a screen — and it cannot be said clearly enough, the pixels on the screen are not my document, as anyone who has experienced a major word processor crash can attest.

Sent by friends + collectors Ann & Claire, from their adorable pad in Pittsburgh, PA. They acquired the PJM Pattern Series painting (Dr. Martin's ink & Golden/Guerra acrylic, center right) when we were neighbors in Bushwick.

Fitzpatrick rightly observes the complex activity inherent in computer-based text composition, which is dimensional and complex. The image of the text and meta-text are simultaneous within the perceptual, in the domain of visible cognition, and simultaneously extant as thought or conception being revealed through the mechanical processor. Image and representation are the medium by which thought is encoded and revealed, for the production purpose of sharing (communication, information), as output, but also sharing from the (sensual) mind of the writer to the eyes of the writer and whomever might have real-time access to the writer-user’s desktop/screen. Sensation is indelibly intimate, establishing a creative bond between computer and writer-user, which remains a unique characteristic of this vibrant personal technology. For comparison, consider the next technological development - the podcast, which can be shared as audio or audio/visual output, with an end-user; or the next, an advanced A/V-capable communications tool like ZOOM. Also, the text-only mini-share variation, like Twitter, which intensifies by reduction of the limited thought-packet (e.g., 140+ characters or whatever), which can then be daisy-chained into a string of messages to a designated set of “followers.” In the tweet-o-sphere, the consecutive or serial appearance of any thesis is compounded by the platform-as-framing-device, with its own programming and protocols. To some degree, the peculiar mech-mindfulness Fitzpatrick describes is diluted and diffused into a collective exchange in the thought-processing of reductive social media tools, sometimes with embarrassing results, as when the writer pops off with an unformed, inconsiderate idea, which is promptly witnessed by the community to which the writer-soc.med-publisher is networked:

The image of my document on the screen of my computer is only a representation, and the text that I am actually creating as I type does not, in fact, look anything like it, or like the version that finally emerges from my printer. The document that is produced from this typing is produced only with the mediation of a computer program, which translates my typing into a code that very, very few of us will ever see (except in the case of a rather unfortunate accident) and that even fewer of us could read. On some level, of course, we all know this, though we’re ordinarily exposed to the layers of code beneath the screen’s representations only in moments of crisis; computers that are functioning the way we want do so invisibly, translating what we write into something else in order to store that information, and retranslating it in order to show it back to us, whether on screen or in print.

Fitzpatrick dials in on the collaborative nature of the human-computer production in composition. The reminder that the computer is a machine must be emphasized, but the relationship is complicated by software-as-intermediary, because of the invisible linkage to the coder, without whose technical expertise the text writer’s project remains impractical, or must be relegated to an “analog” device, e.g., pen/pencil and paper or typewriter. Fitzpatrick suggests in summation a more visible form of creative collaboration between writer and coder, which could simply involve co-presentation or parallel collation, for instance:

It’s important to remain cognizant of this process of translation, because the computer is in some very material sense cowriting with us, a fact that presents us with the possibility that we might begin to look under the hood of the machine, to think about its codes as another mode of writing, and to about how we might use those codes as an explicit part of our production.

Alas, over that short decade since the publication of Planned Obsolescence, a lot has changed. Digital Humanities is pretty much obsolete, as an academic conversion movement. Post-COVID, the Academy, as such, is under significant duress. The political, economic and social trends that were already compromising and threatening the future of the academy, prior to the pandemic, have left the higher educational system on the verge of collapse, at least in terms of credibility. Among these trends: Skyrocketing tuition, student loan debt, remote learning due to the pandemic, increasing political and social polarization, downward pressures on faculty by increasingly powerful administrators, donors and boards, etc. Combined, Higher Learning, like the entire domain of education, is beset systematically, and virtuality is only one of many externalities. The Planned Obsolescence about which Fitzpatrick writes is a functionally different phenomenon from the PO engendered by Taylorism, GM’s version, or the kind engendered by Christine and J.G. Frederick in the 1920s. Nevertheless their managerial roots intertwine, and at each nexus is the schism between techne and episteme. The trend toward converting education into a cash cow for Big Business oligarchy is the most ponderous force affecting the field.

(In the manner of a V-log presenter, who rarely glances at the camera, while reciting from a script.)

luminescent

∞

In the immediate aftermath of Occupy, I experienced an existential crisis, which I soon discovered was fairly common among Occupiers. Through Occupy with Art, the Occupational Art School, Good Faith Space, Novads (from whom this URL + site was named), and other projects, I sought to extend the free radical movement through community networking or work-netting. I continued to exhibit my art in excellent retail galleries like SLAG Contemporary and David Lusk Gallery in Nashville. Assuming a typical Dark Matter profile, I participated in NYC panels, attended lectures and openings, visited museums and galleries and maintained a vibrant network of connections with artists, writers, performers and academics. OWS, however, had changed my understanding of most everything art-related, cultural, social, political, economic… In short my previous worldview had been made obsolete by the Occupation, and what happened to it, or what was done to it. I had to come to terms with it. My thinking underwent a substantial, if not total reformation. I was forced to reconsider, perhaps for the first time in my adult life, the precepts upon which my perceptual and aesthetic foundations had been laid. Basic assumptions about America and the world, History, money, democracy, power, freedom, technology, exchange, force, necessity, ideas, themselves, memories, etc., required a thorough “look under the hood,” as Fitzpatrick put it. The evaluation is ongoing, but I think most of the “heavy lifting” is behind me.

Post-Occupy, my opportunities in art world establishment channels dried up. Facing the professional artist abyss, I resorted to techniques developed parallel to my object-oriented art practice, since the mid-90s. The labor involved production of prototypical conceptual art, which was inherently obsolete or in some aspect impossible to productively manifest outside virtual media. These artworks were tactical, gestural and could be quietly confrontational. They were by definition unconventional. My lifelong ambition to succeed as an artist in the Big Apple had been gravely damaged by my radical activities. Rejected from the visible art scene on political, economic and ideological grounds, I shifted to a program of serious play. AFH projects from this period included KYSP (Kill Your Smart Phone), Selfie, Artist Zoo, and The Society for the Prevention of Creative Obsolescence. Such endeavors did not contradict ongoing collaborations with other post-Occupiers. The approach was nuanced. Presence seemed important, as did unpredictability and chaos, as means to disguise intent. I shifted from trolling corporate targets in social media to trolling Q&As at events like CAA Conference, PEN talks, Sotheby’s (Institute of Art) panels, or presentations at Cooper Union, NYPL, NYU (Hemispheric Institute), the Brooklyn Book Fair, etc. Because of my well-constructed profile, I was invited to all these things, but at the events my skin wore thin, whenever I opened my mouth. The rebuttals got testier. Eventually I took a friend’s advice and reduced my appearances to a bi-annual schedule, in the interests of stress-reduction and anger management. My performances were being mistakenly construed as real, but disruptive, when they were only “art.” I mapped the contours of my blacklisting by a dimensional approach, which involved submitting dozens of professional applications, and whenever possible, using contacts within the bodies or businesses to which I applied to discover the circumstances of my near-total record of rejection. I had been fortunate, previous to OWS, to have enjoyed enough professional success, production experience and network affiliations to be able to distinguish artificial obstacles from reasoned inadequacy, e.g., lack of- or too much experience for the position, mismatched cost/productivity expectations of/for the hire, managerial concerns about personality defects, ageism and similar excuses for “bad fits,” etc. I worked with high-performing technicians to analyze and where possible correct the virtual destruction visited upon the AFH platform, consequent to my Occupy involvements. Management pretensions of objectivity became increasingly, subjectively, irritating. For me, the work of Kafka became more literal, non-fictional, horrible.

Daniel Beatty Garcia: In your work this incomprehension in the face of the nonhuman world is the nexus between horror and philosophy.
Eugene Thacker: There’s a synergy between that kind of cosmic horror and certain philosophers who also explore the limits of our understanding. When we think about philosophy we usually think about some sort of picture of the world, and when we think about philosophers, we think about a person who knows, and who’s going to tell us how to live our lives and how to exist in the world and so on. But some philosophers are more interested in asking questions than giving answers, and finding compelling ways to articulate confusion. — MONSTROUS THOUGHTS: Philosopher Eugene Thacker on the “New Golden Age of Horror,” 032c (July 16, 2019)

Most importantly I tried my best not to personalize my enforced redundancy. No matter how much effort I applied, I had to admit there would be no straightforward, linear, advancement on the career path I had been traversing for nigh twenty years. The gates had been shut and would not re-open. My trajectory would have to be adaptive, circuitous, oblique. Was this a new development? Not so much, but the stakes felt higher. My Occupation had made my occupation untenable, and I resorted to responsive asymmetry. I experimented with multiple configurations of virtual/actual production, arrayed on intersecting multi-dimensional grids or networks, seeking communities for whom my Occupier resume was either an asset or at least not a liability. Some of these attempts met with a modicum of success, but that term (success) was now relative in a way it hadn’t been before. I resolved not to be overwhelmed with bitterness over the harsh facts of Occupy’s demise, and those who cynically skipped through the ruins of the movement, whose fortunes were made by staying quiet throughout the uprising, affirming their affinity with the “winning” side, or worst of all, those who used Occupy as a professional springboard. I had to take a look at the principles in victory and defeat, and what I learned about people I have yet to unlearn. My regard for the people, particularly for the people I believed art was for, had been dealt a devastating blow. The most important lesson I learned, though - and this has to do with obsolescence and the radical distinction between humans and machines - unlike a widget, I could refuse to be made obsolete. By any means available, I could resist enforced or any other kind of obsolescence, except one: physical aging, which is its natural analog… Or to be more nuanced on a touchy subject, I could resist or deny aging, but the biology is conclusive. I must age and my body eventually dies, if it is not killed in the meantime.

Actual phone, as described in the introductory prospectus for “Kill Your Smart Phone [KYSP] (Photo: LULA)

My refutation of obsolescence centered the next steps in the strategic progression. I reformulated my approach to selling art, looking toward the next generations of art collectors. I experimented with various new online art marketplaces, notifications for which seemed to cascade through my inbox and feeds hourly. AFH first offered PJM art online on ETSY circa 2001, and with Saatchi, when it launched, then Artsy in its first wave, and others, with little or no response. We conceived of and tested our own virtual sales platforms, but none of these replaced or displaced person-to-person sales, either direct or through dealers and galleries. Back then, buyers and sellers were reticent to purchase stuff online, generally, and art especially. Amazon changed everything. As the virtual sales behemoth consumed vast portions of the Net-based retail space, consumer comfort levels improved incrementally. Finally, the conversion from real world to virtual shopping escalated toward a game-changer, the tipping point, during the pandemic. The art world was very slow to adapt, but today most major outlets have a legitimate web-sales program. Outside the structurally established hybrid art business, and the now-technologically-refined top-tier exchanges for all kinds of cultural production, including “art,” there are a host of specialty platforms focused on specific consumer demographics. I scanned and sorted through a host of early options (including Kevin McCoy’s blockchain project, shortly after its launch), and, after trying some, stepped away from the domain, choosing to maintain only our store at Good Faith Space. Even before NFTs became the Next Big Thing, the disjuncture between Art and whatever-it-is, virtualized art is in my estimation still a problem of critical insufficiency on the virtual side of things. One positive outcome of the COVID-19 global epidemic is the unmasking of this insufficiency. My first priority as an artist is to create art for humans - not machines or any other thing. Period. Which is out of step with what’s going on with AWINC®.

When things are confused and confusing, it can help to survey and scan the domain and gather a few quality perspectives. Timing is important. You have to know your go-to sources. One of the best analyses of the whatever-it-is phenomenon is McKenzie Wark’s “Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative,” which e-flux published in 2016 (Issue #77, November). She begins by framing one of the key issues thusly:

Let’s start with this paradox. Art is about rarity, about things that are unique and special and cannot be duplicated. And yet the technologies of our time are all about duplication, copies, about information that is not really special at all. At first, it might appear that the traditional form of art is obsolete. If it has value, it is as something from a past way of life, before information technology took over. But actually, what appears to be happening is stranger than that. Let’s look at some of the special ways in which art as rarity interacts now in novel ways with information as plenty, producing some rather striking opportunities to create value.

CONTENT: Jessica & Friend, Nashville 2001

She goes on to sketch the key connections among a matrix of factors which pose in aggregate an existential crisis for artists and art in the post-contemporary scenario. Wark lucidly explains the interplay of derivatives and simulations, a gamed which becomes very complicated in a few moves, then she draws out the appropriate associations, whether economic or theoretical. To get to the core, she dissects the parts, a progressive, if clinical, approach for aesthetic/economic/technical deconstruction. Wark concludes:

So in short, I think what is most interesting about the relation between art and information is the reciprocal relation between art as rarity and information as ubiquity. It turns out that ubiquity can be a kind of distributed provenance, of which the artwork itself is the derivative. The artwork is then ideally a portfolio of different kinds of simulated value, the mixture of which can be a long-term hedge against the risks of various kinds of simulated value falling—such as the revealing of the name of a hidden artist, or the decline of the intellectual discourse on which the work depended, or the artist falling into banality and overproduction.

In late 2015 I ceased art production and devoted myself to doctoral work on the dissertation, the thesis of which would ultimately become A Thing [There Is No Such Thing]. In the course of writing and illustrating the 700+ page text by hand over eighteen months, I continued to explore the in-flux field of art, with an eye toward the hybridization (virtual/actual) of art, through parallels, primarily economic-aesthetic, unfolding in conjunction with macro-, global or universal changes over time. The picture that began to emerge was a vision of the future for art, based on the study of patterns recognizable at all levels of exchange. Roughly, the future for art would be a conglomerate for the top tier transactions now conducted through the Big Enterprises, such as Gagosian, Pace, Hauser & Wirth, Lehman-Maupin, Perrotin, David Zwirner, White Cube, et al., and the worldwide network of art fairs. Art fairs would consolidate into a single network, with subsidiaries and constellations. The network of annualized expositions would continue to exist as a syndicate of affiliates (like US college football bowl games) with corporate sponsors. Museums would adhere to this model, with a few exceptions, perhaps, in the case of the NY Metropolitan, the Pompidou, the Tate and a few others. China will probably its own mirror version of this system, which will eventually be subsumed, consumed or enjoined to the West’s. Auction houses will continue to lead the secondary market, but eventually a single entity will acquire and conjoin all of them, under one ownership entity. Amazon will supersede all these exchanges, and at last monopolize the global marketplace small-to-large.

Fletcher Liegerot performing in "Artist Zoo" > Arts in Bushwick/Bushwick Open Studios (2014) in AFHstudioBK

The reduction of aesthetics to subservience of this whatever-you-call-it has in great measure already happened. The NGO support systems - the foundations, the art-orgs, the non-profits, etc. - will continue with superficial autonomy, but their reliance on corporate/elite patronage will govern their productive capacity, which limits the function of these entities to the effectiveness of the tax breaks they provide their well-heeled benefactors. They too at last will be integrated into the approved hierarchy, one by one, or they well disappear. The rich have a panoply of implements to evade or avoid taxation, as we learned through leaks and investigative journalism (see the Panama and Pandora Papers). State-sponsored art programs and their brick-and-mortar infrastructure will suffer the fate of the states, themselves. Amazon, or whatever banal name it acquires (i.e., Alphabet or META), when it merges with Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, plus the anagram corporations and agencies i.e., ATT, IBM, CIA) into the singular global power, with or without China, will make the State obsolete, will be the single state dominating the human population, using acquired force, surveillance, imprisonment and all other means to maintain its power. The most powerful players will dedicate themselves to ventures like off-worlding and immortalizing themselves through bio-technology, etc. Art will be only one luxury asset they enjoy. Star artists will cycle like production auto vehicles do, which is predominantly the case already. Art trading will continue to be the risk-minimal or rigged speculation it is already, at the art industry pinnacle. The rest of the lower-case art industry will cater to order-fulfillment for popular tastes, which is to say, follow the consumption models that exist for rugs and shoes.

(In the manner of a poet giving a reading at a coffee house or local.)

needle

No-one would listen to his theories: no-one was interested in art. The young men in the college regarded art as a continental vice and they said in effect, “If we must have art are there not enough subjects in Holy Writ?” — for an artist with them was a man who painted pictures. It was a bad sign for a young man to show interest in anything but his examinations or his prospective 'job.’ It was all very well to be able to talk about it but really art was all ‘rot’: besides it was probably immoral; they knew (or, at least, they had heard) about studios. They didn’t want that kind of thing in their country. Talk about beauty, talk about rhythms, talk about esthetic — they knew what all the fine talk covered. One day a big countrified student came over to Stephen and asked:
— Tell us, aren’t you an artist?
Stephen gazed at the idea-proof young man, without answering.
— Because if you are why don’t you wear your hair long?
A few bystanders laughed at this and Stephen wondered for which of the learned professions the young man's father designed him. -- (p. 34,) James Joyce, Stephen Hero, manuscript published after the author’s death, 1944

(In the manner of a mid-career lecturer at University, with slideshow.)

finesse

∞

What is to become of us artists? It is facile to say that almost all our prospects are grim, but this is true is on a number of levels, demonstrable in a range of metrics, readily available through the art industrial media (e.g., Artnet news). Disengagement remains the first option, which is always true. The concept of an artist strike is clumsy and comical, readily evoking the “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…” reposte, unless the artist-striker is positioned to draw attention to the stand. However, dismissing the tactic outright ignore the studio artist production discipline of intentional isolation, in order to maximize focus in labor and thought. As much as the practical aspects of artist isolation have been fashioned into the butt of cliche, the non-artist understanding of its (isolation’s) necessity for art excellence is rooted in fear of art, its mystery, its unknowns, and its polyvalent potential. The invisible or socially camouflaged artist playing the art historical long game has enough precedence, the current revival for female (e.g., Hilda af Klint), BIPOC, LGBT+ and other identity-artists - not-White-Euro-Male-Hetero - is the preeminent push currently and proof of point. The future of the artist is being designed before our eyes, right now, and along with it, art’s future definition, or continued de-definition.

***Matterhorn Project***: "IN GOD WE TRUST" (Bushwick - Livin' the Dream!) ~ October, 2014

The terms art and artist are already nearly completely fungible in the popular imagination. Art amounts to whatever one does or makes to which one attaches feelings like pride and accomplishment, or anything one does or makes that is not otherwise categorizable. For Big A art, art is whatever one of that tiny club deems it, or buys as art, and what the super-rich art club AWINC® collectively accepts as art. An artist is who such a one or collective of them determines to be an artist. The procedure for minting A-list artists is as transparent as cryptocurrency. An authoritative purveyor can determine someone to be a viable artist, provided the collector class can be convinced. Some weight is still given to the opinions of the few remaining celebrity critics, like Saltz and Smith, but that’s soon over. The link between AWINC® and cryptocurrency is a curious one. The art-NFT (Non-Fungible-Token) boom-craze is loudly touted by advocates as a bonafide future for art and artist. My friend, former ArtInfo editor, current artnet Editor-at-Large Ben Davis has been following the phenomenon, and has yet to make up his mind about NFTs, after attending the sold-out NFT.NYC 2021 conference. He writes:

On the one hand, I find it indisputable that the NFT/crypto-art space is heavily driven by FOMO, hype, get-rich-quick fantasies, strategic double-speak, and fake-it-til-you-make-it auto-hypnosis. On the other hand, much of the same applies to the worst of the “traditional” art world. Which of the two has the deeper deep end or the shallower shallow end is hard to say…
Above all, I left the three days of events during the conference convinced that the NFT-powered “Web 3” is coming. It’s not something you are going to escape hearing more about, because huge forces are propelling it: a “take-back-the-web” backlash against the current internet order, which in the 20 years since Napster, has destroyed the commercial basis for most creative careers; some genuine youth cultural foment from digital natives exuberant to see memes and gifs* valued; the worldwide displacement of attention into online spaces that came with last year’s Covid quarantine; and, above all, financial capital’s desperate, win-at-any-cost hunt to invent new avenues of return in an economy that has been leeched of plausible investment opportunities by more than a decade of near-zero interest rates and global stagnation.

*[Follow the internal link to a June 2021 Guardian article by Sirin Kale, “NFTs and me: meet the people trying to sell their memes for millions,” which provides helpful context for art-NFT discussion, within the broader domain of online culture and economics.]

Screen grab of AFH **Not-an-Artist** (NAA) Tumblr (April 1, 2014)

I used to cite Greg Sholette’s excellent book Dark Matter as a discursive basis, a point of origin, for conversation on art economy, specifically labor, but much has changed since its publication in 2011. The pandemic has deeply impacted art workers, who suffered disproportionately compared to other economic sectors, through job loss or layoffs, temporary workplace shutdowns and permanent closures. Good benefits are a rarity in the art business, usually only reserved for executive administration and owners. Those in art-related labor services infected by COVID-19 in the US had to face added horrors atop the illness, as did the population in general, navigating the already broken, now overwhelmed, for-profit health care system. I also used to cite the Handbook on the Economics of Art and Culture, Volume 1 particularly a study breaking down the answer to the question commonly posed by snarky art tourists and baffled wannabe art pros, “Is this how you make a living?” or, for the latter cohort, “How can you make a living doing this?” [The short answer would be, “Whatever it takes”]:

Studies of artistic occupations show how artists can be induced to face the constraints of a rationed labor market and how they learn to manage risky careers. Pioneering empirical research by Baumol and Bowen (1966) found that artists may improve their economic situation in three main ways which are not incompatible and may be combined: artists can be supported by private sources (working spouse, family or friends) or by public sources (subsidies, grants and commissions from the state, sponsorship from foundations or corporations, and other transfer income from social and unemployment insurance); they can work in cooperative-like associations by pooling and sharing their income and by design a sort of mutual insurance scheme; and finally they can hold multiple jobs. — P.M. Menger, “Managing the risks of the trade,” Ch. 22, “Artistic Labor Markets,” HotEoAaC, p. 794

Post-Occupy, post-pandemic, Menger’s framing of the asymmetry inherent in the plight of the professional,semi-pro or struggling, aspirational artist is tone-deaf. Top-down inducements, exhortation of careerism, acknowledgement and acceptance of constraints and rationing, hawking self-management - the legitimacy of these admonishments largely expired during the Crash of 2007-8 and through the Great Recession. The onset of Corona Virus added new layers of art-labor disenfranchisement. The definition of art and art-related work as non-essential condemned the sector to the margins. Cultural professions on the whole suffered the strains of the dramatically precarious. If we examine the macroeconomic topology for the arts since 1966, when Baumol and Bowen did their research, the ascribed techniques for artist survival mapped in HotEoAaC are mythical. Since the mid60s, the cost of living for 99%ers (including almost all artists) has skyrocketed. The pay flat-lined.

It was a reaction to this economic reality, interwoven with the ideological scarcity principles predominant in AWINC®, which drove artists like myself to collectivize (see DDDD and 01, AFH, et al.). The phenomenon had its precursors, but the shape of the neo-collective movement is inter-dimensional, extending across and within blurring sectors (economic, social, governmental). The shape of these collective formations fluctuates internally and externally. In some aspects, the neo-collectives mimic corporations, while maintaining viability for individual accomplishment within their frameworks, and beyond them. In an artnet interview, two of the co-founders of Meow Wolf gush about the messiness of the configuration, and the conflicts presented within the quasi-art construct. This conversation represents a mindset that deflates other models of art industry and production, including the definitions of success:

Do you think you will ever have a Meow Wolf museum show?
Di Ianni: Maybe!
King: If the right situation presents itself, yeah. Right after the house opened, I was working the front desk and a woman came in and said, “I’m from the Art Institute of Chicago.” I was like, “Oh sweet, let us know what you think.” And she literally went in and five minutes later she walked out of the exhibition, threw her hands in the air, exclaimed across the entire lobby, “Where’s all the art?” and walked out.
That is some people’s mindset, right? They see what we are doing as not being aligned with everything they personally believe to be art. And that’s totally fine. Art is subjective. You don’t have to think what we’re doing is art. When I sit in fucking meetings and I look at spreadsheets, I don’t even always think what we are doing is art, right?
Our intention purely is to be expressive of our condition and our thoughts and the times that we live in, and that resonates to me in the way that art has always done throughout history.
Di Ianni: We were talking earlier about what happens when you leave this place. If we can get somebody to look at a piece of trash differently, or think differently about what a parking meter does, or like, solve climate change, that’s all part of the same kind of process of activating your imagination and connecting to the human condition that I think maybe is art.
If everybody doesn’t connect to that, if people need a white cube gallery to call it art, that’s fine. And there’s a place for that. I’m not anti-art world.
King: Neither am I!
Di Ianni: It’s just nuanced, right? There’s such a tendency to have black and white conversations about stuff, but it’s not so dualistic. The whole thing is an art project—the organization, the company, the business, the relationship with the union. This is what we do. It’s all part of the art project. — “‘The Whole Thing Is an Art Project’: Meow Wolf Cofounders Explain the Grand Plan Behind Their Wildly Popular Immersive Art Universe” by Sarah Coscone for artnet (October 20, 2021)

The Meow Wolf model is no substitute, however, for a good national art program, or a fair and democratic art economy. It is a creative band-aid, at the systems level. On November 27, 2021, Truthout published an excellent report entitled “A Unionization Wave Is Reshaping Museums and Cultural Institutions Across the US,” compiled by Tyler Walicek that surveys the pre- and post-COVID conditions for arts laborers, and their continuing efforts to unionize against managerial exploitation. Those readers who know the arts and culture business will not be shocked to learn that wealthy and powerful trustees and donors, boards and “adminions” typically push back internally against such movements, despite their public-facing liberalism. The uncertainty caused by confused systemic response to the pandemic exacerbated already strained conditions in the arts and cultural fields, even in the consumer portable industries, especially those that relied heavily on in-person attendance for revenue. Gallery and museum programs were stalled or upended. Concerts, exhibitions, live performance of all types, lectures and other events were postponed or cancelled. These revenue streams heretofore provisioned artists in their individual amateur and professional pursuits. Survival became the first priority for many. The old adage, “You can’t eat art,” became relevant again on a massive scale, in places and for people that had not known such privation before.

(In the manner of a poetry reading or a monologue for small stage, with projections and live music.)

extenuate

∞

Oddly, due to my post-OWS challenges, I was tuned for the travails caused by COVID-19, including the layered general panic. I had been producing online exhibits, mostly in social media from 2015, a continuation of my AFH-based digitial practice dating to 2001. The emergence of Instagram as an influential content-sharing platform was suited to the program. The content was cross-pollinated, via the artforhumans.com main site, several Squarespace CMS portals, including this one, Facebook, Twitter, Medium and sparsely in other forums and virtual content-visibility outlets, testing the new topography for “reach” by - Ew! - “exposure.” To my chagrin, I found that the web had been re-engineered to foil autonomous or independent creative producers, usually through re-jiggered algorithms over which I and the masses of independent Users had little or no influence. This was especially extreme in soc.med, on Facebook and Twitter. The proliferation of SEO-optimized “Power Users,” predominantly corporate sellers and domaineers, the commercialization of the Web by Google’s advertising regime, and other industrial developments for the online economy driven by both data-driven targeted marketing objectives and its “evil twin” — market-share acquisition — bode ill for my campaign concept. Web-based business for art and ideas folds into the attention economy online, outside the nascent Net.art exchanges used by already-established entities with brick-and-mortar venues, which now includes most galleries that include art fairs in their portfolios. “Blue chip” galleries, especially the Bigs, were scrambling to construct virtual mirrors with mercantile capacity. The infinite Web was shrinking fast.

The consolidation of power over the Internet in the US has been a hybrid private-public enterprise, accelerating since 9/11. The Trump FCC, headed by industry agent Ajit Pai, broke web neutrality (In July of 2021, POTUS Biden signed an executive order to reverse the FCC edict). The progression toward monopolistic consolidation is in many of its facets made opaque, largely because of the secrecy with which governmental agencies and the hugely influential communications, media and technology corporations operate. Clearly however the power players are in cahoots, and their interplay is conducted through massive, and massively funded lobbying machines with media promotion capacity. The syndicate is like a big ball made of rubber bands. Web commerce, we know as a result of whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations and from other sources, has been a front for surveillance and information-gathering by Big Data and the Intelligence community. Their relationship is collaborative, dependent and mutually beneficial, to the detriment of democracy, in defense of Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties for the American citizenry. How is it possible to mesh the reality of the Net today with the visionary Net its founders and pioneers conceived? Is the web anyplace for art?:

For a brief historical moment, humanity has flown high like Icarus, on a vulnerable first-generation Internet platform for securing and using distributed ideas, arts, media, science, commerce, and machines — promising brilliant futures such as a network of things, autonomous personalized services, and immersive media. But now our first generation Internet, built on a fragile global network of vulnerable codes, is failing, like the wings of Icarus, from too close an encounter with a triple shock: A massive data stalker economy built on mining of terabytes of personal data; Ubiquitous criminal penetration of financial and identity networks, both on our devices and in the cloud; Pervasive state intruders at all levels and at every encrypted hardware and software node.*

*[“Inventing a New Internet: Learning from Icarus; An invitation to rethink the Second Curve Internet, by Mike LIebhold IFTF Distinguished Fellow, cited by Bruce Sterling (3/28/2014), WIRED Magazine (Dead Media Beat/Beyond the Beyond blog)]

Transmediale #157, animation still, 2011

The conundrum of formulating short- and long-term creative goals in the latter 2010s increasingly entailed lateral, oblique and reactive measures. One had to accept the demise of the Internet as a free speech zone for autonomous artistic enterprise, as the mature commercial web entrenched its dominance of the technology and tech-enabled cultural exchange. The chilling effect of systemic surveillance became a palpable, prevailing presence in online communications, a monumental data net which spread to offline interactions all-directionally, as strategic TIA (Total Information Awareness) normalized. The meaning of Net has changed fundamentally — away from free electronic network for exchange to the monetized, co-opted, data Hoover, spy tool we have now. The surveillance sweep extended to older analog information exchanges. During OWS, and subsequent to its collapse, we learned the mail was no longer a private, hack-safe alternative, that a secret surveillance program gave inspectors and police broad access to our packages and hard-copy correspondence. Through propaganda and alarms, citizens in America were encouraged to alert authorities of any suspicious behavior, whatever that might be, to beat Terror. Instead of loving our neighbors, we were asked to spy on them. The profusion of terrifying mass murders, like the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas, rarely satisfactorily resolved, undermined the Constitutionally ratified urges of citizens’ blithely free-assembling. It also enabled a programmatic switch of focus from foreign-originating terrorism, to domestic terror. Populism was now a dirty word. Patriotism was merged with white privilege and domestic terror in corporate media, blamed on Trumpism, although the roots were far deeper, historical and traceable to both parties’ actions over consecutive administrations. The trend was by no means local, regional or even national. Reactionary movements surged globally, in countries like Panama, Poland, Germany, France, Brazil. Urban centers, including regional ones like Portland and Richmond in the USA, descended into chaos, symptomatic of extreme political polarization, pitting violent ultra-left and -right gangs against one another in the streets. Anti-police animus grew due to infamous cases of excessive force, a euphemism for brutality without just cause, caught on mobile video by bystanders and amplified through social media and clickbait-driven for-profit news feeds and channels. The unrest recognizably incited by for-profit News coverage and the perverse incentives unfettered in social media channels was revealed in documentaries and exposes. “Rabble-rousing,” an old-timey political tool joined at the hip to Rat-fuckery, was updated for the network media age, through algorithms and lack of regulation. Long-simmering feuds and divisions were erupting, elevating civil disintegration to the forefront of (un-)civil mass consciousness. Art was shunted to the margins of all-sided animosity. Meanwhile the stock market, and rampant inequality, like a black hole or algae bloom, burgeoned in numbers and effects, without meaningful encumbrance, sucking up and swallowing the “real economy,” whose syndicates use the excuse of inflation to gouge the dummies (us). Oligarchy and mob rule synthesized gridlock in government. Blatant corruption, fostered in the post-Citizen’s United ethics-free era, swept through every level of the polity.

Typically, it is the materiality of things that gets lost in discussion around digital art…All in all, it is much easier to visualize an alternative art economy than it is to sustain one. Projects often appear robust in the short term, or within a well-defined regional community, but time wears them down. Most importantly, any effort at scaling-up creative challenges to the global art market must ultimately confront the reality of the latter’s powerful reach…Despite the promises of digital art such as NFTs, the vast majority of artists spend considerable time and labor realizing their work in physically plastic, material media - including embodied performance. — Gregory Sholette, “NFT Fever: Is it Time for a Great Refusal 2.0?” Electra (Issue 14, Autumn 2021)

New York City was a powder keg, ready to blow. The City was always a bizarre soup of toxic sludge and glitz, a violent and phantasmagoric wreck, adorned floridly with dirty, legacy, laundered and Stupid Money, siphoned through dark networks of shell companies, exclusive markets, tax havens and obscure financial instruments; a calamity in unceasing motion, exuding the perfume of hatred, the stench of evil and decay, gross excess, neglect and waste; a visual mess so awesomely ugly no defining aesthetic applies, because none is thought out and invested in. The money is in the Fix, the Game, and that means property, assets, cash and the portfolio. Schemes abound. NYC, built on a foundation of slave bones, a tortured grimace set in granite, festering with discord so mighty the ear is fractured upon contact. The screeching subway brakes drown out the howls of broken saints and villains, and the mediocre most of all, who are smashed by the metropolis’s concrete fists and battered to dust. The rats scurry from garbage pile to bin and back again over the bodies of drunks and madmen, destitute, forgotten people destined for grave pits unmarked, after stints at hellholes like Rikers Island. The world’s finest shops sparkle and glow, through panes of industrial glass reinforced with steel, on the grid, monitored by tens of thousands of cameras, armed watchmen on speed dial.

Then, as they sometimes do, the precarious hordes rose up and smashed the barriers and grabbed the things they craved. The glass would be replaced with plywood. The Goods put out of sight, along with the dreams and illusions which they signify. In the final analysis, for all the gems it contains, artifacts and humanity alike, New York City remains forever an abyss for beauty. The anthropomorphic metaphor is a “functional” alcoholic, who maims all it touches, while celebrating each decimation with a drink and a self-congratulatory huzzah. I concur with Henry Miller. It is a rude and foul place, where the courageous are besmirched and heckled at every haunted corner, where blood fills the gutters, and disease lurks in each crevasse and unholy niche. Only the superrich, who dwell high above ghastly streets, over which they circulate in black cars with mercenaries and ex-cops at the wheel, whose most trusted acquaintances are besotted doormen and high-priced whores, who frequent every important art affair and cultural festivity, strutting with their botulistic faces, slumping in velvet chairs behind designer bifocals, peering out from under drooping painted lids… At the last, in low whispers wet with lust unfulfilled, they deign to pronounce judgment on gifts they will never comprehend. Criminality is inbred, the fibrous, calcified, bilious, subdural hematoma in the City’s pulsing brain mass. Its incessant whining critiques are guttural barks, aural blemishes, of no more consequence than an unidentifiable sidewalk stain. Its intellectualism is truth’s antithesis, a distraction from the menace New York sprays upon the world, like vomit, from the mouth of the panhandler croaking at the Opera entrance.

Some of the more interesting contemporary art criticism has grown from Marxist thought where attempts to articulate art’s meaning tie it to a discussion of production, economy, and sociopolitical power structure. Though this line of thinking is compelling, and strikes to the core of something essential to art making, it was also a shadow that I grew up under. It assumes that art’s value lies in its challenge to the establishment, and that in this effort art is always co-opted by the reigning political and economic powers. This was, and is, a very glum vision of art’s function placing it in a position of constant failure. — Jessica Stockholder, Yale Panel: “Powerful Art and Power” (June 1, 2006)*

* Event and essay dating to the ‘00s wartime art boom (see also HERE and HERE), shortly before the Crash and the Great Recession.

***Matterhorn Project***: "This may be worth Something (Your Options)” ~ October, 2014

(In the manner of the panel discussion.)

rupture

∞

After a protracted search of hundreds of possible escape routes, before New York’s cyclic cannibalistic orgy went down, we did what many others did in droves later: we migrated, following in the footsteps of generations of wounded, worried and wanting pilgrims and pioneers; we packed our things and moved across the country. I thought of it as a tactical retreat, from an impending-doom precipice to a relatively safe haven, on the Northwest Coast of Oregon, where the Columbia River meets the Pacific, to Astoria — on the opposite edge of the continent — not the one in Queens. So, we miraculously avoided the NYC uprisings of late teens and ‘20, and the misery of the COVID-infected Big Apple. Much of the intervening three years have been chronicled here, in this very blog, and in AFH Facebook and Instagram portals. As a quizzical disclaimer, without sheepish embellishment, I submit that this artist’s creative flow has been consistent throughout, fluid, as in flux. Sales? The intermediary art world for what I make has mostly collapsed. Practically every hastily concocted plan I made for pro-art viability during the transition between continental edges has failed. My Astoria/PNW vision landed with a plop and deflationary gasps. I did not hit the ground running, and I mean that literally, due to chronic arthritis. It’s been a painful transition, again, literally meant. Throughout my artistic career I’ve had a magical knack for appearing and disappearing correctly, landing in the right place at the right time to POP!, at a fortunate stage of a site-specific evolutionary cycle, gaining momentum, shedding entropy, capitalizing on opportunity, making connections, in the Juice! Following one’s instincts is a perilous chase, and chasing the Muse even more so. I can inventory my relocation scheme’s procedures and evaluate the exertive hypotheses a posteriori. But while the wheels of the vehicle were spinning, and the whole contraption threatened to snap and blow into bits and pieces, we just held on and hoped for the best. No matter what you do, though, you will lose things on the way to a slow or sudden stop at the next destination, or the Crash. Oregon has been an inertia-inflamed slow stop…

The success of practical operations in the past and present period, in a limited field, should be sufficient warrant for the application and investment of capital to a more extended sphere of activity. Observation indicates the approach of those who will apply prompt and incisive measures: then, the wheels of the car of progress will revolve more rapidly: there will be a paucity of population no longer: but the tramp of the coming multitude will be heard and land occupied by thousands of our enlightened and energetic race. — Orvil Dodge, (p. 19) Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties, Or: Heroic Deeds and Thrilling Adventures of the Early Settlers, 1898

The recounting of every foiled plot in the lost schema here is pointless and boring, a ghastly foray into thickets of dark humor. In a month one could scan the scene and grok what’s what and who’s who. Astoria is one of America’s lovely small art towns, with studios, galleries, cafes, shops of unexpected variety and quality, a lovely restored theatre, cinemas and a diversity of excellent restaurants, diners, food trucks, etc. The local college has a good arts program and institutional gallery. There are museums and history centers, ample parks and attractions, and the notable absence of big-box stores, which are across the bridge and up or down the highway a ways, far enough. The local listener-supported radio station is excellent. There is a fine art and craft supply store, hardware stores, a book store, a music shop. The culture and politics are vibrant and healthy. The K-12 public schools are terrific. Commercial associations and others like the VFW, Moose and Elks lodges are well attended. Labor is well represented, with its own clubs and hangouts. There are plenty of bars, and even a strip club, and a roughly equivalent number of churches. The farmer’s market is lively each summer, and throughout the year Astoria and its near-neighbors host many festivities. The county fairground is close by. There are Coast Guard facilities and military bases in the area, and the choppers are not infrequent in the low altitude skies. The traffic on the river is consistent, consisting of huge container ships, barges, naval craft and small craft of many types. The borders dividing nature and man are indistinct. We see eagles, elk, deer and many other critters in the course of a given day. The natural beauty is the dominant feature of the area, and I will not attempt to do it justice in this synopsis, except to say that, having traveled America far and wide, I consider the Pacific Northwest and Northwest Coast to be a jewel of the nation, and this corner of it exceptionally wonderful. Portland and Seattle are not too far distant, and the famous HWY 101 is accessible a few short minutes from our front door. Some pandemic days, the cities, suburbs and big towns feel a million light years distant.

“Wovenform 7-1,” from the Valubl (AFH) Instagram exhibit, 2019

The very strong synthesis that occurred is what now enables us to speak of the contemporary instead of the postmodern. For me, it’s an extremely important distinction. The post- presupposes a continuity between what happened and what is happening today, as if 1968 were something that continued, that pulled modernity toward hypermodernity or postmodernity. But that’s not the case. There was a jump, a division in history, a rupture. — “A Revolutionary Process Never Ends,” Antonio Negri, interviewed by Sylvere Lotringer for Artforum (May 2008)

Perspective, subsequent to translocation, is not effortless. The specter of alienation in the present or from one’s past, haunts reflective accuracy. A workaround lies in rooting through archives for resonant accounts, which illuminate the gaps in one’s historical understanding. Refinement of perception can be a function of hindsight. Revelation can derive from consulting an Oracle, in Time’s reverse gear, an artifact contrived as non-fiction that comes across as a dream sequence fiction. “A Revolutionary Process Never Ends” served as just such an instrument, in my search for consequence in pastoral or provincial circumstance, as the newly transplanted Oregonian. In another time and world, parallel to this one, Lotringer and Negri present a master class on the European revolutionary organism in a conversation that could be situated in a nice cafe, well-appointed office or loft, nostalgically lit and dense with smoke and the perfume of espresso and strong tea. After reading hundreds of books and articles, attending countless lectures, spending hours in intense discussions pro and con, on content, context and contingency, one discovers, happens upon, a trove of secrets to illuminate wide territories of one’s own ignorance or misapprehension. The discovery is a blade that slices through the dense fog enshrouding one’s visionary history. Suddenly a new map with many paths can be tracked. Speaking of Peter Watkins’s film La Commune (Paris, 1871), Negri says, “The only fictive element in the film is the presence of television. So it’s the old and the new. It’s the old rebellion re-experienced in an entirely new form, because a revolutionary process is never over.” Then - are you picturing this? — the two men go on to unpack the relationships among revolutions, subjectively and objectively simultaneously as temporal phenomena networked in a distinct but not autonomous dimension for comparison, correlation and, finally cohesion. The process is synthetic, but its basis is organic. These titans build a world of memory as vivid as any on Apple +.

And that, sadly, is all their great conversation is: a memorial to sequential loss. The context and subtext extend from a singular, experiential root. The epistemiological expression arises from the subsummation of technicity in any case. The historical focus varies, but the message is the medium. The feeling is the binary opposite of sensation. The portent is the collapse of a known future that held the more equitable promise, displaced by falsity, disguised as “only temporary.” Nobody put it better than F.A.T.:

Ten years separate the talk given by Frank Rieger and Rop Gonggrijp at the 2005 Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin and the one given by Peter Sunde of Piratbyrån and The Pirate Bay at Transmediale in the same city in 2015, but their message is the same --- we lost. We, who believed the Internet could change society, that technology could take other paths than surveillance, centralization and consumerism. The battle is lost and the juggernaut of the security industry, power and capital has been unable to stop.

What is also lost is the potential of the now so popular artistic hacking practices at a time when the tech industry on the one hand supersedes any artistic attempt at parody of it when they make themselves look like idiots in more extravagant ways every day and on the other hand continues to be able to incorporate critic and creativity to make itself stronger.

Realizing that you lost can be a powerful thing both depressing and liberating.

There are different reactions to the realization that you lost. The first impulse is to give up. Giving up leads to cynicism, disconnection from social contexts or postponing any action until you "figured things out". Needless to say this is a dark path. But equally bad is denial of loss. Believing that if you just keep going, the next time you will really show them. It's just around the corner, just a few more projects away. Just have to try a little harder next time. The longer time passes the more the feeling that it won't happen keeps creeping up on you. The new projects and ideas seem just a little bit more hollow than the last ones. You should have stopped already a long time ago.

The more active reaction is to shut down. Determined, proactive, and with intent. There are different ways of shutting down. Piratbyrån burned the file sharing debate in a big book burning when it had run its course. KLF burned a million pounds when they left the music industry. Both The Pirate Bay themselves and their adversaries have been trying to shut it down for years but it keeps being reborn. Only by quiting forcefully before it is too late can a loss be turned into something else than a defeat.

But there is never a good point to shut down. Either you are too early and people think you are making a fuss about nothing and are just destroying the party with your negativity, or you are too late and no one cares anymore. The shutdown becomes a fade away and looses its liberatory powers. You need to shut something down that you still care deeply about. If you can't decide if it is the right thing to do or not, it probably is.

The context of the talk from Chaos Communication Congress of how we lost the war came out of the last great battles for privacy and against biometric identification in a Germany with the cold war still fresh in memory and from the fight against surveillance in a terrorism-frightened Netherlands. In the talk they project forward ten years to 2015. Technological limits for data retention that existed in 2005 are done away with and technical capacities for surveillance are infinite. Yet they also postpone the hope of a new resistance ten years into the future. Maybe in 2015 people have had enough and ten years of capacity building for technological resistance can change society. It is these promises of a large "prosecution of the criminals of the security industry in 2015" that sound the most depressing today. Ten years later we catch up with those predictions in Peter's talk that comes a few months after he came out of prison and his exhaustion from ten years of activism against copyright laws, trade agreements and in the backwaters of massive leaks of information about surveillance that led to absolutely nothing.

It would be unwise to predict ten years into the future again. But one thing is clear, tactics of the last 5 years whether legal, political, activist or artistic have resulted in little progress and have not kept up with the latest control measures. There's no use banging our heads against the wall anymore. Either your head will explode or they will simply open the door and let you in. Either way, no house will come crumbling down. It was as true in 2005 as when Peter says it in 2015. Let's face it, we lost, we all lost.

"We Lost", from F.A.T. GOLD: San Francisco. By Magnus Eriksson and Evan Roth.

Standing in the smoke and ashes of what has been abandoned — and this is the moment Philosophy rescues the all-over narrative, deus ex machina — one surveys the wreckage of aspirations, and clearly can see all the Loss as essential, but only the precessional portion of the Rite of Passage to the next possible world. The Turning: the conclusion of Revolution is an illusion, useful only for the dramatic construct of an end, suited to the constraints of time, a perceptual facet of the crystalline dimension separating being (finite) and becoming (infinite), about which there can be no temporary understanding, for in that liminal space, the mind is unbound and its labors invaluable. There is the Bridge. There is the Column. The Wovenform is a pile of kelp washed upon the beach after a storm. There the forest upon a cliff of water- and wind-battered crumbling stone, shells and soil. The giant River, flooding into the more giant Ocean, upon which float the ships and boats, navigating the torrential waves, and their white crests. We meet the Sailors and Fishermen, casting their nets, dragging up the fish, the crab, and all. In the Town are the hunters, the farmers, the loggers and the Folk, some wise, some stupid, some brutal, some kind, funny, sad, on each day themselves under the Rain, the Mist, which lays like a blanket and paints the land green, or if churned underfoot and -plow, mud-brown, oily. Astoria, our new home, is named after the early American oligarch John Jacob Astor, and his mark on the tiny city is yet visible, beyond the name. Explorers Lewis and Clark also left the impression of their historical passing, at the Dismal Nitch, Cape Disappointment and all round. The Natives and their ghosts are still here, too, acknowledged in words like Chinook, and anyone who knows, knows. The Scandinavians, the Chinese, the Islanders and many other peoples are represented. There are Forts, active and abandoned. The bones of Shipwrecks. Most importantly, there are Dreams, and water is the vehicle for dreaming.

CONTENT: Wartrace Regulators, Nashville 2001

When they were crowded on the narrow ridge, the red shirted fellow in the lead and not more than eight feet from the muzzle of the gun, I applied the fiery end of the rope to the priming. The execution was fearful, at least twelve or thirteen men were killed outright and such a tumbling of scared Indians I never saw before or since. The gun was upset by the recoil; but we never stopped for that but rushed out to them and soon cleared the rock of all live warriors. We counted seventeen dead Indians on the rock and this was the bloody baptism that gave the name of Battle Rock to our old camp at Port Orford on the 10th day of June, 1851. — Orvil Dodge, (pgs. 36-7) Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties, Or: Heroic Deeds and Thrilling Adventures of the Early Settlers, 1898

Ah, the Frontier. The West, again. Pioneer living. Manifest Destiny. …Astoria has proved a sturdy part of the world to wait out the plague. The myriad political, social, economic and cultural conflicts roll up to its edges but do not swamp it. With each passing day the fear of breathing one’s last on a cold and lonely Gotham bed of filthy stone, while desensitized golems stride across one’s expiring body, recedes. There are far less frequent sirens, auto horns and enraged shouts on the Northwest Coast. Upon our arrival, we set a date for a Home Show, and our new residence seemed magically well suited to the occasion, attended by a few handfuls of people. I applied to the local arts residency, for a radio program, inspected potential studio and office spaces, attended openings, visited the cities and met prominent dealers. I quietly extended offers to contribute to arts-related programming for downtown. I tested the viability of web-based projects, such as a podcast. I posted images on social media, hoping to draw the attention of circles of associates, mostly based elsewhere, to leverage concepts of exchange. I began the process of research and actualization. It was different this time, different from before. Or, rather, I had changed. The usual, initially negative, responses from gatekeepers were now enough to dissuade me from going further in these enterprises. I let go of people and ideas more easily than I ever have. I had little interest in community-building, changing hearts or minds, volunteerism, and the like. I brought to the table my experience, know-how, techniques and resources, and if they were not welcomed, I ceased to pursue it any further. I discovered, as one does, that the virtual projection of Astoria and the NWC diverged from the real one. I will refrain from explaining how. Anyway, one does what is within one’s power to do, and it’s the Rule of Substance, inviolable, so there’s no point to cry on it, although a good weep can short-term feel cathartic. I continued to paint and write, and, in a minor-note way, on a limited basis, continued to maintain the AFH portals and networks or at least provision them. I culled contacts and did not seek new ones strenuously. My focus appears to be narrowing.

[From ***Pioneer History of Coos and Curry Counties, Or: Heroic Deeds and Thrilling Adventures of the Early Settlers*** by Orvil Dodge, 1898 (For context; another cringe-inducing historical account is the *Encyclopedia Brittanica* entry for “Northwest Coast Indian” - PJM)]

In the course of the conceptual phase of pre-production, I had settled on “Drift” as the central theme, a term with specific meaning in local fishery vernacular, but other meanings that resonated with new technical and theoretical developments, which were gaining traction in the words I wrote and works I was creating. The 4D VyNIL series of thesis paintings commenced with the Network series, followed by the inversion-y WorkNet. I mentioned “nets” above, and with the assistance of a new local friend and notable figure, Fisher Poet Tom Hilton, I began to weave parallel narratives for the virtual and ancient global technological net-crafts. The third VyNIL series, “Currents, Flow and Reproduction,” re-introduced concerns with which I had been occupied in the early 2000s, in the vein of “growing things,” expressing spiritual practice connected to natural systems, and particularly attuned to sensuality and fertility. The fourth series, “Events,” is one about which I don’t have much to say, yet, and maybe will never have. The subsets in the series, such as “Meta-Elements” and “Nodes,” along with a great many small sketches and exhibit mock-ups add to a vision I have for a grand doctoral production. I made a barter with Jennifer Robbins, a friend since Notre Dame and the person who writes the book on HTML, to help me design a (gorgeous) web page for the Thing thesis. Encouraged by Andy van Roon, one of my earliest supporters in the area of moving image and media, I completed what began as a script for serial television, and manifested as a four-act musical play, entitled “Four Things, Or: The Ballad of Jesse and James.” In my vision, it is produced as a Live Art Event, in a massive hall, partly within a cavernous construction capable of containing four or five distinct sets. The crowd will flow through the complex freely. And, as shared here, I finished the outline for my EGS dissertation, in response to Heidegger’s proposition, “What Is a Thing?” for our generation. I have been busy, and today I feel tired. I am growing old. I am thinking of the October crowd, who are now antiques.

Art World constellations and their fortunes are not fixed. Each star in that firmament has its independent duration and intensity. The rapture of fame and the crush of anonymity are flickers in the celestial story of art. Influence is less a glow than a shade, and as art historians turn their attention to the propitious tally of equivalent preservation or restoration, the golden threads that bind art to us fray, and will inevitably snap, according to Georg Baselitz. Time is not the fourth dimension, it is only one, and as art goes, poorly described and a superfluity to most serious aestheticians. The comic melancholy in aesthetic hindsight derives from the shared root of fashion or style, in the pattern and repetition, and one’s failure to recognize them in time to save embarrassment or worse. In 1982, the year I graduated high school and left home for university, venerable Hal Foster penned “Re: Post,” which was included in the anthology Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (ed. Brian Wallis). The resonance of his observations is not chronological. The text, reread today, echoes itself by accident. Both modern and postmodern, outside the concerns of sellers, buyers and librarians, are inactive or static art assignations, practically meaningless. Subsumed in the contemporary, modernity and its immediate aftermath are like ruined buildings from important architectural periods and movements. They charm and are photogenic, in ways they were not in the glossy magazines. We can almost remember the names of their architects without looking it up. Foster writes (197-9):

Recently, of course, we have witnessed a resurgence in painting, not only a revival of old modes as if they were new, but also a retreat to old values as if they were necessary. Much of it is regressive — or rather, defensive. In the midst of society suffused with “information,” many seem to regard painting — its specificity — as crucial. Old avatars (creative artists, authentic art) are returned, precisely because they are untimely, as forces to resist complete mediation (which is to say, complete absorption in the consumerist program of mass media). Such a position, a nostalgic one, would regard postmodernism as complicitious with, not critical of, the media forms that engulf us.

“Net Shadow, Pier 39, Astoria,” (January 2019)

I also like, in the social media sense, the footnote Foster attaches to the paragraph:

This remark is representative: “That art which commits itself self-consciously to radicality — which usually means the technically and materially radical, since only technique and not the content of the mind advances — is a mirror of the world as it is and not a critique of it.” Barbara Rose, American Painting: The Eighties…(1979), p. 12

My liking is ambivalent, in that it arises from an awareness of ritual as a prescription for loss, rooted in experience, as the precursor of interpretive commentary. The ritualism inherent in painting conducts sentiment such as nostalgia into new expression, through “old” media to that which exists beyond it. The unknowns the future holds reliably reverberate with past events, ameliorating the feelings with sensual continuity. It is the physicality of action that connotes the vitality of making, which we affirm as creative when we see the finished object. Desire is encapsulated, not in loss, but in the doing again, then again. The virtue of painting as art exists in the plane of choice, which aligns properly under the auspices of Philosophy. True science, humane science, embraces this configuration, an alignment as temporal array, because the truth is thereby presented in the visible, where it can be evaluated on its merits. The ineffable bits can be delegated to the disciplines most suited to immaterial study, processed, decomposed, where nothing is ever really dead. Forget about Walter Robinson’s jaded and superfluous “Zombie Formalism.” Paintings are their own shadows, whose features mimic the original but never simulate anything else. Art is a radical ritual, the rite of passage by which loss is memorialized and “the loser” made whole again. Historically, everybody but the historian loses in the end. In art, the thing remains itself, in itself. Only time, itself, outlasts history and art and all such constructions, just as it preceded them and our modern or contemporary, expressively mortal selves.

There is no longer any trustworthy art establishment, perhaps because there are established institutions that privilege certain modes of art by presenting them in a manner that makes them seem inevitable, that is, decisive details in an ideal narrative, or rather an establishment narrative that ironically turns the art into a shallow spectacle. — Donald Kuspit, “The Contemporary and the Historical,” Artnet (April 2005)

PRE-READING POSITHETICAL ASSIGNMENT

Reference 1:

WIRED Magazine published a set of articles to belatedly celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the release of the first installment of the Matrix series (exact date: March 31, 1999), a critical benchmark in geek cultural history, in the run-up to the premier of the 4th film, Matrix Resurrections, on December 22, 2021. I watched the first film in Humboldt County, California, at whichever of the colorful local venues showed it first - I can’t recall which, only that the seats were very old, profusely padded and lumpy, and the theater-packing crowd was profusely enthusiastic. It was a seminal moment in the AFH Journeyman residency project, Eureka! The movie was my gateway drug to Baudrillard. As a tech-freak, the first Matrix was a cultural breakthrough, the latest in cinema’s long tradition of bringing science fiction to the screen. Metropolitan, War of the Worlds, Flash Gordan, Barbarella, Stars Wars, Hackers… For generations, movies have shaped our vision of the future, as the world has been transformed by science and technology. The impact of popular media on our forward perception is underlined in the contemporary era. Cartoons and comics, with a healthy scoop of pulp fiction, plus CGI, is the recipe for the biggest of all blockbuster movie franchises, the corporate MARVEL (and DC) “universes,” which have dominated big and small screens since the late 2000s, although their filmic histories are older. But the Matrix owes at least as much to cyberpunk sensibility and early Hong Kong action cinema, as it does to Batman or the Avengers. The Matrix to a great extent defined the design aesthetics of the early 21st Century, its concepts of cool, in everything from fashion and design iconography to the neo-academic Maker’s Lab, a displacement for the old-fashioned artist studio or atelier, and the MCU and DCEU, too. The reader is encouraged to read the WIRED essays, paying special attention to discussions on the machine-man relationship, central to the Matrix narrative. Remember that Leonardo designed the West’s first working android, and other fancy drone machinery, with potential wartime applications. WIRED is oriented to futurism, while heavily invested in technological currency and production. With this in mind, the reader is also encouraged to follow the subtext, which is the production of the imagination, the who and what that determines what many of us see into the future. To put it another way, How are we being conditioned to visualize the future, by whom and why? Finally, the reader should pay close attention to depictions of the confusion of “reality” and “dream,” and the technologies being foregrounded, cinema not least among them, for blurring the edge between the waking and dreaming realms. Other angles to consider:

The historical, comparative roots of, say, Superman and Neo; i.e., was the former a product of World War American ideation, framed in propagandistic binaries of Good versus Evil, a conservative configuration, and the latter forged more by Continental ‘68er conceptions of self, a liberal or multilateral construct?
The impact on and of the Matrix on the Gamer movements, which extend East, and into the domain of anime
The self-conception of the Hacker, which would reappear in OWS as Anonymous and Tech Ops, in the movie V, in the series Mr. Robot, and so on.

“VIDEO 1” #180, Animation still, June 2011

The titles and taglines >

WIRED Peers Into the Future of Reality: Two decades after The Matrix, technologies have emerged that make us question what is real—in ways stranger, if less sinister, than the movie imagined

The Future of Reality: The world of the Matrix is here. It’s nothing like what we imagined.

Of the WIRED essays, I found Amy Webb’s particularly interesting. Webb’s forecasts and analysis are standard for the genre, pitching the future of biotech in splashy imagery, with a goodly dose of the cautionary. Her article, “Welcome to the (Synthetic) Meatspace: Reactor-grown nuggets, human-edited genetic code, and new mRNA technologies could change our relationship to life itself,” feels current with COVID-19, the origins of which remain unclear. Mitchell Joachim was one of the EGS faculty who lectured in my first (2010) summer intensive in Saas-Fee, and at that time he was already working on programmable, artificial or alternative meat-like stuff in his Brooklyn-based lab, Terreform ONE. Plant-based Impossible Burgers, Nuggets and other products are now available at restaurants and stores. Cyborgs and soylent green are fast becoming realized science, and the trends are merging with visions of interstellar travel, DNA-, drug- and surgically-enhanced class distinctions, and a variety of utopian/dystopian scenarios. Urgency is provided by the acceleration of climate-caused global cataclysm. Webb writes:

The future of reality will be virtual, yes, but also synthetic. Starting with components from the natural world—DNA, more basic molecules, cells–scientists are already altering biology, performing a kind of alchemy that allows these materials to serve a new or better purpose…And scientists are synthesizing more than just dinner. The opportunities for breakthroughs in medicine, human performance, and materials science are enormous. But biology has a tendency to evolve in unexpected ways. Our new designs for life have the potential to morph into unrecognizable mutations of what we see today, leading to a cascade of unintended consequences.

Later on, she comes across as somewhat breathless, fingering the reader “be-afraid” button, when she discusses scientific experimentation, manipulating the building blocks and larger parts of earth life-form, to solve problems, or simply find out what happens, because one can. In short, what happens when the scientist, mad or not, plays God, and creates new life, tinkers with nature, or tries to fix the fixtures of life itself (like death and disease)? The premise has generated creative conjecture, and horror, from Frankenstein to Dr. Moreau:

There is a term for these synthetic, hybrid life forms: chimeras, which in Greek mythology were part lion, part goat, and part serpent monsters. And a monkey-human hybrid is an ethical minefield. At some point, such chimeras will inherit qualities that are somewhere between humans, on which experimentation isn't allowed, and animals, which are often bred specifically for research. We don't have a system in place to define “human” characteristics in a world of animal-human chimeras. How will we decide when an animal becomes too human? What if chimeras escape and outcross in the wild?

Well that is exactly what many people believe happened to cause the global (chimeric) Corona Virus pandemic! As is noted later in “Posithetica,” the Chimera was the mascot of the Novad End of the World Edition Megazine.

Reference 2 (+ Response):

[NOTE: The second referral is the subtext for “Posithetica,” the outline I submitted to EGS Co-Founder, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schirmacher for my dissertation course. The outline is shared here with the reader, with the invitation to respond to the prospective document as a whole or to specific inquiries. Each entry represents a thread reducible to a chapter in the thesis. The Four “Books” titled at the top represent the handwritten BETA draft of A Thing (There is no such thing) — the second iteration of my thesis, following the 2009-10 project, Notes on Dimensional Time.]

A Thing
Assembly Required
There Is No Such Thing
The Art Thing

On Martin Heidegger’s “What Is A Thing?”
On the History of the Question
The Challenge: “If We Are Remain Equal to the Question At All”
On the Thing of Science and Philosophy
On the Classical Thing
On This Thing
More on The Thing (“An Sich”)
On Thingness (Essence)
The Substantial Thing
On the Golden Rectangle and the Thing
On the Thing and Its Sign
On the Particular Thing
On Numbering and Naming A Thing
On Categories and Lists of Things
On Force and the Thing
On a Thing Being
A Natural Thing
Framing a Thing
Das Ding
A Thing, Now
The Thing as Presence
On Time-Space and the Thing
On a Thing Belonging
On a Thinking Thing
Can a Person Be a Thing?
Can I be a Thing? (“What Am I?”)
On Subjective-Objective Things
True and False Thing
The Dynamics and Effects of and on a Thing
The Thing as Content
The Thing in Context
Novelty and the Thing
The Republic
On the Value of a Thing
On the Conditioned or Unconditioned Thing (be-dingt)
On Kant’s “Thing In Itself” and “Thing for Us (Phenomenon)”
On a Thing and Its Simulation, Its Simulacra
On No-Thing, Nothing & Void
On the Processed Thing
Recursion and Compression and the Thing
On the Transcendent/Impossible Thing
On the Meaning of “Thing”
Networking Things
On the Thing and Data
On the Thing and its Representation
On the Thing and its Visualization (As Data)
On the Thing and its Projection
On the Internet of Things
On the Thing of Wonder (As in “Cabinet of Wonders”)
On the Creation of a Thing
On Anything and Everything
Something (God/etwas/X)
On the Single Thing and Plurality
Absence, Quiescence with Things
On the Set of All Things
On the Virtual Thing
On the Digital Versus Analog Thing
On the Conception of a Thing
On Thing 1 and Thing 2: Cloning a Thing
On the Thing in Art, of Art, for Art…
On the Thing As Gesamtkunstwerk
On the “Thing Called Love”
A Thing for Giving and Receiving
Is Pleasure a Thing? Joy?
The Spectacular Thing
On the Thing in the Function of Memory
The Dimensional Thing
The Thing as Wovenform
The Appearance and Disappearance of a Thing
Visibility as the Will of Things

***Matterhorn Project***: "American Bones” ~ October, 2014

Machines appear across generations, and it’s possible to prolong their development into the future, as long as we remember that evolutionary lines are rhizomes. Machines developed in one era can become really significant in another, such as the steam engine, originally developed as a child’s toy in China. Technological innovation stop and start, military technology in particular [compare with DeLanda on the war machine]. However, even humble technology and tools display such phylogenesis [the example is the hammer]. History displays intersections of machinic universes, innovations, stops and starts. From early days, technological machines related to language machines and social machines. War machines were particularly nomadic. Capitalist machines emerged from urban machines, royal machines, banking machines, navigation, religious, scientific and technical machines. — Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (1995)

[Optional] Creative Writing Assignment #1: Technological Induction Inventory

TASK 1 > Reflect on your use of technology, beginning with childhood, up to your present usage. Write a list of all electronic devices you have used in play, for entertainment or work.

QUESTIONS >

HOW have these devices shaped WHO you are today?
Do you have emotional attachments (positive or negative) to any of the devices on your list? Describe these in as much detail as possible.

TASK 2 > Begin a journal to inventory your daily usage of electronic devices. Detail the time and type of usage and duration [Note: This list should include any machine that is computerized (e.g., a car), or connected to a computer-based network. As your awareness of computerization intensifies, you may begin to add devices like street signals to a list that will contain radios, televisions, phones, watches, and computers, i.e., the more obvious things.

TASK 3 (Extra Credit) > List activities that do not involve any computerization, network communications technology, electronic devices, and so on. Detail Detail the time and type of activity and duration

Media and Additional References:

“The Hidden Side of the Art Market” (Freakonomics Radio, December 2021); an excellent and timely three-part investigative series that delves into the opaque mechanics of AWInc®, including revealing interviews with key players and authoritative figures, researchers and token or sample artists; which provide the listener with a rude and rudimentary introduction to forces and dynamics that drive the system, perspective on the effects both long- and short-term for culture and markets; a sense of how meaning and values, means and value are conflated in aesthetic terms and industrial “artspeak.”

Francis Outred [From the introductory notes at artnet News, which published an excerpt, HERE: This interview has been excerpted from the recent collection New Waves: Contemporary Art and the Issues Shaping Its Tomorrow (September 2021, Skira Publishers), in which art historian Marta Gnyp interviews some of the world’s leading curators, artists, and collectors.] - A glimpse into the Big Data-driven processes that have transformed AWInc® over the past several decades, and a straightforward assessment by one the key players on current uncertainties apparent in the inter-generational media-cultural shift now unfolding.
Ben Davis’s 2021/2022 Trend Watch, with prognostications
Cyclic revisitation >
Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton (2008): A primer published as the Crash/Great Recession happened on the 00s Art-Bubble popped, and then snapped back in place, and grew and grew and…
“The Medium is the Market,” by Hal Foster (London Review of Books, Vol. 30 No. 19 · 9 October 2008); an incisive deconstruction of the period and its historical antecedents, with tremendous processional relevance to the current iteration of AWInc®

The commingling of much contemporary art with the media and the market has affected it in other ways as well. The critic Julian Stallabrass highlights the parallels with corporate mass culture in his book Art Incorporated (2004): ‘an emphasis on the image of youth, the prevalence of work that reproduces well on magazine pages, and the rise of the celebrity artist; work that cosies up to commodity culture and the fashion industry, and serves as accessible honey pots to sponsors; and a lack of critique, except in defined and controlled circumstances’. These connections are significant, but others are more structural. For example, once seen as a bohemian outsider, the artist is now regarded as a model of the inventive worker in a post-Fordist economy. According to the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005), managerial discourse over the last two decades has promoted attitudes and attributes once associated with the artistic personality: ‘autonomy, spontaneity, rhizomorphous capacity, multi-tasking (in contrast to the narrow specialisation of the old division of labour), conviviality, openness to others and novelty, availability, creativity, visionary intuition, sensitivity to differences, listening to lived experience and receptiveness to a whole range of experience, being attracted to informality and the search for interpersonal contacts’ . — Hal Foster, “The Medium is the Market”

The Wikipedia entry for “Art Market” with plenty of good external links. A fine place for the newbie to begin his journey in the ineffable AWInc®
“The Art Market is Less Ethical than the Stock Market” was a consequential Intelligence Squared debate featuring prominent art world “whozits” like Jerry Saltz, Chuck Close, and Amy Cappellazzo (all against the motion, LoL), plus Richard Feigen (RIP) and a couple of others for. Held in early 2008, the IQ2 event crystallized the popular anti-market animus that had percolated through the early 00s boom years (which Cappellazzo and others had notoriously predicted would not bust). The Great Recession had precipitated calls for market reform and regulation, and the usual suspects were trotted out to defend the status quo.

2 (or ZERO)

In his invaluable diminutive book, You Are Not a Gadget, the brilliant tech pioneer Jaron Lanier provides insight into the critical discourse on Man, Machine and Media. You Are Not a Gadget is readable, and balanced in its analysis of the competing ideas and interests driving tech innovation and proliferation in the latter half of the 20th century, and how deep and far-reaching are the changes wrought by the technologies. Lanier empathizes with the people who invented these transformative technologies - he’s one of them - and also with those who use them - he’s one of us, too. Lanier is submitting a qualified apology on behalf of a “tribe” of scientists and visionaries he counts as his own, while distributing responsibility for the way things have turned out, and finally suggesting solutions for technical problems that are serious enough to endanger our future. His historical vision has implications for hybridized culture, capable of modifying the current technological environment, and initiating a reformation that reconnects tech with its idealistic roots. He writes on technologists in the introduction, “Missing Persons” (p. 11):

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web-cams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world. We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are design. — From “How Politics Influences Information Technology”

Lanier followed up You Are Not a Gadget (2010) with Who Owns the Future (2012), another entreaty for futurist change, this time focused on a more equitable distribution of technology-derived income and wealth, to sustain a healthier, happier global economy. He pinpoints a key fracture in the status quo: “We’ve decided not to pay most people for performing roles that are valuable in relation to latest technologies. Ordinary people “share,” while elite network presences generate unprecedented fortunes. His proposals for repairing the economic schism, facilitated by monetized, surveilled, social contemporary tech are viable, although you wouldn’t know that, if you’re getting your information from, well, pretty much anywhere except his text, and the relatively few that accurately represent the power dynamics of tech-econ. If you’re familiar with the phrase, “If I had a penny for every time I ______”…, then you comprehend one of Lanier’s key provisions, that we all be compensated for every contribution we add to network culture. I for one adore this concept, because if it had been in place during my lifetime, I’d be rich!

Manipulated Google Map satellite view of southern West Virginia mountaintop removal, “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #136 (2010)

In the early 1990s, I concocted a literary persona named Milo Santini. Over time Milo became a vehicle for responses to speculations and conjectures, and to situations about which one could never ascertain the truth, at least in a simplified or recursive form. Milo is the go-to literary device in my bloggi-verse for the powerless, easily agitated, chronically aware discontent “speaking truth to power.” Yelly Milo replied to Lanier’s economic proposal outlined in Who Owns the Future thusly: Fat chance! The more likely global, tech-enabled conversion of money from a material idea to an immaterial file or packet, a continuation of the movement founded by John Law for a desperate French Monarchy centuries ago, will manifest in some digital currency redeemable everywhere and anywhere by anyone, with severe dimensional constraints and hyper-surveillance by layered overlords. Bitcoin and all the other digi-money fiscal convections exist to supply a complex parallel exchange, as alternatives to cash from nations’ treasuries or central banks. China is one of the countries exploring their own sanctioned cyber-native brand of money. This is because China realizes a completely controllable, track-able marketplace is possible within a wholly digitized economy. The scheme could be so efficient, and relatively easy to control! No more money stuffed in mattresses or pesky bank runs! The justifications for conversion are the usual sordid claims against crime, black markets, drugs, human trafficking and pedophilia trotted out whenever sovereignty or civil liberties are on the chopping block. Globalist businessmen have long pined for a unitary means of purchase, saving and investment for their project. Good for their fanatic maximal ideal of and for business, which is to make everything run more like a business! The American Dollar is the world’s present reserve currency but incremental, systemic steps have been, are being and will be taken to make the dollar replaceable by shadowy agents of the international super-rich and their uber-alles powerful corporate syndicates, fusing banks and conglomerates into a seamless network. The prime players in the Game operate behind and within various “skins” and “shells” for conducting their affairs and plots at the level of anonymity they prefer, as dictated by the principles of risk aversion and optimized ROI. During the transition nations are impoverished and the global oligarchs win out. Everything public that can be is privatized. All available wealth, i.e., anything that can be monetized and capitalized, is re-distributed bottom-to-top. A key part of the scheme, the Big Bright Idea of digital money, needs to be sold to the masses. Think Mega-Bernays! The NFT (“non-fungible token) and the wacky marketplace that is exchanging them presents NFTs as an explosive buy-in opportunity that helps schmoz to burst into exclusive the elite communities (e.g., art and finance). The goofy hustle for NFT “art” is no more than a the smiley face emoji for global domination. Put on a party hat, harlequin! Win the lottery, Lucky! Everybody’s doing it, Joe! …One musn’t be fooled or complacent. This new techno-bureaucratic bank system is the basis in the imaginations of mad contemporary Sun Kings for perpetual war, off-planet adventures, the virtualization of humanity and a manifestation of corporate cum corporeal immortality. The cost may include the death of Earth and everyone not curated for survival. Like the movie. [puff, puff, puff]

“Figure #7” costume design and character study for *Four Things* (2021)

Milo is prone to such cynical, troubling, hyperbolic outbursts. If you liked that rant, you’ll really enjoy his take on World War 3, which Santini believes started in September 2010, although skirmishes were occurring throughout the 2000s, and I’ve heard Milo claim that lazy history will mark WW3’s commencement at 9/11. Milo, nonetheless, believes World War 3 begins with cyber attacks on critical infrastructure (see Stuxnet); coordinated, massive hacks to acquire actionable identity and bio-data of government officials and employees (e.g., 2015 US OPM), then civilians (US Voter Database, also 2015); cybercrime on an enormous scale, much of which is un- or under-reported, so that affected agencies and companies can falsely maintain the illusion of cybersecurity and virtual privacy or confidentiality; breaches of tactical systems, especially those that are key to national and international defense, again, not reported as such for strategic reasons. Milo in a prescient moment predicted the use of conjunctive cyber- and chemo- or bio-warfare. He mapped choke—points, based on the US model used in pre-Shah Iran (see Kermit Roosevelt, CIA, 1953), to predispose the nation to disruption and hostile takeover: co-optation of media narratives; disruption of interstate and intrastate transportation; civilian unrest, pitting minority versus minority and majority versus minority; corruption of military and government bureaucracy; targeting of key cultural, political and commercial figures and mechanisms; infiltration of educational complex; breakdowns, causing food and goods delivery to be precarious; undermining and weakening leadership; exerting pressure on energy and financial exchange; creating dimensional isolation. According to Santini’s speculative diagnosis, we are nearing the stage in which the multi-lateral, mostly virtual conflict can quickly escalate through a simmering proxy-enacted small-scale series of engagements to regional conflagrations to total war and the annihilation of civilization as we now recognize it. His analysis is in this aspect not uncommon among lay analysts, experts, creatives and lunatics alike. The topology of WW3 is all-over, all-directional. The main players are obviously world-powers. Second-tier powers, like Israel and Saudi Arabia (Britain, India, Germany, France and a few others fit this description) enter the WW3 game on the basis of technological or logistical capability, control of key resources, historical status, etc. If there is a novel component to the scenario, it might be the extent to which mercenary technologists might impact any facet of the many-layered struggle. Due to global neoliberal (and -conservative) military privatization trends, the use of actual mercenary forces, consisting of elite soldiers operating high-budget combat systems, an ancient war practice has been dangerously upgraded. To any sane person, the prospect of a 21st Century World War is absurd! Lunacy! Anthrocide! Terracide! Yet, there is no shortage of imagineers envisioning apocalypse, converging their dystopic nightmares with those of kooky “preppers,” Book of Revelations believers, bunker-buying billionaires, etc.

“Blood-red Sideways 8,” “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #207 (2010)

If one required explanation as to Why anyone might contemplate another World War, after the first two, after the whole bloody 20th Century, Milo argues that it is more pragmatic to think about How WW3 might begin. He referred me to a recent article in Web 2.0 gen-Millennial click-machine (“1 million pageviews a day!” - adpushup) Interesting Engineering by Christopher McFadden (October 20, 2021), which article contains a workable summary list:

“The ebb and flow of great power and ‘Thucydides Trap’”: basically, attributing war to the assumption of hegemony by the Chinese, overtaking the US as the world’s preeminent power.
“Taiwan might be the straw that breaks the camel's back”: China invades Taiwan; US and its allies retaliate, in defense of the island state, which the PRC claims as its own territory.
“Prepare yourself for the water wars”: Global water shortages caused by climate change; people fight for survival.
“Economic collapse and peace are bad bedfellows”: a strange way to phrase an obvious condition (not explicitly referred to in the article); unprecedented inequality; billions in poverty = pitchforks with nuclear warheads on the prong-tips
“Electronics wars on the cards?”: again, an odd phraseology; in a nutshell, burgeoning demand and competition for the mineral components used in ubiquitous electronic devices and systems devolves into commodities-driven warfare as a means to gain control of extraction and exploitation of vital industrial materials and minerals
“Mass migration may spark the next world war too”: pretty much hordes of people running away from something terrible or terrifying or both; a phenomenon that is metaphorically represented in popular games and movies as zombie hordes.

The essay, entitled, “What Could Cause World War 3?” with sensationalist click bait taglines “Can you hear the war drums? Is World War 3 just over the horizon?” wraps up with the shopworn admonition, “Food for thought.” I think Milo’s referencing this article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but even though McFadden’s piece reads like he wrote it in twenty minutes over lunch, or like a hyped-up popcorn-conversation over pizza and Red Bull in a poli-sci student’s dorm room, the yellow-tech writer gets the gist. Apocalyptic world war is a real possibility, because the circumstances are ripe to manifest planetary conflagration and mayhem. If we believe pulp cinema (see 25 episodes in the 007/James Bond series), all it takes is one visionary madman to kick off the end of the world. Then, its GAME ON! and you best have a Bourne guy on call…

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∞

Posted November 5, 2021 @josephnechvatal.

Milo noticed a Deleuzian fragment captioning an Instagram post on my friend Joseph Nechvatal’s page, which reads: “…finding a characterization of ‘war machines’ that’s nothing to do with war but to do with a particular way of occupying, taking up, space-time, or inventing new space-times: revolutionary moments … artistic movements too, are war-machines in this sense. (Deleuze, 1995a: 172)” This quote, which is so appropriate for the subject of “Occupy 2021, carries with it a lot of provenance. I tracked it down first to a fine paper by Simon O’Sullivan of Goldsmiths College, entitled, “Deleuze Against Control: Fictioning to Myth-Science.” The quote is extracted from Negotiations: 1972-1990, the chapter “Politics, the section “Control and Becoming,” from a conversation with Toni Negri from Futur Anteneur 1 (Spring 1990). Both - the Deleuze-Negri dialogue and O’Sullivan’s work - inform our project and resonate with its impetus. Deleuze comes across as positively prophetic in his portraits of emergent control society. Many of his observations have materialized, since 1990. For example:

One can envisage education becoming less and less a closed site differentiated from the workspace as another closed site, but both disappearing and giving way to frightful continual training, to continual monitoring of worker-schoolkids or bureaucrat-students. They try to present this as a reform of the school system, but it's really its dismantling. In a control-based system nothing's left alone for long.

Deleuze riffs on the current control-based system prior to the technology that enables it materialized, via high-speed networked PCs, smart phones and tablets, for operating productive, communication software like Zoom and Google Meet, and all the others, inclusive of social media, search engines, and browsers, which also function as data-sweeping tools for a hybrid public-private surveillance state. Deleuze associates types of machines with corresponding societies, and his associations are provocative. [I would add to his short list a visionary society, fueled by free speech, driving a dimensional engine for interpretive exchange, i.e., a next-gen sense-converter with a time element as governor. Milo remarks This machine is us in a speculative democracy.] Post-pandemic, Deleuze’s future tripping is an inversion of our daily reality. We see our wonderful happy, pre-pandemic past as part of the harshest confinement. Lock-down and other forms of enforced separation have been normalized, in the service of fighting COVID spreading through and decimating populations. “Contact-tracing” is obviously a tool with surveillance applications, and as such, its adoption is an indicator of trust in open society or a sign of expanding oppression in a closed society.

Deleuze’s associative machine-society construct reflects a modern sensibility. To a degree, his analysis brushes over the millennia of Western imperialism and colonialism that shape the history unfolding before our eyes. A feature of civilization is the translocation of practice, not only people. Military occupations of foreign lands eventually transform the homeland of the occupier. Commercial exploitation of a distant place and its habitants will be pronounced within the exploiter’s base of operations, not only as gain, but as a practical carry-over brought “here” from “over there.” In America, we are experiencing this phenomenon as a hyper-dynamic, accelerated and compounded by virtuality. America is experiencing occupation as both occupier and occupied simultaneously, on a practical basis, most apparently in the burgeoning US surveillance and prison systems. Deleuze continues:

…the machines don't explain anything, you have to analyze the collective apparatuses of which the machines are just one component. Compared with the approaching forms of ceaseless control in open sites, we may come to see the harshest confinement as part of a wonderful happy past. The quest for "universals of communication" ought to make us shudder.

Asked about tactics of resistance, to which he adds delinquency, in his view a differentiation, Deleuze ponders the effectiveness of strikes, sabotage, piracy and viruses, etc. Since 1990 we have seen those tactical methods, signs of resisting authority, reconfigured and redeployed by authority against dissent. Dreams of the"transversal organization of free individuals" - a notion that is consistent with the ideals of early Internet pioneers - seem less obtainable, more distant, than ever. Deleuze grimly concludes:

Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money-and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

“Circuit-breaker,” graphite on electric schematic on paper, 2011

A nod to Joseph Nechvatal is warranted to open “Occupy 2021. “ Joseph is one of the pioneers of digital artistry, a master of circuits integrating computer- and machine-based practice with the recognizable activities of multi-disciplinary creative life. He is an accomplished art writer and educator, whose insights into art history are consistently valuable. Joseph has been a visionary polysemic whose focus has ranged from sound sculpture to viral image programming, always underscored by a comprehensive understanding of contextual material within the array for content presentation. Nechvatal is also keenly sensitive to aesthetic role play in artistic community, having participated in the courageous early contemporary art movements that frame the mainstream today. Few transmedia, polyvalent creative agents working today evidence Joseph’s courage in confronting the multi-dimensional malaise afflicting the imagination. Nechvatal does not hesitate to champion expression in defense of vulnerable personal and expressive freedoms, and his critiques are those of an artist witnessing cyclic oppression, from the Reagan/HIV era through Trump/COVID, while continuously striving to produce meaning in presence, word, form and image.

And a nod to my friend Liza, pictured above, who inspires “Occupy 2021” through an expression of artistic courage in the face of disease, upheaval and discord, too, if from another angle, or set of them. Buzytsky is an immigrant American artist, embracing a feminist perspective that weaves hand-craft, sexuality, technology and the institutional structure for art into collaborative modes of productive embodiment. She, too, is exploring the vitality of text, provocative auto-portraiture, using installation as a means to expand the parameters of aesthetic experience. The dimensional points at which Joseph and Liza might appear superficially to creatively divergent, in fact are complementary. Both artists inhabit a libidinal liminal space of fractured Americanized consciousness, and in that space find physical and intellectual sustenance for intimate realities, alternative to a status quo that valorizes the banal and authoritarian. To me Buzytsky demonstrates the power of resistance, which manifests as insistence on the potential for beauty and grace in breath, in movement, in style and decoration, a dance advocating for longing in a scene that is in ruins.

We have poetic mirrors, even at times like this, that function as contemporary recitals, rather than suicidal, homicidal, anthropocidal or terracidal incitements. Seduction and reduction offer very limited answers to the solutions necessary, if we (and that “we” is inconceivably big now, encompassing future generations) are to survive, much less thrive. It does not appear that time is on our side in the contemporary age, which implies perhaps we should move on to something else. The autocratic urge to declare War on ideas of things that challenge and frighten the powerful will not work on Time. Artists have historically played the bridesmaid and groomsmen of Power. The assignment of uselessness for art and powerlessness for artists has never been a proper fit. If the “new” technology for imagination is to attain its potential, it will do so in the service of upending, of disrupting, that force dynamic to usher in a truly novel expression for vision, voice and the body of senses. We may be drifting toward a renewal of movement that is the vital succession of mortality and possession as aesthetic prime directives. To make such a beginning, temporal perception must change, starting at the Self, and extending through the Other to reach a natural consensus. Art, philosophy and technology, together, are best suited to the task.

“Bridge, Manhattan + Brooklyn” (September 2010).

Marshall McLuhan spoke on this topic in a 1973 lecture at Columbia University, entitled “Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (p. 208, Understanding Me):

This enormous gap between man’s natural equipment and technology has gotten bigger and bigger. I suggest that the artist’s role is to fill that gap by retuning and modifying the perceptual apparatus that enables us to survive in a rapidly developing environment. Art provides the training and perception, the tuning or updating of the senses during technological advance.

A decade later in 1983, the inimitable, estimable R. Buckminster Fuller published Grunch of Giants, a delightfully composed and savage rendering of the status quo, in the first term of the Reagan Presidency, the height of the Cold War (which Fuller refers to as WW3, the trillion dollar war). It was the year I entered University at Notre Dame, which, on its campus, contains a Fuller-inspired geodesic-domed gymnasium, the Stepan Center, built in 1962, two years before I was born. Stepan center in 1963 hosted Martin Luther King, Jr., at Father “Ted” Hesburgh’s invitation. It was where we Domers attended concerts, prayer services, played hoops, held pep rallies and such. In my memory, made by a brain admittedly still as yet not-done growing, which brain I had foolishly begun to assault with a profusion of dangerous, toxic chemicals - 1983 was a time of excitement, an historical moment of social, economic, cultural and political confusion and ripe for reformation. The year before, as I have painfully written about elsewhere, I had voted for “The Gipper,” one of Reagan’s nicknames, acquired by the former actor in his role playing George Gipp, an All-American football player under legendary Coach Knute Rockne. Gipp died of pneumonia in 1920, and on his deathbed suggested to “Rock” that he implore his team to “Win (just) one for the Gipper,” at some future critical juncture. Reagan often resorted to this line on the campaign trail and while in office.

Fuller’s “GRUNCH” is an anagram for “Gross Universal Cash Heist,” which is a central subject for his text, in which the inventor, author, educator, etc., demystifies in a most straightforward, somehow entertaining, style the inequitable status quo, a status quo that prevails through the present. The global scenario in the early 80s I recall as an Age of Anxiety, wherein the USSR and USA, their proxies and allies were perched on the abyss of nuclear annihilation. Meanwhile, Reagan, I discovered after ignorantly casting my vote on his behalf, enacted “Greed Is Good” policies in the US that would have momentous consequences, catastrophic for most not of the richest percentiles of wealth and income. Reagan not only oversaw a deluge of investment in the machinery of war, he swept aside regulations on corporate industrialists, busted labor unions with ruthlessness and ferocity, and made deals with reactionary cultural and religious forces that would come to fruition a few decades in the future during the Trump Presidency. Reagan, his enablers and cronies built the fire that erupted on January 6, 2021, the insurrection at the US Capitol. Reagan’s Presidency, we can see in hindsight, was pre-figurative.

“Coal Tipple,” Mixed media, 1987, collection of Sunrise Museum, Charleston, WV

Resources like Grunch of Giants have and continue to indicate possible worlds and futures, unlike the one we currently inhabit. They lift the veil on falsehoods and fallacies that perpetuate horrible “realities” that immiserate most of humanity to the benefit of a tiny fraction of our numbers - now in the billions - endanger the planet and stifle innovation in all worthwhile areas of human endeavor. In “Occupy 2021” the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive proves a remarkable resource for time-traveling the Web. I use it here to cite the Buckminster Fuller Institute, which posted the entire text of Grunch of Giants in March of 2010, although the WM/IA capture I work from is dated October 27, consistent with our chrono-nodal literary construct, a utile temporal fiction productive of our creative purpose: to link events, people, place in time, to establish meaning and value contrary to normalized deceptions. I will only re-post a few paragraphs of Grunch, while encouraging the reader to seek out and consume the book in its entirety. It is rich in insight, and concludes, not in despair, but with hope, pointing toward practical measures available to rescue ourselves and “Spaceship Earth,” as Fuller refers to this planet, from the forces who concern themselves with power and money by any and all means, the forces who abandon wisdom and true value in their decadent, grisly, shortsighted, exploitative, ancient pursuits:

It is evident that the degree of technical "advantage" now attained by world-around industrial production capability, if realistically appraised and articulated, now shows that all humanity has just reached a state of comprehensive technical advantage adequate to provide a billionaire's level of living on an indefinitely sustainable base for all of the over four billion human passengers now aboard Spaceship Earth (see Critical Path). The world's economic accounting system, if properly entered into the world's computers, will quickly indicate that comprehensive economic success for all humanity is now realizable within a Design Science Decade. All it takes is shifting from weaponry to livingry production.
History's unprecedentedly large and invisible supranational Grunch of Giants being too supra- and infra-visibly large to be sensitively comprehended, it is difficult to surmise and accredit that the almost omni-computerized giant may be evolution's agent of most effective establishment of a world-embracing socioeconomic system most logically suited for the mass-production and distribution of its products and services to economically successful humanity. It could well be that the total-world-involved, supranational giant corporations' computer operations might, to their corporate directors' astonishment and to popular surprise, lead the Grunch into profitable discard of all that is not true, as for instance that anybody owns anything. Commonly acknowledged operational custodianship and popular reaccreditation of the integrated world-around technology management may supplant "ownership" with Hertz and telephone-renting.
The way that the giant can be successfully led into doing so is for a substantial majority of humanity, and eventually all humanity, realistically to comprehend the falsity of the greater part of the inventory of academic premises and axioms upon which the thus misconditioned reflexing of “educated" society is based. For instance, there is no God-validated deed to property of any kind whatsoever. There are no solids. There are no things—only systemic complexes of events interacting in pure principle. There is no up or down in Universe. There is no cubic structure. There are no straight lines. There is no one-, two-, or three-dimensionality. There is only four- or six-dimensionality, etc. As we eliminate that which isn't true, we inadvertently admit into reality that which is true. As world society divests itself of that which experimental evidence demonstrates to be untrue and embracingly enters into its computer the mathematical formulae of all that can be experimentally proven to be true, all the socially, selfishly malignant characteristics of the giant may vanish and the omni-pro-social-advantage-producing capabilities may prevail and flourish.

“Chart Indicating 4D Color Progression…” (1928, Buckminster Fuller)

The brief excerpt above contains many inception points for consequent discursive consideration. For example, Fuller’s envisioning of a future typified by propertylessness. Recent discussions of the concept do not fundamentally resemble Fuller’s. Unfortunately, the powerful elite has dictated new frauds, deceptions and larcenies, misrepresented as industrial disruptions, which utilize new technologies to add new layers of extraction and exploitation to the already near-total economic deprivation of everyone who is not among the wealthiest fraction of legal grifters, for whom the entitled depriving of others is a calculated, nefarious way of life. Uber did not replace Hertz, and Apple’s iPhone + Verizon/ATT/Sprint et al. did not liberate us from gross subscription models, subsidizing the portfolios of the citizen-transport and communication barons and their co-profiteers. Simultaneously enacting greater surveillance, less freedom of movement and speech exchange, and encouraging material waste, cruelty to laborers, price-gouging and inequality of access across populations, etc. Yet, the Fuller prescription, in tandem with McLuhan’s and Lanier’s, and other notable technologists, philosophers and artists, remains viable, even as we appear to approach our final moments as a species, occupying a planet miraculously suited for our sustenance, which itself at the moment seems as mortal as we are.

“Occupy 2021” is auto-historical, not exactly a document or documentation - more a web-native instrument for which no English-language word or phrase has to date been invented. To illustrate, we can examine the image captioned “Coal Tipple…” above. The picture has its metadata, which predicates its insertion in the body of this essay, which is better described as essay(+), an inference to this whatever-it-is’s dimensional composition and virtual, temporary, electrified existence. The original photograph was taken on a NIKON 35mm film camera by my father, William D. McLean, now deceased, on the the back porch of our family home in West Virginia. The photo was retouched in Photoshop, scanned and uploaded to the AFH Flick still image archive, from which it was downloaded and again retouched, to be consistent within this whatever-it-is. The art was constructed on the premises, from found materials. The painting was based on a photograph taken by the artist (myself) and depicts a local, abandoned industrial coal structure common to the region. This particular structure, in Skelton, WV, was demolished and replaced by a shopping center, a precursor to the malls, then “big box” stores, that decimated the main street economy in my hometown, and many others like it. I selected this image in lieu of a photo depicting Ronald Reagan as a mule driver for the mines, which I painted in ink on paper and “framed” behind a Plexiglas sheet, painted in acrylic on its face to window the Presidential portrait. However, I wasn’t able to locate a digital version or original print of “Mule Driver,” and so chose “Coal Tipple.” Other works in the series include “Retired Miner Sitting on a Plastic Bench at the Mall” and “Joe Hill.” This series of multimedia artworks were composed circa 1987. Between 1982 and 1987 I had revised my opinion on Reagan, to put it mildly. I was awakening to the Status Quo, and radicalizing ideologically, regarding the political economy for art. The associations and assumptions I assembled as a young artist, a fresh graduate of UND, would congeal into a content seam that threads through my art production, seeping into the paintings, weaving through projects, their aesthetics, the theoretical and conceptual architecture, and, most importantly, the figuration.

“Devil Anse,” acrylic and ink on canvas, inset in gilded wood frame; originally exhibited at In the Gallery, in the DDDD production “In Sickness & in Health” (2001, Nashville, TN); stolen from my Beckley, WV studio storage in 2003; source material archival photograph.

3 -4-ALL

Anytime one assumes the function of the historian, one is creating an imaginary topology composed people, places, events, things, tracing and linking them in the medium of time. The point, ostensibly, is to gather meaning for the purpose of improving one’s understanding of the interlinked components. The value in the exercise arises from the gathering not only of data, to add to the historical data pool, but to conceive of meaning in and from the phenomena. The historian is not only committed to hunting and gathering information, she offers interpretations, and therefore must shift into a more philosophic role, with respect to the available documentation. In this, the historian operates in conjunction with science, generating hypotheses, eventually moving toward thesis, or better, synthesis. The technical dynamic of cycling through recursive axiom-building and conducting an expansive overview is a feature of historical analysis. The objective is perspective.

The job of the auto-historian intertwines autobiographical data, impressions and interpretation within an overarching, encompassing history, the history one shares with everyone else. The content and context intermingle in the imagination, the interpretive complex, the perceptions of the individual, and the reader is given the task of adjudication, in determining whether the individual experience and interpretation sufficiently inform history, sufficiently to qualify as historical in historical terms. One may question whether this ancient model remains intact, and there are valid reasons to do so. “Occupy 2021” is an example of a kind of auto-historical work, complicated by my prolific use of autonomous imagery (art) in the service of the provisional text. The (blog) format is consistent with the (online) platform, although the composition elements can be represented in separate modalities, including the contemporary art exhibition, in accord with its expository practicum and institutional, architectural constraints. In fact, many of the images have already appeared in the mode of art actualization, in either actual or virtual form.

E-vite, announcing the participation of Occupational Art School Node 1 co-organizer Jenjoy Roybal at Black Mountain College (Posted: September 26, 2012 on the Occupy with Art blog; e-vite design by PJM)

To the best of my recollection, I launched the first AFH Blog shortly after Y2K (remember that!). In the early 2000s I developed a robust integrated dispatch system for the promotion of exhibitions, performances, lectures, panels, classes, open studios, live art events and so on. In short order, due to the relative lack of awareness in the art field, I was able to compile a very good database for mailings, a list of arts-interested people, drawn from preexisting lists generously contributed by local museums, companies and foundations, with whom I was involved professionally. Within a few seasons I grew my clientele exponentially, and therefore attendance at the solo and collective shows I produced for institutional and retail galleries, performance venues, alternative spaces. Publishing in local periodicals and in newspaper columns, having a weekly radio show, and generating coverage of all productions via traditional and some new media, I realized very early on in the art media arc the potential inherent in the digital/analog approach, which would eventually become practically ubiquitous, as we see in today’s art world. E-mail combined with postcards, flyers, posters, signage on vinyl or paper, targeted advertising, direct calls and word of mouth permitted a fairly unprecedented level of market saturation, which translated into increasing sales, notice and creative opportunity.

I realized early on, simultaneously, what advances in communications technology and associated computer-based processes could not add to art. In a word, the technology could not add informatic dimensions — for depth and breadth, plus comparative simulations, for the subjective object, but not objective substance — to the art project. Tech’s limited best is the machined-object, which is an artificial thing, an “art” output, untouched directly by any artist. The artist’s post-output tactile gesture, sometimes only a hand-scrawled signature, is only a pretense, a pantomime of artistry. The machine-artist collaboration is one-sided and non-reciprocal, an asymmetrical equivocation for purposes outside art (i.e., commerce, prestige, or the hybrid social branding). The virtual concentricity that would evolve horizontally into Web 2.0 applications provides an object or exhibition with contextual expansion. Instead of depth, art is flattened and dispersed or diffused in its versioning as network (algorithmic, rhizomatic, concentric) transmission. The associative effect is superficial, and one could witness the impact on viewership, nearly immediately. The acceptance of in-gallery photography was only the beginning, morphing quickly into the art-selfie phenomenon, then the “immersive experience” environmental photo-op, etc. The spectacle is practically artless, now. Concerns were raised within the field that the trend of virtualizing, also framed problematically as democratization, might actually undermine one of the unique features of art interaction: the sensual, experiential aspect of immediacy; happening when a person engages with art in “real” time; in environments specifically designed to accommodate the exchange; usually with qualified people available to answer questions about the art, artist, and the objective of the exposition on view. If the intervening years of development, market hucksterism and technological advances have demonstrated anything incontrovertibly, especially post-COVID, it is that those concerns were merited.

Jenjoy Roybal, introducing the Buckminster Fuller Challenge to a “Wall Street 2 Main Street” audience in Catskill, NY 2012.

The nature of the editable online blog can be complicated, depending how an author or authors utilize its core features. The chronology can be fudged, as is the case with “Occupy 2021.” Continuity is not determined by linearity. For a reader groomed on books, the structural differences can be jarring, affecting comprehension. The writer (typer, or dictator, now) “writes” in sessions, at the desktop computer, on the laptop or tablet, or the smart phone. The technical differences, if one learned to write (actually, write) with pencils or pen on paper, are marked. Referencing is also different, when one is connected to the Internet, rather than sourcing from books in a library, or at home, in a cafe, etc. Is it obtuse to note the momentous change post-digital conversion of literary production? The point of doing so here is to remind the reader/viewer that nothing contained in this whatever-it-is is permanent. The existence of “Occupy 2021” is like the existence of windswept desert sands. The Cloud may presume otherwise, but the Cloud in reality is as fragile as the content in this post. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

PJM

DECEMBER 7, 2021

#

“Event #1,” 30” x 20”, acrylic on canvas (2019)

OCCUPY 2021

It is nigh unto Low Midnight, and there must be a showdown between Word & Image. Both must lose. — Milo Santini, The Book of Milo (1968-2021)

“CONTENT: Jen at Steeplechase, Nashville 2001”

PREFACE

On Tuesday and Wednesday, November 2-3, 2021, I’ll be attending a symposium hosted by the Knight Foundation, entitled, “Lessons from the First Internet Ages. The famed inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a short essay for the event, “Lessons from the Past and Present for the Future of the Web,” which sets the table for a proper vetting of the history and future of network society, from the maker’s standpoint. Looking back on his creation, Berners-Lee describes his motivations:

Working with various different experimental groups at CERN, I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the different and incompatible computer systems people were using, and the resulting inefficiencies. So, I thought, “What if there was a way to use the internet to create one big, virtual documentation system?” I imagined and proposed a system to connect together all these systems into something like one big, hypertext book. One big web.
When I thought about the system I wanted to build, I wanted an instrument for collaboration, for remote creativity, for learning, and for connecting. I wanted to connect people to one another, anywhere in the world, and help them share their ideas.
Each of the people working on a project with me should be able to plug into the project on the web, learn all they need to know, add the work they do into the warp and the weft of it, and then leave knowing that everyone else could see and use what they had contributed. The people should be in a sort of equilibrium with the project web, in that whenever they knew something it didn’t know, they could tell the web immediately and intuitively, and others could learn of the update immediately.

Installation view of "A Prayer for Clean Water (Phase 2)" at St. Edward's University Art Gallery in Austin (2005)

When I log on to the web now, I have a hard time matching the vision of Berners-Lee to my daily User Experience (UE). Later in the text, Berners-Lee discusses his most recent project, named Solid, to address issues confounding his original picture of what the Web could be and how it should function. Meanwhile, the same week I heard about and signed up for the KF Symposium, Mark Zuckerberg announced a branding change for the social media conglomerate Facebook. The parent company will now be called META, and its blue logo is a sideways 8, the infinity symbol. For over three decades I’ve used the sideways 8 in art composition, first in painting, sculpting and drawing, then in a bunch digital applications for moving and still imaging. I’ve also used the sideways 8 as a text divider in my writing, creative, technical and theoretical. The sideways 8 has gone the way of the rainbow, subsumed into a corporate and cultural media messaging system pervasively affecting visual and conceptual production. So, when Greek economist and Progressive International co-founder Yanis Varoufakis tweets “Hands off our mέta, our Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation… Mr Zuckerberg. You, and your minions wouldn't recognise civilisation even if it hit you with a bargepole,” I get it. Social Media neo-Robber Barons just don’t give AF. When one of the Big 5 (Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon) bust a move in any direction, metaphorically speaking, the ripple effect may hit the little guy near the shoreline like a tsunami.

“Occupy 2021” is about loss, about losing. After people experience a significant or catastrophic loss - the death of a loved one, the end of a marriage, losing a job, or a limb - there is a process of recovery, during which a person may not be inclined to keep going without whatever is gone. Defeat entails a specific kind of loss, loss at the hand of another. The terms of defeat might be negotiated, or defeat might be total, fatal. Loss on a personal level, and loss at the civic, national or global level, a shared, collective loss, have become much more complicated by virtuality. The concept of global awareness, of global consciousness, is relatively new, a function of networked communication, in the service of industrial, political and cultural globalization. Other notions of human interconnectedness on a planetary scale previously manifested through religious or imperial dissemination. For contemporary man, loss is a means by which populations are tied to experience that is configured “local to global” within a consumer mass media complex. Such experience is increasingly less direct and more distant, although individual attachment to loss-events feels real enough. Typical examples include the deaths or break-ups of celebrities, outcomes of sporting competitions, especially those wherein one side is a winner, every other a loser, and flops. Such events can be understood to be relatively low-stakes perceptual programming for collectivizing loss - and, an opposite aspirational binary: the Win.

“Equal,” “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #233 (2010)

Loss is fundamental to human existence. After all, we are physically finite. Yet, we strive to not be losers, to be defined not by loss. To be a “loser” is bad, to be called a loser by someone else is derogatory. Fear is inextricable from loss. The fear of losing a person we care about, of losing connection to a place we love, of losing something that matters drives much of human behavior. In contrast, desire and gain - loss’s ostensible obverse - are inextricably intertwined. Winning is aspirational, loss its negation. The Loss-Win binary is fundamental to marketing, to propaganda, an exploitation of the human urge to survive. Winning is conflated with overcoming not only loss (experienced as defeat, a metaphor for death), but transcendence of the fear of losing. The mortality of man ensures that the experience of winning and losing is temporary. The role of history, religion, art and other human inventions in part is to mitigate the obvious reality, that our demise is inescapable. Loss is ultimate, bound as fate to the limitations of physical form and composition. We indulge contradicting fantasies, engage in escapist pursuits, and thrill to activities that celebrate the pretense of eternal life.

The computer, digital processes and the Internet combine to radically redefine our idea of the Infinite. The possibility of our surviving physicality itself, if only in a very different even non-physical form, seems an inherent promise of the virtual. Science fiction has been a reliable cultural platform for staging potential futures wherein death has been defeated, although we have cautionary depictions of deathless life, as well. The classic Star Trek series, the original, presented several scenarios in the context of pulpy, kitschy futurist melodrama, set against a backdrop of stars, sometimes focusing on the computer as a central character in simplifying quasi-theoretical and technical plot lines, as in “The Ultimate Computer” and “The Changeling.” The Terminator films posited a terrifying future war of Man versus Machines, with the machines mostly destroying humanity, and doing their best to complete the job, going so far as time travel to that end. The Matrix outlined a similar future conflict for the next generation. Both film franchises centered action on human heroes and mech-tech nemeses. More recently, movies like Ex Machina provide smart counterbalance to cartoonish, CGI-heavy movies like Transformers. Since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), filmmakers have found a ready subject in the Man-Machine configuration. Yet, the medium (movies, for big- and now small-screen) may be inherently compromised as a platform that dictates discourse on mankind’s relation to the machines we create, and how they are re-creating us. “Film,” evolving from its chemical origins, as a camera- and now computer-based medium, is fundamentally mechanical, and so biased. To be more precise, film can be conceived as a battleground upon which the humans and machine struggle for the belief of the audience. Short belief, the binary competitors appeal to the emotion, and short that to instinct. The moving image is only information generically.

“Hashtag,” “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #233 (2010)

Man-Machine, as subject matter, has occupied purveyors of the written word in almost every field, for centuries. An early example is L'homme Machine, by Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748), in which the author posits a conception of man, mechanical in his functions:

Let us now go into some detail concerning these springs of the human machine. All the vital, animal, natural, and automatic motions are carried on by their action. Is it not in a purely mechanical way that the body shrinks back when it is struck with terror at the sight of an unforeseen precipice, that the eyelids are lowered at the menace of a blow, as some have remarked, and that the pupil contracts in broad daylight to save the retina, and dilates to see objects in darkness? Is it not by mechanical means that the pores of the skin close in winter so that the cold can not penetrate to the interior of the blood vessels, and that the stomach vomits when it is irritated by poison, by a certain quantity of opium and by all emetics, etc.? that the heart, the arteries and the muscles contract in sleep as well as in waking hours, that the lungs serve as bellows continually in exercise, ... that the heart contracts more strongly than any other muscle?

The author’s perspective is greatly informed by Medicine, and aligns with materialist philosophy. In colorful style, de La Mettrie expansively charts an idea of man that acknowledges or refutes the conforming or contradictory concepts put forth by an impressive list of thinkers who have attempted to reconcile the complexities evident in human beings, and confirmed by our behavior, brutish to sophisticated. The copious references in L'homme Machine suggest that, from Descartes to Galen, the robust examination of human nature is delimited by an unresolved elemental fixation of consciousness to the corporeal. Seen in this light the configuration is no longer Man versus Machine, but Man + Machine. This fundamental discourse is not static. As it spins through history, each age imprints it with a new twist, like Marxism, the Uncertainty Principle, Chaos Theory… Each development causes the re-examination of our self-conception, and with it our perception of the world, within a universe inhabited by everything, including ourselves. Existential questions (What is, or is there, a God, or Soul; are the body and the mind somehow divisible…) are situated in a synthetic binary - of life, and/or not-alive, or both - in the medium of Time, an infinite container of finitude.

“Inertia,” “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #217 (2010)

Man + Machine has inspired much popular fiction, literature, technical writing and non-fiction. The genre especially suited to the topic used to be science fiction, but now the science fiction of yesterday is often our lived reality. H.G. Wells immediately comes to mind, along with Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Herbert. My generation was fortunate to have the “Cyberpunks,” writers, including: William Gibson; my European Graduate School instructor Bruce Sterling; Cory Doctorow, who made an appearance on the Knight Foundation Symposium mentioned above; Rudy Rucker, who is also a brilliant 4D artist and theoretician; Phillip K. Dick, really a cyberpunk progenitor, and others. I am a huge fan of Iain Banks’ “Culture” series, my favorite being Player of Games. The Man|Machine configuration in many of these authors’ most famous stories cannot be separated from the Space|Time construct. As our understanding of each and all evolves (man, machine, space, time) over the past couple millennia, the stories we generate to make sense of the relations between and among them, and us, incorporates myth, science, history, math, in the immaterial medium, which is imagination. On imagination, de La Mettrie puts forth:

The finest, greatest, or strongest imagination is then the one most suited to the sciences as well as to the arts. I do not pretend to say whether more intellect is necessary to excel in the art of Aristotle or of Descartes than to excel in that of Euripides or of Sophocles, and whether nature has taken more trouble to make Newton than to make Corneille, though I doubt this. But it is certain that imagination alone, differently applied, has produced their diverse triumphs and their immortal glory.
If one is known as having little judgment and much imagination, this means that the imagination has been left too much alone, has, as it were, occupied most of the time in looking at itself in the mirror of its sensations, has not sufficiently formed the habit of examining the sensations themselves attentively. [It means that the imagination] has been more impressed by images than by their truth or their likeness.
Truly, so quick are the responses of the imagination that if attention, that key or mother of the sciences, does not do its part, imagination can do little more than run over and skim its objects.
See that bird on the bough: it seems always ready to fly away. Imagination is like the bird, always carried onward by the turmoil of the blood and the animal spirits. One wave leaves a mark, effaced by the one that follows; the soul pursues it, often in vain: it must expect to regret the loss of that which it has not quickly enough seized and fixed. Thus, imagination, the true image of time, is being ceaselessly destroyed and renewed.

Lately, those categorical divisions within the discipline of writing (popular fiction, literature, technical writing and non-fiction) are blended, mashed up. The 2019 Ian McEwan novel Machines Like Me welds the technicalities of literal intent, with respect to an imaginary literate audience, into a smoothly tuned engine fueled by dreams of artificial intelligence (AI), humanized robots siding as wish-fulfilling djinns or cuddly toys, the perfect lover, companion or financial advisor. Mayhem ensues. The action swivels from entertaining tech conjecture, of the What-If? variety, to subtle commentary on social atomization and breakdown, dystopia arising from economic inequality and ecological crisis, with nods to human resilience or humanitarianism under pressure, all scenarios inhabited, infested or incorporated into a media perceptual complex wherein thinking machines are normalized, even as they terrify or dominate. In contemporary fiction the voices of novelist and scientific philosopher are wedded in a parallax narrative that meshes with our contemporary reality, while simultaneously upending it. History has been digitized, and re-imagined in one of millions of possible plot lines. The thematic undercurrent is Adapt or Die, in a state of technological wonder and universal potential - gone mad. And, you know, Where is Love in all this? Will we really cause our own extinction, facilitated by the bots we created? What were we thinking? For God’s sake, the Children! Growing up on the dark husk of a planet, with no birds singing or bees buzzing! No Tree of Life to sit under and ponder the Apple yonder! Recent entries to this cinematic sub-genre include Finch, a kinder, gentler version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and the unfunny but poignant satire Don’t Look Up.

“Obliteration,” “Notes on Dimensional Time,” animation still #297 (2010)

On the subject of what we might think of as political fictions or speculative politics, one might demur to the genius Alan Turing in his seminal text “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which appeared in Mind (Volume LIX, Issue 236, October 1950, Pages 433–460). This is the essay in which Turing proposes his famous, influential “Imitation Game,” a key inspiration for McEwan’s Machines Like Me and many other ensuing creative and scientific enterprises. Near the end of the paper, in the section on Learning Machines, Turing offers this compelling thought:

The idea of a learning machine may appear paradoxical to some readers. How can the rules of operation of the machine change? They should describe completely how the machine will react whatever its history might be, whatever changes it might undergo. The rules are thus quite time-invariant. This is quite true. The explanation of the paradox is that the rules which get changed in the learning process are of a rather less pretentious kind, claiming only an ephemeral validity. The reader may draw a parallel with the Constitution of the United States.

The paralleling of the US Constitution and the “idea of a learning machine” is a vital notion, a conceptual innovation that bridges several spheres, beyond science and ideology. Turing points to the mechanics of political advancement within a practical framework, embodied in the Constitutional text. The program contained therein, he suggests, is rooted in learning through trial and error, as a working model for progressive experimentation in sustainable democracy, conforming to a loose definition of the “learning machine.” His is a brilliant observation and true. That the American contemporary experience diverges from Turing’s vision of the nation’s promise leads to the question, “Why - why is this not our reality?” Or, “What might be done differently?” Or, “What and who are the obstacles and impediments to the proper functioning of Constitutional democracy in the USA?” We live in an age where such inquiries have gone META.

“Notes on Dimensional Time” animation, “Gramatica Parda” installation View, ANDlab, Los Angeles (October 2010, Photo by John Merrell)

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The early studies on increased Internet usage during the Corona Virus pandemic clearly demonstrate a massive global surge toward virtualization in a broad range of human activities. This development accelerated a long trend occurring over a period of decades, following the emergence of personal computing, and then ubiquitous networked electronic devices, connected to a vast array of industrial, mechanical, software-based systems. The drift from mostly agrarian living to mechanized living has been a pivotal narrative in the modern age. The question, sometimes lost or repressed in the push to Progress, is How have these changes in how we do what we do define who we are? How do we think about things and each other, now? More importantly, is this good or bad? The critique of Progress, broadly defined, has been frequently relegated to a recessive position in the scheme of things, framed as a metaphysical hindrance to the irrefutable facts of science, math and measurement. The former is framed as Idealism, the latter pragmatism. The economy of Progress through industrialization has displaced the less savory drive to globalize through imperialism, colonization, justified by religious fervor and ideological superiority. The role of the Humanities over many centuries, provisioned primarily in the West, has been to assign virtuosity, to rationalize the prospects and effects of partitioned globalization. The economy, roughly configured, consisted of power over peoples, the conversion of land, sea and air to property, and the extraction of value from all that can be commoditized. Virtualization, coupled with a crisis - the approach of a tipping point in returns on investment with the constructs of material economy - has enabled established hierarchies to pivot to a novel prospective domain. That domain, plainly speaking, is Us.

Art for Humans Blog, snapshot September 21, 2002, Internet Archive, Wayback Machine.

INTRODUCTION

On September 12, 2002 I posted an entry - Number 22 - titled “Surf for Aesthetics” to the Art for Humans blog, which at that time was hosted on Blogger. Nearly two decades later the post is still available for viewing, via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine HERE and on the the blogger platform, which for now is still AFG-maintained, in an archival state. To begin the current project, OCCUPY 2021 | A Thing & Its Self, I wanted to establish the main throughline, establishing a triad of chronological nodes, as a point of origination for a meaningful, dimensional discourse on art, philosophy and media in the early twenty-first century. Our inquiry would concentrate on the three centers of contemporary life: politics; economics; and society. Thematically, the orientation would allow wide latitude in discussions on the impact of phenomena, such as the COVID 19 pandemic, on individuals and collectives over the specified timeline. Comparisons to other eras would be enabled, on a chronological basis, but also through other means of association arising from the designated concentric models. The curated historical references serve to anchor the discourse in the experiential, both individual and shared or collective. Through the experiential, the study can turn to interpretation, and possibly definition of central issues with which the one and many are engaged. The medium of the discourse itself may be presumed to be perceptual. We suggest that the nature of interpretive perception is complicated, convoluted and changes over time, in short — dimensional. An additional consideration will be the interplay between virtual realities and the Real, with emphases on both theoretical and practical or technical responses. The scale and scope of the discourse will be extended by linking it to other discourses, timelines and interpretive modes, which we frame as historical. At the heart of the project is the investigation of the Thing, and our current understanding of what a Thing is, relative to ourselves. This concept is useful to approach the complex relationship between man and computer, for example, although the significance of the configuration (Man+Thing) is greater than that key contemporary subject (Man+Computer), and not just in a general<>specific sense. For one thing, the Man/Thing relationship is one of our most ancient. The assumptions of Thingness versus humanity’s self-conception move much of Civilization’s expressive, scientific, and ideological evolution (or lack thereof).

CONTENT: Football Friday Night, Nashville 2001

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I. In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is with respect to the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of phenomena; that the things which we intuit, are not in themselves the same as our representations of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; and that these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us. We know nothing more than our mode of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which, though not of necessity pertaining to every animated being, is so to the whole human race. With this alone we have to do. Space and time are the pure forms thereof; sensation the matter. The former alone can we cognize à priori, that is, antecedent to all actual perception; and for this reason such cognition is called pure intuition. The latter is that in our cognition which is called cognition à posteriori, that is, empirical intuition. The former appertain absolutely and necessarily to our sensibility, of whatsoever kind our sensations may be; the latter may be of very diversified character. Supposing that we should carry our empirical intuition even to the very highest degree of clearness, we should not thereby advance one step nearer to a knowledge of the constitution of objects as things in themselves. For we could only, at best, arrive at a complete cognition of our own mode of intuition, that is of our sensibility, and this always under the conditions originally attaching to the subject, namely, the conditions of space and time; while the question: “What are objects considered as things in themselves?” remains unanswerable even after the most thorough examination of the phenomenal world. — Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “General Remarks on Transcendental Æsthetic.” (1781)

“Blue MTN #1,” Watercolor pencil on paper, 12" x 9" (2021)

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On September 11, 2001, I watched the television with a small crowd of people in Fido’s, a coffee shop in Hillsboro Village in Nashville, Tennessee. The screen was filled with video of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Anchormen and -women, commentators and reporters were tasked with describing these terrible images in real time. People jumped from the burning highrises, plummeting to their deaths below. Politicians, local authorities, military personnel and first responders communicated official information. Witnesses gave their accounts. Within 24 hours, we knew America was at war, although the scope and type of the conflict was, in that moment, speculative.

On September 26, 2011, I traveled from Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York City to Lower Manhattan by subway. My destination was Zuccotti Park, where the Occupy Wall Street protest was located, in the financial district. I walked the last few blocks, and as I approached the scene, the noise and commotion swelled. Drums pounded. The police presence was massive. One of the first things I noticed were the signs, but I realized immediately that this thing, whatever it was, was unlike any gathering I had encountered previously. Something was happening, and it had “juice.” Media was there. I wandered around a bit, taking it in. A successful, elderly foreign artist who had participated in the ‘68er scene had suggested I visit OWS, and determine whether she could donate a painting to the cause, whatever it was. I had done as much prep as possible, via the web, and by asking and calling around. I had planned to attend a meeting of the Occupy Arts & Culture Working Group to ask about their policy on art donations for my friend. I found the meeting fairly easily. The park was not too crowded then, at that time of the afternoon. The session lasted what seemed like a long time, but it was interesting - fun, even. There were all these strange protocols: hand signals, stacks, facilitators, mic. checks; it all was rather mystifying. Some heavy hitters were in attendance, including Nato Thompson of PS1/Creative Time, the Yes Men, art reporter and critic Martha Schwendener and others, but also some real anonymous characters. By the end of it, I had signed on, volunteering to build a web site for the group, which had given itself the unfortunate name of “Occupennial” - ignoring my web-technical objections: the word was too long and hard to spell for ‘Net usage; the subtext was irrelevant for the target demographic (the 99% of everybody, everywhere); Occupennial expressed art world biases not suited for the movement; etc. I had suggested instead “OccupyArt” dot com or - org. Either Nato or the Yes Men had popcorned Occupennial and championed it, so when the vote was taken, the matter was settled. Most of the meeting consisted of logistical problem-solving. Inquiries from all directions were flooding the communication channels, and no clear response program existed, and there was no obvious leadership. Ideas about art shows, auctions and artsy direct actions were floated and considered. It was all very exciting, especially in the context of the protest itself, which was phenomenal, a subject and object, and the platform, all at once. Some time later, after some enthralling post-meeting conversations, encounters and observations, I left Zuccotti Park, a.k.a., Liberty Square, for the BK, with my mind blown, exhausted.

On August 30, 2021, news of the last plane leaving Kabul airport reached my computer in Astoria, Oregon via a constellation of websites. The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Times, Politico, The Hill, and others, and through social media channels. There almost isn’t anything more to say about it. The coverage was generally not journalistic. The hyper-polarized sensationalism that typifies info-media now makes remote analysis by a layperson, by the Average Joe citizen, increasingly difficult. My internal reaction was complicated, and this essay represents an effort to sort through the complications. Outwardly, life went on. August 30 was a Monday, in the waning days of summer. The Corona Virus pandemic was surging, and any faith in the health system to adequately respond to the crisis had been undermined by underperformance, prevarication and confusion from the top-down in administration. We were preparing for our son’s precarious in-person, fourth grade school year. His Youth Football season had started with practices. The weather in Astoria was a bit cooler than average, but ferocious climate calamity had engulfed the American West with raging wildfire, on the heels of prolonged drought. Elsewhere, savage storms wreaked havoc. Everyone, everywhere, seemed on the verge of a nervous breakdown - lockdown, quarantine, uncertainty, lack of human touch, the rewriting of social scripts disrupted any consensuality. Migration of so much interactivity to virtual platforms proved insufficient and unsatisfactory on many levels. Many local community businesses were struggling. Yet, somehow, the fortunes of the super-rich and their multinational companies and conglomerates, like freshly-divorced wealthiest man Jeff Bezos and Amazon, improved inverse-proportionally to the dire circumstances of the rest of us. Bezos and Branson had just jetted into the edges of space on weird joyrides. Menacing China was on the rise! Domestic Terror was set to supersede other Terrors at the top of the list of threats to freedom and civilization. The entertainment industry was struggling to find a model for these times. What the hell. And America was a loser again. Viet Nam 2.0. The Taliban were back, victorious. The War on Terror was a failure. Guys in robes driving pickup trucks had defeated the most advanced, well-funded army on the planet. What else possibly could go wrong? How could one not be depressed?

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The 20 year anniversary of 9/11 and the 10 year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in 2021, framed as a time-linked combine, present an opportunity to highlight integral features of contemporary perception that facilitate the next vital phases of processing reality, such as critique, reflection and introspection. The two events (9/11 and OWS) subjectively make an odd couple, and together usually do not arouse the fascination of the discursive class. From a certain angle and conjoined, they serve as markers in unfolding sequences that intertwine outside the autonomous discourses for either. One feature of the configuration “9/11-OWS-2021” to note is compression, as a temporal phenomenon in collective memory. The notation can be formulated as a proposition. The decade separating 9/11 and OWS plus the post-Occupy decade establish the first and second nodes of a sequence in historical time. The events bracket the nodal sequence. When thus linking two chronological instances, the specification naturally inclines interceding moments into recession. As in the Parallax view, which Zizek explains in the opening of his book so titled:

The common definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply "subjective," due to the fact that the same object which exists "out there" is seen from two different stations, or points of view. It is rather that, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently "mediated," so that an "epistemological" shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an "ontological" shift in the object itself. Or, to put it in Lacanese, the subject's gaze is always-already inscribed into the perceived object itself, in the guise of its "blind spot," that which is "in the object more than object itself," the point from which the object itself returns the gaze.

The emphatic foregrounding effect denotes the hierarchical rendering of events, in terms of ontological importance. It is a lossy thing. Alexander Galloway stipulates in “A Lossy Manifesto:” “Lossy compression thus is imperative today for theories of media and mediation, because lossy compression is the best way to upcast toward the generic. Lossy compression accomplishes this via an impoverishment or impotentialization of existence.” (Culture and Communication blog post, Jan. 15, 2017). Using Galloway’s compressive term for now, could we not conceive of the post-9/11 generation as predominantly “generic?” For the moment, let’s keep in mind Deleuze, when he says, “Spatio-temporal position is not a conceptual property.” (p. 12, “Kant: Synthesis and Time,” seminar at the University of Paris…1978). All “Property” is materially generic in its compression of hard, soft or wet information, with the exception being non-corporate - artificial - personhood.

On Deleuzian Kant’s synthetic other hand, an applicable remedy for avoiding existential impotence is extension. In the interests of minimizing Freudian anxiety, and to temporarily conform to the proverbial “Rule of three,” why don’t we simply add a decade to the progression? What is the arbitrary nodal September event for 2021? As of September 10, it appeared there was no correlating event in perfect phenomenological alignment - except the end of the United State’s occupation of Afghanistan. Over-specificity is not our analytic friend here, and our time division construct is rickety, conceptually. A contributing factor to consider is the fuzzy nature of historical beginning or ending. The start and finish of anything happening is generally an arbitrary designation, assigned after the fact. Such rigorous timeliness in the “rearview mirror” is prone to overreach. The Visionary in reverse is improved by a more universal perspective on the composition of events, which includes the start and finish. The idea of the isolated event marginalizes both contingency prior and causality in an event’s aftermath, such as ripple effects. If isolating an event in terms of history is a focal function, the ideological isolation of the event creates a practical problem of assessment on future events. The emphasis of an event’s historical otherness or isolation, also subverts and inhibits the analysis of eventual relativity over time.

We can cite Occupy as a case in point. The parameters of the OWS timeline are chronologically blurry. Some narratives suggest the occupation commenced in August, and erupted as a bonafide global movement in September. Likewise, the evacuation of US forces and Afghani allies was officially determined to be August 31, but the last transport left Kabul the day prior. Apparently, the pull-out will continue indefinitely, unofficially. Both events at minimum condition subsequent developments. The extent to which Occupy has influenced subsequent political, economic and social movements is open to debate. The power of opposing external forces to shape perception of Occupy (and the de-occupation of Afghanistan) through media and by other means, can be scrutinized. Both assembly and collapse are phenomena that infer the quality of continuum. Perhaps there should be a physics of history to analyze the behavior of historical “particles” that come together and fall apart on either end of an event. We wonder about the forces and dynamics that make a thing happen, but conjecture is insufficient to explain the mechanics of event as change agent. The complexities are profound.

If we assume a beginning and end to be a negotiation, we should settle on the terms of the negotiation itself, while the stakes, the consequences, remain harder, if not impossible, to determine in advance. Our cited events are merely symptoms of a practically immediate, universal negotiation over the terms of existence, on the precipice of its culmination (the world as we know it) and inception (the world as we would make it, or wish it to be, for ourselves). All negotiation is contextual to an extent. Just before he passed away in August 2021, the great Jean-Luc Nancy published “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (Philosophy World Democracy, July 29, 2021). The reader is advised to read this masterwork in its entirety, because it provides authoritative mediation for the themes and subject matter addressed in “Occupy 2021,” and so much more. Nancy manages to clarify the essential issues in contemporary Philosophy, by unpacking the legacies that inform it, and simultaneously illuminating a promising path forward. A brief but comprehensive history for Philosophy, both Western and Eastern, is mapped. Ubiquitous opinion, is deferentially put in its place. Colonialism and globalism are summarily and efficiently confronted and denuded. Nancy’s astute guidance on matters of thought, framed as task, negotiates the contradictions of origin and completion, permitting us a chance to discard that which undermines truth and our realization of it. Jean-Luc contextualizes the negotiations of Philosophy in synthesis with Science, Art and Politics, especially, moving forward. In the process he envisions an elegant topology for truthful thinking in a possible world. Facing his own imminent mortality, Jean-Luc Nancy writes:

Philosophy begins with this question: what if there is no longer any order available – neither sacred, nor social, nor cosmic? The axis or soul of the philosophical answer consists in the necessity of founding an order itself.
This necessity has two aspects: on the one hand, it requires us to discover this world stripped of its attributes; on the other hand, it requires us to justify the approach taken and its results.
Keeping it very simple we can say: the first requirement invents “nature”, the second invents “reason”. Nothing could be more elementary than this nature/reason pairing. We know it well and it has structured centuries of thought. Today, however, we are scrambling ourselves: are oil, electricity, the possibility of calculation, information, natural or rational realities?
What has guided philosophy, in all its forms, has always been to give reason to nature and to naturalize reason. To give reason: that is to say, to bring to light the principles from which the cosmos, life and, if possible, thought itself proceed. This last point comes back to what I called “naturalizing reason”: understanding that the totality of what exists comes from and accomplishes a purpose. The latter has ceased to be the realization of an order given with the world itself.

“Seven Episodes: A Unifying Dream Interrupts Causality :: The Casualty Animates the Space” (2006, Claremont Graduate University Installation Gallery)

Our treatment will cross-reference current contemporary art discourse, with a nod to the technological influence. Art and media are creatively conflated in the experience of the artist, who tactically integrates the discourse on analog and digital for psychological impact. The confessional approach toward the subjective assists the objective, by establishing the illusion of proximity between the maker and user, formerly artist and viewer. The compression of content into a consumable package appeals to the cultural marketplace, with all the attention that accompanies success there. The authenticity of the product is validated by signs of the personal, instead of the artist as actual person. Artificiality is a settled matter in the genre, while the human presence in art is rendered unsettling. The tension between the transmitter and receiver can be explained technically, as glitch, not kitsch. The critic becomes an explainer, apologist, interpreter… for tech novelty, for innovation. The concerns of art are superimposed, usually clumsily, on the multimedia exhibition as artifact of process. A reason, logic must be applied to the project to validate its artistic merit, prioritizing the contemporary for aesthetic merit. Our orienting example will be an extended quote from Hal Foster’s review of Ed Atkins “The Worm” in the Artforum Fall 2021 edition, entitled: “Your Loss.” Foster’s take on Atkin’s animation, presented in his New Museum show “Get Life/Love’s Work,” sufficiently addresses some basic concerns about “the state of the art,” to be explored below in “Occupy 2021:”

“The wager made by Atkins is that if reality can be derealized by such technologies, it might also be rediscovered there, and this might occur in a few ways. First, he believes that, once outmoded, technology passes over to the side of ‘base materiality’; its very clunkiness becomes a reality effect. Atkins adapts the term corpsing—the moment when an actor breaks character and so dispels the illusion of the performance—‘to describe a kind of structural revelation more generally’; his examples are when a vinyl record jumps or a streaming movie buffers. To corpse a medium is to expose its materiality, even to underscore its mortality, and in this moment the real might poke through. Second, punctuated by the gestural tics of the Atkins avatar, The Worm is also rife with manufactured glitches—sudden blurs, flares, beeps, and crackles—and these apparent cracks in the artifice might provide another opening to the real. Although these reality effects are artificial, ‘they baffle the signs of reality by parodying them, engendering a new kind of realism.’7 Third, if the real might be felt when an illusion fails, so too might it be sensed when that illusion is ‘glazed with effects to italicize the artifice,’ that is, when illusionism is pushed to a hyperreal point. In this register, Atkins conforms to the criterion of ‘fidelity’ in technological reproduction, but excessively so, and in this way claims such fidelity for the side of ‘revelatory materialism rather than techno magic.’ Fourth, Atkins exploits a central feature of high-definition video inherited from photography and film, at least when they were experienced by early viewers: The inanimate appears to be alive. This confusion is a telltale attribute of the uncanny (in his account, Freud was inspired by those avatars known as doppelgängers), and this uncanniness is another “mortal experience” that evokes the real.8 Finally, if photography and film opened up an ‘optical unconscious’ for Benjamin, a reality not perceived by the naked eye, high-definition video expands this realm for Atkins. His surrogate dead men make visible the psychopathology of everyday technological life...

Here his notion of art confronts his theory of media, which Atkins sketched in a 2018 lecture titled ‘Losslessness.’ ‘Losslessness,’ he tells us, ‘refers to a category of data compression algorithm that allows original data to be perfectly reproduced.’ To achieve this fidelity, digital media, even more than analog media, aim to disappear; ‘technology constantly seeks to be lost.’ The magic of technology wants not simply to cover up our existential lack—this is what makes it the ultimate fetish—but to distract us from its inevitable failure. Its myth of losslessness serves ‘ideological ends,’ among them our fantasies of ‘coherency,’ ‘holism,’ even ‘immortality.’ However, it never quite succeeds: Loss is felt nonetheless, and because this loss cannot be acknowledged, our relationship to technology is rendered ‘neurotic,’ marked by ‘aimless melancholy or shame.’ In response, Atkins argues, ‘the artist must first set out to find the technology,’ and the initial step is to make the technology ‘corporeal, analog, mortal.’ This “movement toward the literal” is not simply ‘a rebuttal of the desires of the tech’; it also points to the ‘uncovering of other realities,’ which in turn promotes the ‘freedom of the subject.’11 Here we are back on the familiar ground of modernist defamiliarization, a project that is now vastly complicated given that the human seems almost fused with the technological and the world often appears to be media all the way down. Moreover, for Atkins, it is not enough to defetishize technology, to demystify its magic. For his work to be effective, illusion must be allowed ‘sufficient function’ not only ‘to sustain critique’ but also to promote affective recognition—to express loss, to ‘set in motion a shift from melancholy to purposive mourning,’ to find in media technology an interpersonal connection that it always promises but rarely delivers.”

— Excerpt from "Your Loss" by Hal Foster*

*[Ed.: Footnotes presented as they appear in the original text, linked HERE and above.]

September 11, 2010 Commemoration Ceremony, Lower Manhattan (PJM)

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Faced with the irrationality of the situation, with its insoluble decomposition, what is one to think? What is one to do? Nancy suggests a creative Philosophy. But first, we must accept the task at hand, the original action of which is allotropic resistance, bearing the signs of a second negation. Near the brilliant essay’s conclusion, Jean-Luc asks of us, “What Heidegger means by the ‘task of thought’ – at least what we can indicate – is this: are we going to stand in front of the untenable?” Atkins co-optation and re-appropriation of the term “corpsing” opens an aesthetic portal to a rich cache of raw concepts having strong bonds to Old Media and canonical art. The body, in death, is the subject of masterpieces of astonishing variety. From Roman death masks to the Pieta, the representation of mortality in art is a key theme. The grisly thread coursing through culture over the centuries, the physicality of a life’s ending, persists through the contemporary era, into post-Internet art practice. The translation of the human creative preoccupation - with dying as a corporeal event or experience into the computational format - is immediately metaphysical. The real world and virtual world are not identical. The concepts of life and death are divergent in the two spaces. The life/death binary is suspect in the virtual, and things anyway are much more complicated than that.

The contingencies of all systems have had to be reevaluated. Fantasy has been redesigned for the PC, and then again for the mobile. Whimsy is encoded, available in an online catalog. Thought is recursive, molded to the tweet. Access to the unconscious is surrendered stealthily to the search engine. Reactionaries molded by valid frustrations and desires absent viable recourse or expression are nudged by network dynamics into conspiracy or worse. Identity bursts forth only to suffer dispersion. Home is a home page. Layers of protocols bend the human, not the machine, which answers to START PROGRAM. RUN PROGRAM. END PROGRAM. Millions of programs on billions of devices hum with silent but activity. We walk looking into the palms of our hands, into the light, the glowing. A nagging whisper but no one is talking. The phone on the bed stand keeps us from sleeping and greets us in the morning and never leaves our side. Satisfaction is mechanically incomprehensible. The stoccato flow of electricity, the ON/OFF switch, fail to correlate to our concepts and rituals of living and dying, or love. The machine cannot comprehend our natural nakedness. Humanity doesn’t stand a chance, but it never has. Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” perfectly encapsulates the malaise within the nightmare. He writes, “Enlightenment dawns on the dullest. It begins around the eyes. From there it spreads out.” The moment the condemned realizes he is the bug trapped in the web. Whether or not the story’s ending is happy is ambiguous.

“Corpsing” (September 21, 2010, Manhattan, near the Fed)

The existential man/computer conundrum reduces to this: As soon as people turned to processors to solve the our worldly problems, the machine commenced to process us, and our world, in its image. Machines (outside the movies, e.g., Blade Runner’s great scene with Rutger Hauer: “Time to die.”) as far as we know do not have knowledge or understanding of death, as we know and understand death, or don’t. In the machine world, the Mechiverse, the solution for death, its fix, like any other, is a workaround.

The Game mentality pervades the field of computing, and has done so since the early days. We have come quite a ways from RAND Corporation’s A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates and its poker tests. We are no longer using punch cards to figure things out, but rocket technology is still at a premium, which we will discuss later. RAND has evolved to become a satellite of American government, contributing data and research on a vast range of policy issues. The ultimate management resource, RAND’s portfolio of technical expertise and global influence is immense. Pondering the diversified production of this mighty corporation, one might wonder if the approaches to problem-solving championed there have not remediated most of humanity to NPC (Non-Player Character) status. One might get the impression that RAND, as a mandate of its corporate AI, reserves the determinate status of the RPC (Role Playing Character) for itself, which may or may not apply to its workforce and clientele, but presumably does, to those for whom the corporation is a property in their portfolios. One might imagine that an outfit like RAND would care little for art, in its calculations, and one would be wrong. In 2004, RAND published a noteworthy monograph by Kevin F. McCarthy and Elizabeth Heneghan Ondaatje on the state of art in general, and new media in particular, entitled “From Celluloid to Cyberspace: The Media Arts and the Changing Arts World.” It is a bloodless but accurate analysis of the domain, confirming the NPC/RPC bias outlined above. The second chapter, "The Arts Environment in America,” closes with this paragraph:

The exact shape of the arts world in the future is, of course, unclear. But it seems certain that technological developments will continue to play a central role in shaping that future. Technology will have implications both for the various components of the arts environment (audiences, artists, art organizations, and funders) and, as Benjamin (1986) suggests, for the nature of art itself. Since the media arts have been the most aggressive in their use of technology, they provide a window into that future.

September 11, 2010 media coverage, lower Manhattan.

“Benjamin” is Walter Benjamin, and the work cited is the ubiquitous “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” originally published roughly a half-century before 1986. We will have more to say about Benjamin and this essay later, but for now, let us consider that he is cited in a RAND paper on new media’s art world impact. Of the many sources available on the topic, why did Benjamin’s view gain such establishment credibility? The paradigm underpinning “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as an evaluation of the object, art, endorses a series of false equivalencies, put forth as settled arguments. Reproducibility does not fit within the definition of “fine” art at the time of Benjamin’s penning his seminal essay. Art copies and forgeries, versions in other mediums, were understood to be derivative versions of originals, of lesser value. Art-as-form-of-labor, in 1935, represented a political concept, and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is quite obviously political, as much as it is aesthetic, in its perspectives, predictions and argument. The motivation of the essay is to a certain extent evangelical. By 2004, however, after decades in remission, Benjamin and essay had been revived and rehabilitated to other purposes. What purposes?

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It is an extreme idea, to posit an absolute disciplinary division between art and science. The two fields intertwine at the most fundamental level of materiality, for art. Paint, is a chemical product, for instance. Art and science share the experimental model. Outside the lab and studio, which are not perfect reflections, the complexes for artistic and scientific interpretation display significant differences. Some of these dissimilarities are structural, others ideological. The economics of art and science are wildly unalike. Art-Science partnership or collaboration is a somewhat traditional. Important figures in art history, such as Leonardo da Vinci, stand out. What we might think of as technical art has roots in antiquity. The Trojan Horse could be labeled technical art. Both “science” and “art” are general terms. “Art” has come to describe general subjectivity. “Science” has come to describe general objectivity.” Pre-art, pre-science, such specialty of meaning in identification was, as far as we know, relatively unimportant. In a tribal social scheme, the lines are blurred. Contemporary art (and modern science) embrace a bit of blurriness, in the interests of pragmatism, which can be political, economic or social.

Modern art and science both demonstrate a speculative and indicative urge simultaneously. In this characteristic they are alike, in their humanity. We attempt to anticipate change, ostensibly in the service of survival. We look to the past for indications of future conditions. Assessments and planning are based on interpretations of the past, which are applied to projections for the future. The utility of historical criticism hinges on the accuracy of analysis and the truthful, honest and unbiased view of scenarios that do not yet exist. Historical humor arises from study of past visions of the future. Much historical tragedy arises from the follies of plans gone awry. With respect to art and science, commingled, in Futurism, Dada, Constructivism and other movements, through the contemporary period, which produced Speculative Realism and the 3D Additivist Manisfesto, we have a selection of efforts to contextualize art and science. We have theories of technological aesthetics, with Philosophical implications. Critical hinge points are fodder for academic discourse, as to which theory has proved most or least actionable, sustaining or diminishing, over time.

A pertinent example is Harold Rosenberg’s “Past Machines, Future Art,” which was initially published as a New Yorker review in the January 25 issue, and was included in Rosenberg’s essential collection of essays The De-Definition of Art in 1972.Rosenberg expressed skepticism at the prospects for scientific art, or artistic science. His comments are incisions into the construct, which today ring excessively pessimistic, given the emergence of a technological art mainstream of the early 21st Century.“Past Machines, Future Art” is a review of the MoMA exhibit "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age," which Rosenberg aggregates within a list of artists, artworks and projects that today are not necessarily easily fitted within an art-science binary conjunction. The art historical narratives have evolved, since the late sixties, and science is practically something else entirely. The current popular conceptions of both art and science bear little resemblance to those alluded to in Rosenberg’s survey. He zooms in on “Tinguely’s ‘Homage to New York,’ the machine construction that destroyed itself in the Sculpture Garden in the spring of 1960.” He goes on, “Philosophers of culture may find significance in the fact that so many of the creations sacred to modernism embody destruction, either of objects or of earlier art.” It is salient observation, which does not expand into an inquiry into art directly mirroring Devastation, as such, representationally, simply because It was a predominant feature of the 20th Century.

Rosenberg writes:

The history of the machine in art consists largely of the responses of artists to mechanisms of fantasy and to devices that are out of date or broken down or have changed into something else…The humanization of the machine, in the form of mechanisms that behave like human beings or of human beings that behave like mechanisms, provides a major current of farce, terror, irony and mystery in modern art…In our century, technology has often put in the claim to be not only the collaborator of art but a rival of it or a substitute. Apart from the reactions, pro and con, of artists to machine culture, the presence of an ever-expanding technology has inspired an independent aesthetic of the machine, with values that compete with those of traditional art and the traditional conception of the artist…

It is a sobering, precise assessment, arrived at decades prior to the emergence of the personal computer, the Web and smart phone. Initial notes would have been taken by hand, using pencil or pen and paper. The ideas would then be translated by typewriter for the magazine Wes Anderson romanticizes in his latest film, The French Dispatch. We are reviewing the writer’s review, in our century, the twenty-first. The claims still apply. Further, what is “traditional” and what such “values” might or might not be is today less concrete. Rosenberg continues:

The inspiration of machine art is problem-solving; its chief aesthetic principle is the logical adjustment of means to end. Under the guidance of this principle, it has eliminated decoration from architecture and industrial products, and nonfunctional elements from painting and sculpture. Its concept of an art reduced to essentials has spread far beyond its own mode into seemingly unrelated movements of the past fifty years. Aesthetic reductionism - that is, conceiving painting in terms of color, sculpture in terms of scale, poetry in terms of word or syllables - owes much to the machine ideal. A painting reduced to a minimum is a machine for converting paint into art.

His insights into the machine art have broader implications. The trend Rosenberg describes extends to most things anthro-mechanized. The transformation has been extreme, and, from an historical perspective, practically instantaneous. For examples, consider the human body, or food. Both have been radically re-conceived, according to the principle Rosenberg identifies. The concept of reduction for the dual purposes of production, service and reproducibility is the overriding conception of the post-War period, and is still. Those who study art phenomenologically ought not to be surprised at the ordering of it. The Eakins-Muybridge exchange at Penn is an excellent illustration with respect to aesthetization of mechanical processes. Art is the prime indicator for future technological patterning. Rosenberg is clued in a priori on a turn in history. The creative adaptation of man-machine is apparent now in everything from war to finance to web design for interactive social media. Absent from Rosenberg’s art-centric text, because of the “slow” materiality of art generation and consumption, is an emphasis on speed, which Virillo corrects. Rosenberg goes on:

The “classicism” of machine art, in which the light of the laboratory eliminates subjective shadows, exerts a powerful attraction upon the twentieth-century mind. By contrast, other concepts of creation appear disorganized, vague, and outmoded. At present, the linking of art to technological processes and purposes is the most influential trend in painting and sculpture both here and abroad…One seemed forced to conclude that whether or not “art is dead” or the mechanical age is ended, the age of “the new machine art” has arrived.

The first point is especially intriguing, suggestive of much deeper inquiries into the effects of machined experience on the human psyche, which surface in art, but in life more generally. The human experience of illumination and darkness is primitive. Our optical-interpretive systems are evolved to identify and respond to threats and other base stimuli. These responses over time developed associations with light and dark. Culture, as we currently know it, contains a rich profusion of inferences to our instinctive responses to the things we associate with light and dark as phenomena. The introduction of electricity has in a relatively brief interlude in human history altered our primitive, instinctual memories. That realization alone unveils a trove of interrelated speculative multidisciplinary study. Artists and scientists are already exploring in this direction. Next, Rosenberg points to the design effects of mechanization as a comparative construct indicative of efficiency. This realization suggests another promising direction for study.He limits his view to “concepts of creation,” but the phenomenon extends to other areas, such as production. Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, for instance, transformed labor, and its influence continues through the present. The connection to Muybridge is graphic, although it is less clear to assume a position for art in the machining of civilization, in all its aspects. Is art in the machine age to be thought of as witnessing? Expressing? Are artists collaborators? Or are we, like most people, simply caught up in historical change, sometimes as victims, sometimes complicit, sometimes perpetrating mechanically-assisted harm? What is “the new machine art” about? More simply put, What is “the new machine art?” Has it killed not-machine art, which would be - what - natural art? Rosenberg concludes:

If art is dead, it will stay dead if machine art has to resuscitate it…in a museum a machine has no alternative but to destroy itself, leaving behind a memory of forms that at times resemble those of art.

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[In truth] our occupational exercise for 2021 is almost as artistic and political as philosophical, and the format will reflect it, while adhering to Nancy’s recollection of Philosophy’s former status. Our themes are less timely than time-inflected. The content has even less to do with science. Our impetus will be the proposition, mostly the re-introduction of questions already in play. If anything, the tissue of the textual body presented - its binding - is emotional, not logical and categorical. The effectiveness of its chronology is approximate, a simulation of the expressionistic recall possessed by the survivor of trauma, whose historical rank is nondescript, practically stripped of value in the perpetuating narrative. At best we can only simulate the logics of philosophy or science, and therefore must more or less abandon the prospects of objectifying their aims. Our disclaimer is that of a speaker whose final simulacrum is freedom as a condition for living. To that end the conjuncture of art, philosophy and science is somewhat agreeable, in the medium of truth, itself, and only there. In that medium the question plays a different role, than it does in the respective disciplines, or branches of truth. The question is formed like fruit on a fruit tree (the Truth Tree). The author-survivor transmits a theory of the witness to events over which he has no obvious power. The storyteller, if he was ever a change agent, in the retrospective point of view is no longer one. He is no reliable historian either. What is he, if not one more homo sacer, whose memories are but shades of memories, imagined by a ghostly figure in the void of the historical? He is a thing, even if he remains devoted to the lossy, blurred ghost memory that began as both direct and virtual experience over the span of time. To mark a point of origin, we can reference Agamben, by re-introducing several of his questions, and an observation (p. 60, “Sovereign Body and Sacred Body,” Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995/-9): “Why does the survival of the devotee constitute such an embarrassing situation for the community that it forces it to perform a complex ritual whose sense is so unclear? What is the status of the living body that seems no longer to belong to the world of the living? …What happens to the surviving devotee? Here it is not possible to speak of a missing corpse in the strict sense, for there has not even been a death.”

Our chrono-nodal configuration, considering death and survival, is clearly imperfect. The three selected historical moments contain dissimilarities. For example: The 9-11 attacks caused many fatalities. Political and military measures afterwards, justified by 9-11, resulted in many, many more. The de-occupation incurred casualties, soldier and civilian. OWS self-identified as a peaceful movement. Efforts were made by Occupiers to disassociate with violent protest, specifically Black Bloc tactics. The discourse on “diversity of tactics,” went beyond the consideration of violence versus peaceful means as a position prior to action. Everything was being considered, all the time. Does Occupy have leaders, or will it be leaderless? Do we make demands or not, and if we do, what are they? Should the movement be autonomous, or make alliances with outside organizations, such as Unions? Will Occupy be pursue its aims (or aimlessness) as a strain of anarchy, or will we Occupy Democracy? And so on. On the other hand, even after the 9-11 Commission (a.k.a., The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) published its findings in 2004, the picture of who or what was responsible for those “Terrorist Attacks,” beyond the terrorists themselves, was still very unclear, and remains so through the present day. Obscuration abounds. Official justification for the invasion of Iraq included assertions that Iraq could be linked to the terrorist network responsible for the 9-11 attacks. Conspiracy theories persist, because the explanations for what happened and who was behind it were and are not trusted. Should anyone be surprised by public or private skepticism, the historical shadow?

President Joe Biden, who was Obama’s Vice President during the War on Terror (2008-16) assumed full responsibility for the pullout. Opposition to his decision was forceful, on the part of advocates for endless war and occupation. Critique of the technicalities of the evacuation abounded. In the United States, in matters of armed conflict involving this nation, the President is the Commander-in-Chief. Allies may be brought together, or not, but “the buck stops” with the POTUS, in wartime situations. A month after August 30, 2021, the citizenry of the US have not protested Biden’s decision to any significant degree, and Washington, D.C., seemingly, has moved on. It is an appropriate time to recall the protests against the War on Terror, during President George W. Bush’s first term. The anti-war protests were global, the biggest in history. In spite of those uprisings, the War on Terror continued at least through August of 2021. It is hard to say, whether the War on Terror is over, now. It has not been undeclared. Casualties mount. Terror still exists. It perseveres.

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Another way of comparing languages and determining their relative antiquity is to consider their script, and reason inversely from the degree of perfection of this art. The cruder the writing, the more ancient the language.
The progress of writing is thus a natural progress. And it is a progress of reason. Progress as regression is the growth of reason as writing. ‘Why is that dangerous progress natural? No doubt because it is necessary. But also because necessity operates within language and society, according to ways and powers that belong to the state of pure nature. - Jacques Derrida [p. 271, Of Grammatology, “The Originary Metaphor,” (1967/1997)]

An attribute of the 9/11-OWS [+ 8/30/2021 (the de-occupation end-date in Afghanistan)] chrono-nodal configuration is the convolution of formal and informal reality. Within the convoluted circumstances of these three historical events are apparent and indistinct linkages, both internal and external. The external linkages connect to intricate systems of command and communication. The internal linkages are subtle. How much of what constitutes an event exists for all, as real time data? Top-down decision-making at the institutional or national level occurs in redactable exchanges. For instance, did President Joe Biden select August 31, 2021 for his deadline, based on the Taliban insisting US forces leave the country by September 11, 2021? In its formation, who was party or privy to that decision, and who or what might have influenced it, and why? The issues affecting mass perception of these events to a degree are the result of variable levels of opacity and transparency, distributed among layers of information, ranging from public to private, or secret. The protocols for the information traveling among many layers, through interlinked systems are often not shared evenly among users. The codes for information access to the information are usually inseparable from control systems. We know this because of the efforts by individuals and organizations opposed to the constriction of info flow, such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, etc. One is reminded of the remarkable statement by Donald Rumsfeld:

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.

Given this inoperable operating principle for knowableness, proffered by a high-ranking insider, it is unsurprising that its inherent convolution invites conjecture by outsiders. Both convolution and conjecture suffuse the operations of critique. A third feature of contemporary perception is its resistance to conclusive critical analysis. Instead, the confluence of events promotes narrative over-production, absent meaningful resolution. The situation creates an end to history, as a viable project. The limiting of free speech in the liminal space of public and private on the basis of subjectively determined need-to-know fuels “conspiracy theory.” When subtlety in management becomes obscuration, the manager engages the protocols of stealth and cover-up, applied throughout organizational operations. Protocol produces culture, the encoding of stricture on open transmission. In the Rumsfeld scenario, direct questions meet conflicted interests, camouflaged as epistemology. For comparison, juxtapose the networks for unofficial, official and secret communications in the White House with Occupy’s “open mic.” The Rumsfeld/Bush Administration corrupted the process of data dispersion, as a means to an end - which turned out to be “endless war,” and the reorganization of American principles to conform with that initiative. Torture, for instance, would be “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Mass surveillance would be “Total Information Awareness,” encoded by legislation titled “The Patriot Act.” The conditioning of the receiver of information becomes the project, instead of precise and comprehensive communication of information being the objective.

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When we use a natural language as a metalanguage to describe and reason about an analog cultural experience, we are doing something strange: forcing it into small number of categories which were not designed to describe it. In fact, if we can accurately and exhaustively “put into words” an aesthetic experience, it is likely that this experience is an inferior one. - Lev Manovich (“Computer vision, human senses, and language of art,” AI and Society, November 22, 2020)

We realize, twenty years on, that 9/11 has been used by a bi-partisan consortium of leadership to justify the radical reformation of America. The role of technology in this transformation is hard to overestimate. The compression of imagination over the past twenty years is at the heart of the collective experience within that timeframe. A great flattening of the national identity has materialized, contained in the context of virtuality. The onset of the pandemic has only exacerbated the situation. This is the case not only for the US, but for most, if not all, humanity. Certainly the wired world is broadly modified by the switch from the perceived as physical correlate to remote reality. History joins everything else in the vast stream of data, which supplies the uber-machine, Big Tech, the dominating presence consuming humanity in its self-perception. Tech has assumed god-like proportions, with implications for all sectors of society, across markets, relationships and ideological boundaries.

Media coverage of the three cited events 9/11-OWS [+ 8/30/2021] illustrates the phenomenon of historical convolution, with its promotion of conjectural perception. What does not occur in the suffusion of conjecture, which is designed to confuse, to avoid conclusion, is a viable process for accountability. Clarity is sacrificed to critical speculation, centered in mass media channels, for optimum impact over time. This is a proven propaganda technique. The repetition of information, transmitted according to strict pattern schemes, is effective. The effectiveness of such propaganda is amplified by a complementary program for speculation and critique. The potency of subliminal suggestion is being tested on enormous populations, at unprecedented scale. The capacity to implement all manner of scheme on the individuals and communities - without the prior knowledge or consent of those affected undermines choice. The protections of privacy have been tossed aside. Exploitation is now a reflective disorder, happening in the vacuum of physical territory and resources to be consumed by ambitious neo-conquistadores. The novel syndromes are derivatively and virtually cannibalistic. Mankind transmutes itself into a resuscitating monstrosity, a terrifying revenant. The zombie is a preeminent cultural sign of the times, the inversion of Christ’s resurrection.

In the meantime, in a game of bait and switch, art and media have become falsely synonymous, surreptitiously equivalent. The merger of the two has been more of a hostile takeover by media. In Industry and Intelligence: Art Since 1820, Liam Gillick conducts an interrogation of art historical analysis using a format that this essay echoes. Writing on substantial developments in 1963 (p.68), one of his chrono-nodes or -markers, he explains:

Populism marked the artistic terrain. Populism confronted the emergent political threat of the artist as a figure through an excessive reaction to what was deployed as art. Populism in Europe was represented by social democratic or socialist politicians as much as by the right-wing organizations who instrumentalized funding bodies and private foundations. Such populism was in direct confrontation to the politically conscious threat of the artist as a figure.

What we might gather from integrating Gillick’s contentions with those herein, is the evolutionary quality of artistic change over time. The influence on art - of politics, economics, social interests and so on - thus is embedded in the historical, like an insect in amber, and fossilized. Art and artist can be displaced or reassigned, to occupy an historical object within media, within the conceptual and conjectural discourse. The implications of the configuration are plentiful, positive, negative and neutral. The main thing is that a utility for art and artist is derived. One supposes the derivative purposing of art and artist would depend on the user, whose usage would determine whether it is a good or bad thing, or nothing at all. Which is a naive presumption.

The tactical debasement of art, beginning with Plato’s excommunication of it in The Republic, alternates with art’s containment, since then. With both tactics, art is deterritorialized. The Church became the primary force for containing art within the bounds of dogmatic architecture through the Reformation. The liberation of art from its constriction is summarized by Frank Stella in “Caravaggio” (p. 5-6, Working Space, 1986). The decoupling of art from architecture is a precursor to the movements that followed.

After 1500 the artist became critical of his relationship to the surfaces of architecture and sought to modify it, either by separation, making more use of individual portable panels and canvases, or by accommodation, creating a painted space that interacted in some meaningful, though often competitive way, with the structure.

“The most important deterritorialization was the transformation that converted a special-purpose Turing machine, rigidly defined by its internal states and the symbols it uses to write on its memory tape, into a universal Turing machine capable of simulating any special-purpose one,” writes deLanda in Philosophy and Simulation (Appendix, p. 201). The Internet of Things now has deterritorialized one’s personal relationship with the Turing machine. As the technological databank, or the Cloud, increasingly replaces the Collective Mind as the operative consciousness of human beings, the conceptual is modified drastically. So, too, is the objective modified… or more specifically, the Object is altered fundamentally, for machine sentience, upending the Cartesian balance, and its inherent anthropocentricity. In “The Thing,” Heidegger says in 1971, “Today everything present is equally near and equally far. The distanceless prevails.” In the contemporary mind, because of the (false) immediacy provided by technology, remote witnessing is weirdly reducible to the feeling of “sharing,” if not shared ontology. This shared feeling is illusory, generative and active. The false media is perceptually convincing, sufficiently capable of generating confusion in the user-witness. One’s idea of “being there” is transformed, through a deception of the senses, which have not adapted to experiential technology for the purposes of discernment and interpretation. To put it another way, the meaning of Being is technically dislocated from Mind. Presence is thereby radically corrupted, and perceptual over-stimulation becomes a dangerous side-effect. The difference between the actual Thing and the immaterial Thing is made indistinguishable. The suspension of immediacy enables practices such as the drone strike. One can refer to the infamous leaked footage publicized by Chelsea Manning, accidentally (on purpose) chronicling the nature of our contemporary version of World War.

The capacity of the artist to adapt within the progression of art over time does not necessarily parallel the image of the artist proceeding through art history. Now, artist-image is folded into a conception tied to marketing strategies. The management of the syndicated artist has no industrial parameters, because art has been contrived as an asset, a function of a realized investment, and the artist is relegated to labor. Exceptions exist, and these are forwarded not as rarities, but as aspirational figures. The architecture for the global artist (image) is total, because art and artist are considered virtual. The presence of humanity is dualistic, an inevitability that must pass. The animation of the artist as presence, as real, is temporary. The living artist artist will die, which is the hinge on which the market model turns. The capitalist artist is compensated as little as possible while working (alive), so as to maximize profit value when the inventory of her art is knowable, finite. It is tempting to frame the art business as a long con, and many have done so. To deride the industrial enterprise along these lines is facile. Interpreting art as grift is simply a repackaging of Plato. To suggest that art and the art business should exist independently concedes the best domains of art to capitalist domination. The problem is not reducible to capitalism, however. Art is up against everything, practically, that exists to dominate, subjugate, exterminate, exploit, etc. Art threatens Wall Street, but it threatens Beijing, equally. One needn’t be fooled by the Chinese simulated art market, designed solely to outperform the Western market, in the mediated global perception. Art also threatens radical, rich Islam. One needn’t be fooled by the gaudiness of Dubai, the desire of the Rulers of the Middle East to be recognized as civilized global players, not Sultans. Why is art so valuable to these actors on the world stage, in their ambition to “level up”? For the same reason art itself is and has always been valuable to humanity: Art and image are inextricable in the mind.

nomenclature

∞

Opening his review “Materialist Invisibility: Art As Organic Development In Pamela Rosenkranz’s Work,” Nicolas Bourriaud (Flash Art 336, Fall 2021) writes:

In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx declared that the “engine of history” was the working class, ushering in revolutions. In these early years of the twenty-first century, the climate crisis, followed by a lethal COVID pandemic, show us that the engine of contemporary history is no longer a human group, and that it partly sidesteps the order of the visible: what makes our history is the increasingly chaotic interactions between human activities and living matter. We are in fact living inside the direct and indirect effects of these interactions.

The space for concepts and objects has become a perceptual continuum, within which things and our conceptions (of them) are conflated. The borders between material and immaterial have dissolved. Definition of what is real or not real becomes problematic, therefore. Alternatively, experience and perception combine in the sensation of total immersion in things, and subsequently the whole thing (unity) is remanded to the shadow of itself, its conceptual version. If we identify this state as Virtual, we risk converting our present time into a simulation of presence. Out of that model the only thing one can expect is the simulacra, a projection of an uncertainty, defined as the real thing for practical purposes. At this point, discernment stipulates uselessness, and takes on art’s contemporary lack of stable meaning. It will be fascinating to see what the post-9-11 generation of artists makes of all this, once they attain maturity. The old tropes of “creativity” and “flow” no longer apply. Big Tech’s armies of marketeers drained those words of any meaning. Similarly, the supposed impotence of activism to resist both neoliberalism and -conservatism has proven a premature reading of the topology. Visible fractures in directional mass messaging systems can be attributed to skepticism about “play,” another trope sucked dry by marketing overuse. A recent example is Jake Angeli, “The Horned Headdress Capitol Protestor,” who was convicted for his part in the January 6 uprising. Trump was not. The contradiction and the moral perfidy of the power dynamic is resonant in the cautionary analysis of Hannah Arendt in Responsibility and Judgment (p. 132, 2003): “By identifying ourselves with the one who issues the commands, we experience the feeling of superiority which comes from wielding power.”

The malaise is psychic, the consequences are political and economic, reciprocally infecting both sectors and eventually society as a body. Schism is a fundamental project for which the solution is self-proposed by modern industrial and cultural globalism, and as such, is endemically Freudian. Schismatic politics embrace a psychology of programmatic subsumption, justified by the mantra “For the common good.” Within this project the prioritization of individuals and institutions is justified through the ideologies of exception or exemption. The inevitable friction created by this arrangement is relegated to an imaginary sector for euphemism. We are urged to accept “necessary waste.” We should agree that “no one could have foreseen” this or that disaster, and ignore evidence that cataclysm is a feature of the system, “not a bug.” Breakage is the fuel that drives the machinery of totalizing civilization, generating opportunities for exploitation. Gain is an extraction modality, derived from smashing what exists and subjecting the existential to reformation. The schismatic model is the product of a design project, refined over time by people in the service of vertical institutions, which in turn consistently represent the interests of the topmost fractional population. The history of the “elite” fractional cohort is nominal and enumerative. The commemoration of the masses is proportionately anonymous. The phenomenon is perceptual at its roots, and the reason for it is Force applied through an array of channels. The economy for it is a complex of dispensation based ultimately on the binary Complicity or Resistance. As President George W. Bush put forth to Congress, and the world, on September 20, 2001, "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

The speed at which compounding of effects occurs is dizzying. As soon as a plausible solution for any substantial problem is offered in the divergent discourse, it is abandoned or displaced by its false equivalence. The purveyors of contradiction frequently seem to be the very agents of the problems themselves. Dr. Fauci is such a figure. A profusion of cynicism is the typical side effect, accompanied by an overall lack of trust in any pronouncement. “Fake news” is indiscernible from the public service announcement, equal parts programmatic error and intentional design, for the purposes of “plausible deniability.” Corrosion of trust subverts assertion. The weaponization of distrust, proliferated through so-called social media, has manifested in the global spy and psy-ops industries. It is no longer the richest and most powerful nations and corporations who can deploy sophisticated tools for monitoring and manipulating their own populations and workforces. Practically any despot with cash reserves can acquire the gear, as long as they are willing to join the burgeoning networks for pacifying dissent. The new ubiquity targets civil rights and those who insist on them. Ideology has lost its buffering in the race toward absorption in the web of control. The extent to which the “deep state” has become the State is remarkable. We in Occupy were committed to mirroring as a contemporary tactic. Almost by accident we revealed the map of the battlefield on which the real war was raging. Occupy was resoundingly crushed by a coalition professional combatants doing the bidding of their masters. For the briefest of intervals, what the movement brought into the light was the latest iteration of mind war.

hypercube

∞

“In fact history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems,” Paul Virilio wrote in Speed and Politics (p. 90-1, 1977) …Accession to history becomes accession to movement, distant result of the accession to power.” The mind has always been humanity’s first battleground. The violence of mind is a predecessor of violent action. The mind is where man and animal wage war, with the victor revealed in sign or its opposite, a Thing. Descartes produced the signature battle cry in this war without end, the Cogito. The cry of the Thing is known to those who have witnessed someone wounded and dying as a result of bloody, fatal conflict with another person. “MAMA!” The Thing wails, and thus at the end becomes human. Mortality in war is still only death. Death and defeat are the most fearsome partners in the mind of war. The through-put of our cited event timeline is the puncturing defeat. Death accompanies 9-11, informs 8/30/2021, but barely touches Occupy, a noteworthy distinction. In the field of the new war order, death can be virtual and/or actual, as long as defeat defines the event, an event which in war is almost always a battle. The new war form is like a bubble inflating, being punctured, followed by instantaneous deflation and disappearance. Some defeats can be leveraged into new wars, while others are scrubbed from history. A few are made widely available for controlled interpretation by and for the war machinists and their industrial or political constituencies. In OWS, we discovered that an idea, in fact, could be evicted, and that the eviction incontrovertibly can be the tactical defeat of a movement framed as occupational, even if the effects of the defeat prove temporary and partial.

What the world is discovering is virtual war. Casualties directly attributable to wartime violence are not realized. “Collateral damage,” on the hand is acceptable, whether it is real or virtual. The derivative consequences of war are not officially acknowledged. The objectives of war, and the requirement of sacrifice to achieve those objectives is made fungible, like money. We can see the symptoms of the movement toward virtuality in the evolution of military technology, but also in what is allowed to be visible in war. The proportion of global war that plays out in cyberspace is growing. Armies, especially those fielded by the richest nations of the world, are adapting accordingly. The constitution of military forces in “advanced” countries reflect the overall industrial shifts, a change that owes as much to economic ideology as it does to technology or battlefield experience. Much of war is “outsourced” to “private contractors,” i.e., mercenaries. The ugliest bits of intelligence gathering are “offshored,” to “Black Sites” abroad. The supply chains for manufacturing weapons systems are global, which can pose problems, when political tension rises between nations in the chain. Robot soldiers and unmanned destructive vehicles (drone tanks, planes, ships, etc.) are making the human driven military redundant. The economics of war, however, like streams flowing into a river to the ocean, continue to channel wealth to the main financial centers, the top firms and players. The business of war is as ancient as war itself, the monstrous shadow of Civilization. It was always virtual. Its prime beneficiaries quietly occupy positions of authority throughout the art world, and the broader world culture, in its many aspects.

“ In this dream, which every now and then still recurs, I am standing publicly at the baseline of a gargantuan tennis court. I’m in a competitive match, clearly: there are spectators, officials. The court is about the size of a football field, though, maybe, it seems. It’s hard to tell. But mainly the court’s complex. The lines that bound and define play are on this court as complex and convolved as a sculpture of string. There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net. I stand there tentatively. The whole thing is almost too involved to try to take in all at once. It’s simply huge. And it’s public. A silent crowd resolves itself at what may be the court’s periphery, dressed in summer’s citrus colors, motionless and highly attentive. A battalion of linesmen stand blandly alert in their blazers and safari hats, hands folded over their slacks’ flies. High overhead, near what might be a net-post, the umpire, blue-blazered, wired for amplification in his tall high-chair, whispers Play. The crowd is a tableau, motionless and attentive. I twirl my stick in my hand and bounce a fresh yellow ball and try to figure out where in all that mess of lines I’m supposed to direct service. I can make-out in the stands stage-left the white sun-umbrella of the Moms; her height raises the white umbrella above her neighbors; she sits in her small circle of a shadow, hair white and legs crossed and a delicate fist upraised and tight in total unconditional support.

The umpire whispers Please Play.

We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.”

— David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest," p. 68 (1996)

Who might have predicted that twenty-five years after its publication, Infinite Jest could be reinterpreted, reread as dimensional non-fiction? In its formulation, the book is one of the best literary examples of the 4D text. Infinite Jest imagines a parallax world, in relation to ours, or rather, the one that has appeared, hyperreal, surreal, unreal, fake, uncanny, virtual, and more. The real world feels unrestrained by reality, but its broad contours were predictable. The image of the world about which any sane individual is skeptical, has to be called, not the real world, but a real world. We live in an era were the world image and its reflection - a mirage - displace each other in a seamless operation enabled not only by technology, but an unmooring of perception from experience, causing interpretation, possibly causality itself to fail. It may be that history is not at an end. It may be that causation ended, unnoticed.

Contemporary Art at its best privileges the Times in a signifying image that is pertinent on many levels of discourse, addressing a great variety of phenomena simultaneously. The dissociative sensation for the viewer, attending the image in its presentation by some entity (e.g., gallery, museum), arises from the complications of the interactive experience, both apparent and invisible. While viewing an institutional exhibition, the consumer of contemporary art is most likely under constant surveillance. In alternately subtle and obvious ways, the power dynamics intervene in the territories inhabited by contemporary art. From the wall placard next to the object, which stipulates sanctioned interpretation, to the museum store, its kitsch and tokens, contemporary art is marked by the borders of its containment, in the strict context of managed exchange. Whatever one person’s visual literacy, his encounter with contemporary art is centered in the contravention of art as free-spirited invention. The conventional mode of contemporary art at its worst reinforces the excommunication of freedom from communal space. The object of art is, in short, publicly imprisoned, made an example of, as a warning to any who might resist the power whose non-violent spectacle is the cultural edifice.

agate

∞

When thinking about any critical historic moment, the question of status gains currency. Status is identified with classification, and all that entails. Class is scientific for the purposes of argument and definition, a particular type of argument about the order of natural things. Class in the politics of economics is associated with the primal fear of vulnerabilities. One’s exposure to various threats is largely determined according to class status when inequality is classist, which it consistently is. What is the Status Quo? To put it otherwise, in the vernacular of positioning: Where do I stand in all this? Class affirmation increases one’s desire for plausible explanations, in the form of reportage. In the presence of existential threats, recursive logic gains traction. One wishes to know what to do, what to feel about things seemingly or actually beyond one’s immediate control. Such moments can induce anxiety expressed as reflection. The subtextual worry is that there is no time for memory, while so much is happening all at once.

Through the dimensional lens of contemporary historical convergence, a learned praxis rather than a habit, the individual and the collective can begin to formulate “a picture” of the moment, informed by prior circumstances, as a hedge against the status quo. Stipulating the possibility of evolving imagination, a future vision can emerge from selected events. A curated future can be proposed, with momentum provided by linked eventual phenomena and our perceptions of them. We might be wise to test the premise, which we could define as the perceptual urge, using the classification of cited events [9/11-OWS (+ 8/30/2021)], to understand what really happened. The durational quality of the construct is artificially chronological, but the history it recalls is real enough for the exercise. Beyond understanding, the potential for “better” outcomes, for a different future history, might be realized, if the lessons embedded in these events are clarified and those responsible for the systemic “failures” at the core of each are made accountable.

Except that in the new status quo, accountability is only terminal. Failure can never be admitted, and lessons are left for historians to sort through down the line. Baudrillard was right about 9/11 in his savage essay, “The Spirit of Terrorism.” A non-event cannot not yield understanding. The second negation sets the stage for the second revolution, driven by indignation at globalist excess and its horrific consequences. Baudrillard’s exasperation is palpable when he writes, “…The globe itself is resistant to globalization. Terrorism is immoral. The occurrence at the World Trade Center, this symbolic act of defiance, is immoral, but it was in response to globalization, which is itself immoral. We are therefore immoral ourselves, so if we hope to understand anything we will need to get beyond Good and Evil…” “The Spirit of Terrorism” has not been widely cited in global media on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Nor has its predictive efficaciousness been remarked upon during the de-occupation of Afghanistan, amidst the victorious celebrations of the Taliban. One particularly humiliating image to appear in the press presents Muslim fighters mocking the famous photograph of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. One wishes Baudrillard were still alive to comment on the simu-symbolism energizing the devastating reenactment, effusive in its wry irony. The unwanted child of Good and Evil is the beloved, terrifying clown.

Instead of Baudrillard, political media inundated its readers with the banal reflections of those who conducted the unwinnable War on Terror. Bush gave a speech, most notably on the topic of domestic terrorism, unwittingly verifying Jean Paul’s analylsis about what contemporary terrorism is. Politico interviewed Neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and disgraced generals like David Patraeus, ostensibly seeking answers for what went wrong. None of these men and women were threatened with war crime prosecution, war profiteering, lying to Congress or anything else. To paraphrase Obama, we looked forward, not backwards, and look at us now. The abandonment of Iraq, then Afghanistan, was in numerous articles and commentaries, depicted as an American defeat, criticized as a sign of declining empire. The nation-building experimental project was lost to mission creep. The horrifying cumulative body count and cost in treasure was balanced against the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. The region is as volatile as it ever was. It appears that China will be the next in line, attempting to colonize the Afghanis. Good luck with that, China! The shifty goals in our War on Terror have not been attained. Iraq’s WMDs were never located. The price of gas has not gone down. The excursion did not magically “pay for itself.” The dreadful legacy is most poignantly illustrated in the suicide figures for US Veterans, and all those who survived but were maimed or suffered loss in the conflict. The toll should be counted on both “sides.” …On the other hand: As Baudrillard put it, “Terrorists, like viruses, are everywhere.”

Capricorn

∞

After the flood of mournful think-pieces published, posted and televised in the week following the collapse of the US-backed Afghan military and government, and the streamed spectacle of the ensuing massive evacuation, the press deftly swiveled to the 20th anniversary of 9/11. From a political standpoint, the move was brilliant. Re-emphasizing the connection between the two historical nodes was managed expertly. The association could not have seemed more spontaneous. Editors like to remind us that media is not dispensed by edict and is assiduously neutral. There was no compromise of journalistic principles, no conspiracy. The urgency of the 24/7/365 corporate, for-profit news cycle requires constant motion. Whatever storyline grabs the most consumer attention, defined today in clicks, likes, shares and comments, that story will be exploited until its currency is exhausted. Sometimes a narrative contradicts ideological constraints. Like a depth charge exploding near a submarine. The networks will then pivot into “safer” waters. The practice is a function of corporate risk aversion. The negative attention drawn to the industrial syndicate for never-ending war was threatened by the airing of its dirty laundry during the draw-down in Afghanistan, and its existential project was being questioned. The complicit media got the message and shifted focus to the emotionally sacrosanct subject of 9/11, sited securely in the not-to-distant or -recent past, to take the discourse to an ideologically safe harbor, temporarily, until the heat was off their collaborators, owners, advertisers - and frequent talk show “expert” commentators.

Complicity drove the media machines in unison. The displacement of blame away from those journalists, reporters and editors who hawked the War on Terror in its various stages might have been an unstated, instinctual or accidental objective. Happenstance by design. One would be hard-pressed to find a new story in which a press member reflected on the heady experience of being “embedded” with the coalition forces that brutally and speedily subjugated Iraq, for instance. Ah, the Glory Days! Those who promoted martial savagery in the Mideast against the enemies of the West, and amplified enthusiastically Bush’s diatribes on the “Axis of Evil,” were generally silent about their vital roles in the ensuing debacles. One could nonetheless revisit the brilliant essay of Slavoy Zizek “Are we in a war? Do we have an enemy?” [London Review of Books, Vol. 24 No. 10 · 23 May 2002), to be reminded that some thinkers in real time were contributing insightful counterpoints to the madness that engulfed media after the attacks of 9-11 and in the early stages of the War on Terror. Zizek’s analysis resonates through our designated eventuality and serves as a sobering counterbalance to two decades of moral drift instantiated in the expressed rationale for legalized torture by agents of the state, for example. Or stylized genocide, as another. And the definition of non-personhood as justification for what would otherwise be war crimes. And the persisting opportunities for individuals to refuse to comply to the mandates of evil, whatever its rationale, whoever the authorizing agency might be. These not-wars did produce heroes, who are hardly recognized as such. In too many cases these anti-heroes met the fates of villains and traitors, instead.

Zizek in his essay also deconstructed the hopelessly flawed or Orwellian logic purveyed in defense of indefensible state action in the War on Terror. He writes, “With the distinction between a state of war and a state of peace thus effectively blurred, we are entering a time in which a state of peace can at the same time be a state of emergency.” In the ambivalent semantics of wartime politics, “truthiness” as comedian Stephen Colbert framed it, prevailed and became an asset in the toolbox of lawmakers waging all-out war on the Constitution, especially in the matter of civil liberties enshrined in the main document and the Bill of Rights. Zizek dissects the complex entanglements hiding or distorting truth to get at the “real thing,” which is often an incorrect thought with massive consequence in the unfolding of history, for those who must live it as reality. Philosophy is necessary now, perhaps more than ever, due to the power of media and network technology in conjunction with destructive tech and the profit-motive driving all of it, and us, into one chaotic spectacle to the next. Philosophy, by its nature, is repelled by the blood lust of war, its stupidity, its waste. War is always a lie, which Philosophy cannot abide. Why? The relations among philosophy, truth and democracy are mapped in Badiou’s Philosphy for Militants. He writes, “The difficulty is situated in the relation between the democratic notion of freedom or liberty and the philosophical concept of truth. In short, if there exists something like a political truth, this truth is an obligation for any rational spirit.”

Badiou follows with pragmatism, though. “…but philosophy has no direct relation to justice. Justice rather presents itself, at the farthest remove from the democratic and corrupt delights of individual liberty, as the contingent alliance between virtue and terror. Now, justice is the philosophical name of truth in the domain of politics.” Administering justice to the terrorists behind 9-11 and protecting democratic liberties would be used to excuse the most heinous abuses of democracy. Extra-legality in politics sought and received sanction, disguised as intentional obliviousness. On certain subjects the press adopted the “Three Monkeys Pantomime:” hear no evil; see no evil; speak no evil. Or it redefined evil and good, in the manipulation of visibility. The mass corporate media embraced the pretense of speculation and the Blind Eye. It started with accepting censorship of photography of flag-draped caskets containing soldiers killed overseas. Over the next twenty years the trend incrementally mutated into a monstrosity, which was Trump’s duel with any media that did not kowtow to his fluctuating whims. Both sides descried “Fake News” and feigned surprise at the unthinkable consequences of complicity in state-sanctioned malpractice. Unfortunate side-effects are plummeting trust in a free press and violence toward reporters. The War on Terror and the discursive politics of anti-democratic polarization that coincide with it have proved increasingly dangerous for reporters who place themselves in the hot zones of the dimensional conflict .

mold

∞

But ghosts, a.k.a. media, cannot die at all. Where one stops, another somewhere begins…A cinematic war may not even take place at all. Invisible enemies that materialize only for seconds and as ghostly apparitions can hardly be said any longer to be killed: they are protected from death by the false immortality of ghosts…Total use of media instead of total literacy: sound film and video cameras as mass entertainment liquidate the real event. Friedrich Kittler [p. 130, 133,Gramophone, Film, Typewriter 91986/trans. 1999)].

The liminal zones established in the programming and rhetoric of the amorphous War on Terror coincided with other trends affecting mass memory and focal avoidance. Non-discussion, not-seeing or hearing of persons, places and things is at the crux of Facebook algorithm-enabled soft censorship, for instance. For decades, the culling of the press, through media consolidation and other neoliberal operations, has caused a general constriction in the subject matter produced by newsrooms and reporters. Interpretation of the meaning of events, contextualization, follow-ups and editorial emphasis on the basis of social import have all been dramatically reduced or modified substantially. Sometimes News is replaced or displaced by state or industrial content, which is to say, propaganda. “Erasure” of people, entire hemispheres and experience has been institutionalized incrementally in the primary channels for information dissemination. The flip side of erasure is media obsession. “Spin” is a viable, well-compensated profession for politics, entertainment and most aspects of corporate projection. The dynamism of Occupy in large measure arose from the movement’s willingness to subjectivize and objectify media in alternate dimensions. The impression of the occupation therefore seemed to create itself across media. The media elite were substantially befuddled, and sometimes reacted spasmodically, along ideological lines, and usually incorrectly. Occupiers in turn adopted comedy for dealing with a preponderantly oppositional press corp, invented independent news outlets and sought out alternative channels, quickly becoming adept at generating news to contradict the banal narratives being generated by the most powerful media forces in the world to destroy the movement. OWS became a moving media target, becoming, in a sense, its own live cinema. Anonymity emerged as a tool for de-targeting individuals in the mediated collective, whose efficiency was only partial, as Anonymous itself discovered.

Infiltration, intervention and other quasi-military and -law enforcement terminologies have gained cultural resonance as the lines between media and the other mechanisms of power have blurred. Profit-motive, and the intent to cloak it behind some other motivational pretense, has increasingly defined public speech. The Trump Presidency pushed this phenomenon to the extreme. He managed to monopolize the national conversation by blending enormous social and old media reach to establish a hybrid whose news cycle Trump controlled. He surfed the topical waves, leaving political mayhem and discord in his wake. His savviness for media manipulation was grudgingly accepted by even his harshest critics. Throughout his tenure, the question of Trump’s diversified interests was a constant. Was the entire Trump affair simply a “deal” gone awry, or the greatest con in American history? To some degree, all Presidents after George W. Bush were but inheritors of 9-11. Presidents have their own history to contend with, and events are co-opted into those histories. Omission is pertinent as commission, in the structuring of Presidential history. The world that exists outside the lens of POTUS history contains billions of other perspectives.

Occupy re-popularized the phase, “The Whole World Is Watching.” That was true until it wasn’t. We learned eventually, if it weren’t already obvious, that in the contemporary media-verse, what, where and who “the world” is watching is Media itself. FOMO - Fear of Missing Out - is the syndrome deriving from the subsumption of reality to the subjectivity of attention management. Sensation and spectacle are not only manufactured, they are facilitated and amplified. SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is complete, and Google is the industrial victor. The conversion of attention into currency was accomplished through ad regimes, at least superficially. As we know, the real product was us, our data, beyond privacy, beyond legality itself. The specter of the surveillance state as a public-private partnership is the ghosting of democracy. Another peculiar omission in the post-8/30/2021 discourse was any discussion about the problematic parts played by Israel and Saudi Arabia in the Iraq and Afghani conflicts - which were never officially American wars, as per the post-WW2 simulacra. Rather, the justification was provisional, a onetime/continuous empowerment of the US Executive Branch by the Legislative Branch, a “War Powers Act” for the conduct of indeterminate international military campaigns. These campaigns, it turned out, might also rationalize assignments within “the Heartland” itself. The fact that most of the 9/11 terrorists, including bin Laden were Saudis - not Afghanis, Iraqis, or Yemenis, Libyan, Syrians, Iranians, etc., seemingly lacks relevance in most post-8/30/2021 assessments. The War on Terror’s swiveling to “domestic terrorism” is troubling. The status quo is a condition in which the world watches, everyone in it is being watched, but what is visible and invisible is managed.

schism

∞

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges with the advertisement. The more meaningless the latter appears under monopoly, the more omnipotent culture becomes. Its motives are economic enough. - [p. 131, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947)

The focus of the media emphasized the defeat aspect, but with some exceptions, the alternate narrative was avoided. Who have been the big “winners” since 9-11? This question might be considered in the context of a fourth feature of our nodal configuration: its additive quality; which can be thought of as a dimensional nature of such historical constructs. Heidegger’s concept of “fouring” is especially pertinent here, pointing to an environmental assessment. “The fouring presences as the worlding of the world.” Obviously, the emergent global neo-oligarchy is a prominent winner over the past several decades, as are the huge corporations and syndicates that serve their interests. The fusion of industry and worldwide governance, for the conduct of surveillance, imprisonment, war, communication and profiteering has been (almost) totally successful, as an enterprise. It is impossible to review recent history without acknowledging the dynamic rise to power of these entities in the world. Technology has been key in practically every scenario, including the burgeoning inequality shaping societies on every continent. Consolidation, a false unification, is the characteristic of globalization. The re-distribution of everything is an effect. The perforated reality is evident in the disproportionate consequences of catastrophe. With the onset of the pandemic, the consequences on labor have been magnified exponentially.

While wide swaths of the planet are consumed by fire, while manufactured or natural plagues afflict people and the Earth’s many living things, while glaciers melt and oceans rise, causing tempests and floods, the profits of the richest increase dramatically. Simultaneously, the infrastructure of principled equality is being thoroughly dismantled. Ancient societal binaries are reinforced. Schemes to pit one minority against another in the majority of “losers” are hatched and implemented with organizational efficacy. Meanwhile, when it is noticed, any individual and organized or collective resistance is met with overwhelming force, with great diversity in tactics, and logistical superiority. The scale of the “real” operation happening over time before our eyes and outside our collective consciousness is breathtaking. The winners - who are decidedly not the humble Taliban, with their throwaway gear, AK-47s, handheld cameras, robes and sandals - behave with impunity now. The Rocketman, cowboy hat-festooned Jeff Bezos, flying heavenward with a fawning gaggle of tag-along billionaires, resembles self-parody without being funny. Yet - the winners are the villains targeted by Occupy Wall Street, and in 2021, as Kabul fell, they are on their own terms, triumphant. Boeing may mourn the end of the War on Terror and its boondoggle. But a thousand super-rich fund managers watch gleefully as the stock market continues to set record highs, almost daily. Greece, the birthplace of democracy, continues to be crushed by Austerity, but the party in the world’s financial centers rages unabated. Boris Groys writes (Art Power, “Art at War,” 2008):

Indeed, the contemporary mass media has emerged as by far the largest and most powerful machine for producing images—vastly more extensive and effective than our contemporary art system. We are constantly fed images of war, terror, and catastrophes of all kinds, at a level of image production and distribution with which the artist cannot compete. So it seems that the artist—this last craftsperson of present-day modernity—stands no chance of rivaling the supremacy of these commercially driven image-generating machines. And beyond this, the terrorists and warriors themselves are beginning to act as artists.

Groys’ observations precede Occupy, and the speculation about whether the occupation in sum posited a new kind of performative genre of art. Those same speculations were applied to the Trump Presidency. Only the censorial backlash and political campaign against Big Tech, especially Facebook and Google, have curbed the virtual flattening of everything into code, where it can be reconfigured endlessly. The accusations of electronic election manipulation by outside parties ignore the intra-partisan monkey-wrenching that typified the Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020, ensuring that Bernie Sanders could not be elected President in either instance. At the same time, the new dynamic permitted the template portended in Occupy to be applied directly on the operative malpractice of Purdue Pharmaceutical in pushing Oxy with disastrous consequences. Nan Goldin led a successful political media campaign to link the Sacklers to the hundreds of thousands of overdoses and untold suffering and misery the drug visited upon Americans. Less obvious was the global nature of the overdose epidemic, which had overt globalist, geo-political logistics. Opium is the number one export of Afghanistan. This raw material somehow became part of a murderous supply chain. Drugs, opiates were manufactured in labs, mostly in China, some in India and were transported to Mexico, eventually to the streets of the West, via the Mexican border, and into the veins of addicts.

burnish

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In his essay “On the Social Media Ideology” (e-flux, #75) Geert Lovink confronts the technicality of the Message inherent in a conception of the supply chain as ideological effector:

Networks are not merely arenas of competition among rival social forces. This is a far too idealized point of view. If only. What fails here is the “staging” element. Platforms are not stages; they bring together and synthesize (multimedia) data, yes, but what is lacking here is the (curatorial) element of human labor. That’s why there is no media in social media. The platforms operate because of their software, automated procedures, algorithms, and filters, not because of their large staff of editors and designers. Their lack of employees is what makes current debates in terms of racism, anti-Semitism, and jihadism so timely, as social media platforms are currently forced by politicians to employ editors who will have to do the all-too-human monitoring work (filtering out ancient ideologies that refuse to disappear).

Trumpism is a mutation born of the technology of virality, whereupon an individual in the pursuit of raw power grabs and harnesses the mechanisms of social media and projects the platform in his own image. A novel persona, the Influencer, has emerged from this serious glitch in industrialized, centralized digital culture. The all-at-once direction of virtual propagation does not differentiate substantively between a kitten meme and the ravings of a despot. The laissez faire or libertarian biases of coders and their masters, and the near-total absence of regulatory and ethical constraints in the developmental stages of network culture, allowed for maximum exploitation of the domain and its users, as the political, military and economic sectors converged on the web, while it evolved to attain ubiquity. The head-scratching ambivalence commonly supplanting individual and industrial responsibility for the chronicled damage caused by network computing and all its derivative technologies echoes the worst explicative performances of Tobacco, Energy and Financial Sector Executives in the aftermath of the respective plagues, meltdowns and crashes they create(d). With respect to these, and especially the Climate Crisis, we as a society must ask: What is the real cost of doing business? and What must be done about it? The holographic image hovering over the adjudication could be also-recently divorced Bill Gates, spinning the Captain’s wheel on his recently purchased $644 million (est.) hydrogen-powered super-yacht, the Sinot Aqua. The Gates apparition will serve to keep fresh the Epstein affair, rumored to have been a factor in Melinda Gates’ decision to extricate herself from the marriage. However, we have learned, the Gates Foundation, the couple’s shared concern, will continue its work on a portentous portfolio of world problems. Including, coincidentally enough, global pandemics, vaccinations, and intellectual property.

An aside on this trend of billionaire dudes: It used to be, when a man of a certain demographic faced his “mid-life crisis,” he ditched the nagging wife. He hooked up with a pretty or trashy or kinky nanny, cashier, secretary, waitress, teacher or whatnot. He bought a red sports car. He flew to Vegas or Cabo. We’re dealing with a common cliche here, the stuff of sitcoms and low budget film, a murder mystery, a bad joke. These balding fellows did not spend fortunes on rocket ships and luxury boats. What is the difference between the pre-version and its latest iteration? It is the vast gap between CEO compensation and the median pay for workers in large companies. It is a decades-long lowering of effective taxes on the wealthiest among us, due to policy and enforcement failure. It is the crushing of unions. What once was middle-class comedy is today a sign of democracy’s demise in favor of techno-oligarchy and a new patriarchal aristocracy committed to fantasy fulfillment, above all. If we hoped to encapsulate the phenomenon in a single Art World-centered event, in 2021 the sale of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s to billionaire financier Ken Griffith, CEO of Citadel — who, calculating the optics after the fact, loaned the document to Crystal Bridges, the “American” WalMart museum — does the trick. This lurid episode contains all the pathology and egomania, socio-economic-political corruption, dramatic subterfuge, blatant excess and hypocrisy of the historical moment. The gross narrative unfolds in the same time-frame in which an effort led by Bernie Sanders to raise taxes on America’s super-rich individuals and corporations to enact improvements for the Commonwealth is crushed in Congress, due to the machinations of lobbyists, sold-out politicians and the targets of the legislation, the neo-aristocrats acting behind their syndicates. To call this a national disgrace is understatement, and does not express the seriousness of the threat to democracy the scenario represents. It is a canary in the coal mine moment, and the lack of appropriate critical attention afforded it by media, outside the mostly fawning industrial culture press and power-money newsletters and blogs, is telling.

The despicable story has its compelling tech angle. A Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of “Crypto Populists” crowd sourced $46 million in a week, “the largest crowdfunding initiative of all time,” in an effort to secure the document “for the people.” Artnet, whose reporting led the field, and posted a follow-up article behind their paywall explaining how the auction house rigged the bidding against ConstituionDAO. Subsequently, the buzz is all about whether or how the future of art is going to be shaped by crypto-currency, crowd-sourcing, DAOs… Not about the spectacle itself. One of the original copies (unsigned) of the U.S. Constitution, without question one of the nation’s most important historical documents, was purchased by a “High Net Worth” (HNW) individual, a Wall Street speculator massively enriched during the pandemic! He loaned it to a private museum in Arkansas funded by one of the world’s wealthiest corporate heiresses, Alice Walton, but the reputedly mercurial Griffith, in another mid-life-crisis fit, just as easily could have set it afire or handed it to a Saudi Prince or Chinese Party Leader, or his (Griffith’s) mistress! And still may do! Setting aside hyperbole, American democracy has an existential problem, and that problem, in two words, is private ownership. Ultimately, the two (democracy and ownership, i.e., thing-based capitalism) are incompatible. The latter cannot stop til it owns the former. The former must be free.

skin

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Autocracy, oligarchy, the State, the Revolution - all exist today in a fluid state of convergence, if not agreement. Only dangerous, ravaged, exploitable nature is disallowed a seat at the negotiating table, or a voice in the forging of contracts. Greta Thunberg is dismissed on the bases of her youth, idealism and diplomatic competence. Escalating tensions with China ought to be considered in this broad context, as can the pandemic that originated in Wuhan and, as one of its incalculable side effects, obliterated instrumental nostalgia. All transcontinental remnants of the Commune have been overturned, not by Capitalism, per se, but by a partnership between nature and science in the medium of political economy. The Reds have experienced an inversion of tremendous symbolic import. In the first instance (unaccountable pandemic creator), as a preventative measure, and in the second (threat to the global Status Quo, the New/Old-First/Third World Order), as both preventative measure and putative reprisal. The broad field of political activism has been re-imagined within the purview of associative accounting rooted in dimensional temporality, gazing forward, into the present and in reverse on a continuum, while recognizing optional historical trajectories. In the recent past, this dynamic manifests in The Sanders candidacy, the Standing Rock uprising, The Yellow Vest movement, BLM, #MeToo. On the flip side, even the bizarre Trump-led coup of January 6, 2020 can be folded into the script. The threads aggregate to sketch representationally a period that contradicts the mandates of malaise for the many, and realization for the few, which could be our time, or that of our progeny. Joseph Nechvatal writes (p. 155, Immersion Into Noise, 2011):

Certainly, it is true that, hidden in the computer, there is something so strong, so repetitious, so ominous, and so pregnant with the darkness of infinite noise that it excites and frightens us. This is why the innumerable ramifications of mechanical desire help us to utilize our unconscious mind. And this is the real answer to why computers are interesting in art. We admire their inhuman beauty. They return us to the experimental, to a state of sexual desire and noisy restlessness. The neural processes they mimic are our own deepest desires and meticulous obsessions. Their repetitions are the fusion repetitions of our sexual acts with their duplication of eggs, sperm and blood.

“Cultura01,” ruby green Contemporary Art Foundation, Nashville 2001

Or: In this kaleidoscopic all-over perceptual eruption, chaos coexists with conspiracy and combines to end history. Will the future unfold anyway? In its shape, contours and dimensions, will it evoke Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama or Nietzsche…? Or does it by its nature belong to no one, conform to no person’s idea of it? Will it be a thing we would definitely find unrecognizable, a thing, not an entity, de-linked from fleshy, messy humanity entirely? What actually are our current prospects for any future at all, given the troublesome trajectories? How exactly does one plot a vector into a desirable future, absent certainty, and the inner urgency which sustains it - without faith, or desire, itself? Will tomorrow’s history, if it arrives at all, belong to the technologist, the Futurist, the Utopian, the Visionary, the Prophet? Can the Oracle remain on pace with the velocity of history’s accelerated unfurling? Or does the future of history already exist somewhere in the Cloud, in some database, in a machine, kept alive only by a steady electrical flow, in a climate controlled environment, lovingly attended by bots and human caretakers in uniforms straight out of a science fiction movie, like 2001? Or: …We permit ourselves to radically imagine our potential selves in an unspeakable future. We might consider a future that refuses to be the property of any person, real or otherwise; that exists un-designed; will never be colonized; is unnamed and -numbered; will neither be slave to human imagination. In such a future history our current version is impossible, vestigial, and it is ourselves who would be the alien in our vision, the monster of space and time. To paraphrase the wise words of Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and he will be us.”

Maybe the Last Man won’t be standing, but instead, will be “floating in a tin can, far, far from Home.” Gone, gone, gone Beyond. gate gate paragate… Is this the dream of Bezos, Branson and Musk, et al., or just another junkie Major Tom/Bowie nightmare? Is this our future’s end? - A bio-engineered humanoid, whose history is nothing more or less than data, compressed into a string of zeroes and ones, accessible not through cellular memory, but through a network of circuits, installed by an anonymous technician, long ago… Navigating the void, the emptiness and darkness of space, living and dying between worlds, an earthling, a sentient machine, an artificial, spliced, quasi-human thing existing conditionally in simulated, approximated planet-gravity? Is this the best science can do?

worship

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O my soul, I restored to thee liberty over the created and the uncreated; and who knoweth, as thou knowest, the voluptuousness of the future? - Friedrich Nietzsche, “LVIII. THE GREAT LONGING.” Thus Spake Zarathrustra 1883-92 (Quoted from the Project Gutenberg e-book, 1999-2021)]

The nodal sequence we formulated a tri-nodal time-linked combine for analysis, yes, but more than that. For me, this essay represents an effort to sort through the complexities of this historical period and my response to them. Our construct is perceptual, at a historical juncture in which the experiential element of perception is in question. The sinew that connects all experience (tactile, optical, imaginary, etc.) to the interpretive matrix is collapsing in Real Time, which is simultaneously virtual, in contemporary life. The conversion of every layer of cognition into data has flattened the modes of experience and perception into machine language, evolving into a phenomenological extension we are calling machine learning, and artificial intelligence. They are components of the same thing. We, the apparatus of this golem, must awaken to our new, self-induced condition, this mech-tech status quo, before it is too late. Before the human world, which in truth is not in the least anthropocentric, at most human-friendly in some places and times, returns to mud, clay, iron, wood or stone. Inert.

Historians are no longer necessary to justify and rationalize the rampant colonization of both things and not-things: our imagination; dreams; perceptions; pre-occupations; reverences; loves and so on. Civilization has been thrice converted: from non-verbal encounter, to a language-based franchise or enterprise, to an application for visual and aural agency; civil praxis has been reduced in conduct to a mass spectacle concentrating on the whims of “winners” like Elon Musk. The only accounting that matters is that which arrives at the ever-increasing bottom line of Apple, a media empire, a transnational conglomerate, one of a handful that form a syndicate, which “creates” an artificial culture, to which we can subscribe, and in which we “play” to live. The Game is the meaning. Transactional data is the currency. The global economy is dependent on the many components that feed the Empire Game. “Celebrity,” “fame,” “influence” have supplanted glory, heroism, sacrifice, as prime aspirations. Wealth has crushed patriotism, which is conflated with populism. Defeat,impotence, addiction, eviction, conviction and so are Loser signals. The margin for error is razor thin. The stakes are total. The Game, everyone knows, is rigged, predetermined. A casino. Like Wall Street.

No mythology questions its own status. - Jean-Luc Nancy (footnote #6, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”)

The mutability of identity has been co-opted by the artificial personhood, whose political free speech is money, whose social and cultural “reach” approaches the absolute, is godlike, in terms of consumption. Is there any viable intellectual counterbalance, any checking the acquisition, then possession of “I (am Who…)?” The Empire Media blinds itself (and us) to anything that contradicts it and its mythologies. Economic sanity is shunned, when it cannot be dismantled. The great books of Piketty are ignored. The wisdom of Hegel in his introduction to Phenomenology of the Spirit has been pushed aside. Or it manufactures falsehood in the vestiture of authenticity or, when that con fails, neutrality. We now live in a Fake Age, in which nothing we are given can be trusted. Art and Self are products in a fix, whose big time grifters deny exists, emphatically displacing the marks’ common outrage, by pointing all attention the luxe collections and lifestyles their ill-begotten winnings purchase. Reality feels like a circus side show, except we ourselves are both the sideshow freak and the gawker, distracted while his pocket is picked by the barker’s stooge.

“Who is free to do as he pleases?” is still the wrong question, a narcissistic illusion disguising the generic motivation of the tyrant. Philosophy is medicine when the abuse of freedom “scales up” and becomes a plague that sickens the collective imagination. The diseased excretions of schismatism and fractionalism attack the body of accumulated, generational wisdom like cancer. What chance does one have for a well-lived and meaningful life, absent truth? The odds are similar to that of Power Ball lottery. Outside the attractions of escapism, the scintillation of hedonism, the rush of wanton violence, the emptiness of nihilism, how can one contest slavery of mind and spirit, in its latest iteration? Philosophy is immunity. Under tyranny, shackles of perceptual slavery are virtual, corresponding to actual chains and locks. The material and immaterial signs of the impoverishment of liberty intertwine, each strengthening the other, as the prisoner and his resolve to be free weaken. Enslavement is usually performative. Slaves, especially those whose masters select for punishment at some trumped up offense, are often publicly castigated, tortured or killed. When those who can distinguish types of enslavement by degree are silenced, or refuse to speak freely, freedom dissolves, like a sandcastle swamped by a rising tide.

spell

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What is the path for those who abhor complicity in its many expressions? There are more than one: subversion, sabotage, subterfuge; violent rebellion. For some, destiny is procedural, and their weapons are not implements of destruction. If there is to be a future for hope, it will be found in the alliance of philosophy and art in truth, the procedural way. The answer to the question above, “Who is free to do as he pleases?” is, historically, the Artist! …The cynic, romantic or provocative dramatist may depict the self-serving behavior and thinking of the rich and powerful, outlaws, political libertarians and anarchists, hoboes, mountain men, and others, as free-wheelers. None of those not-artists survive the truth test. The freedoms of babies suggest immanence, as a natural truth, but only if one ignores their extreme natural vulnerability. The tabula rasa scenario is mythological, a contrivance. The artist, on the other hand, is suspended in zones separating outcast, servant, master and seer, in his societal role. His is a pantomime of freedom, based on technical authenticity. The artist exists external to language, through the objects he creates. He himself however is a manifestation of internalized thought, but not necessarily in any particular language. The artist produces history objectively, while being produced internally from historical circumstance. Badiou writes in Handbook of Inaesthetics “Art itself is a truth procedure.” (p. 9, 1998/trans. 2005) Why does his statement explain Art needing Philosophy, always? Because Philosophy makes Art accountable to Truth. The truth procedures of art are exceedingly complicated.

Badiou’s statement, framing the procedural infers techne plus logic. Art has that side, or, at least it once had, but the surface of artistic is rounded, not vertical or horizontal. Art is not in its totality reductionist to a linear representation, except in a sketch, which either comes before or after the fact of the object. A box is not subtle. A circle possesses that quality. It is a curious development: The academy for art is not usually or prohibitively centered anymore on books, manuals. The interpreter, the medium for art faces erasure, with a few vestigial remainders, like Saltz and Smith, whose activity is akin to cosplay. There is no reliable Ruskin today. However, an ambitious artist will find countless online instructional videos and blog posts, explaining the how-to. Aesthetics are as plentiful as clip art. We don’t have one, big “Ruskin;” we have so many little Ruskins! Everyone with an iPhone can be not only the art critic and teacher, but the artist, artist biographer, agent, curator and representative as well! Just by opening an Instagram account! Unfortunately, the social media artist ends up being complicit with Zuckerberg, et al. The situation seems hopeless. Remember what happened to Shepard Fairey when he went to bat for candidate Obama, once Obama was elected? HOPE landed on the docket, and was made to OBEY. If this is the promise of “democratization” of art, then both art and democracy are gravely threatened, which is obvious. Both art and democracy rely on freedom of expression, but art, especially, must be truthful in its expression, or it perishes.

Cyclops (Wearing Davos Lapel Button), circa 2009; image printed, output photographed in 2012, Novads: End of the World MegaZine

Walter Benjamin’s lingual presumptions were wrong. When he states “Language in such contexts means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned-technology, art, justice, or religion - toward the communication of the contents of the mind (“On Language as Such and On the Language of Man” 1916),” he misconstrues the production of art. Art expresses objectively the mind in a body in time and place as experienced by the artist. Benjamin’s idea of art begins the flattening process which will be fully realized decades later in computing. The GUI is the medium of human-code interactions. Computer art is a simulation of another phenomenon, compressed, lossy and ultimately, not comparable to the original. The GUI is not an aura. The GUI is a mimic, not a ghost.

The Graphic User Interface is both inducement and obscuration simultaneously. The illusion of false similarity between machine and organism is critical to enjoining the two in collaboration, the point ultimately of which is transference. The GUI induces the end user to behave without inhibition before the computer, which is a working object, a tool, with functions. The ultimate utility of the computer is to encourage unrestricted usage. The GUI obscures the real function of the personal computer, which is demonstrably the exploitation of the user, as an epistemological confab, reducible in every aspect to ones and zeroes, which can be dutifully computed by the counting machine. The software translates the numbers, representing wholesale inputs, to establish a profile of the user, a profile with many applications. The processing of the user is the operation of the computer. The screen reflects the profile upon the user, under the pretense of upgrading. The pretension is additive, but the process in effect cores the use of exactly what the machine does not possess, and what the owners and operators of the network desire: the exploitable soul of the user; or spirit/mind (geist), to put in Hegelian terminology. Social media extends the equation algorithmically, on the basis of concentricity, a metaphor for human relativity.

thunder

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What art represents 9-11? One might recall the howls that initial artist responses elicited. Moving and still images of those who leapt to their deaths, rather than be burned alive in the flaming World Trade Center, were designated off-limits, either through hard or soft censorship.* A few artists still created works with this imagery, but they were savaged for doing so. And so a model was established collaboratively, determined by government and a complicit media, co-signed by the terrified and vengeful masses, to curtail free expression that might contradict the official narrative, “trigger” the feelings of some citizens, or undermine the War on Terror, etc. These policies on censorship and propaganda have metastasized to consume the body politic in America. The extent of the damage is not limited to the blatant anti-Constitutionality and quasi-criminality of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the spy systems revealed by Ed Snowden and others, the so-called Black Sites, the massacres of civilians by drones and mercenaries, and so on and on. Culture became censorship and vice versa. The delivery systems of information became harvesters of data, and surveillance engines. The barriers against terror became ersatz prison walls within which terror was normalized. If post-9/11 America an iconic graphic, it was the Homeland Security Advisory System. Prospective Terror became identified with color. The idea of it in hindsight is bizarre on many levels, practical and otherwise.

* Recombined horrifically in the latest Matrix film, in the culminating chase scene wherein “normal” people instantaneously transform into “bots” and spontaneously hurl their bodies from buildings at Neo and Trinity, fleeing on a motorcycle. As far as I know, no critic has connected this ghastly depiction with the 9/11 WTC leapers, or even attempted to unpack the motivational complexities operating within the action. To my mind, this is the first instance of creative replication of the unique abject terror that must be associated with the media production and consequent political erasure of that awful historical spectacle. The WTC jumpers for Americans may ultimately correlate to the Japanese identification with the mushroom cloud, in the shared imagination. For the latter, as I have written about elsewhere (in Transthesis, and A Thing…), the conception of the city-destroying monster - e.g., Godzilla - is an imaginary manifestation of the traumas of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The USA has barely begun to scratch the surface of its worst traumas from the 1980s til now in creative representation, arguably a reason for art’s debilitated subjective condition in the establishment contemporary, the AWInc®. — PJM

The de-occupation of Afghanistan will likely not inspire much in the way of art. The debacle inspires little but the blathering of polarization agents. Secondary imagery is in short supply, because the frantic evacuation was dangerous and chaotic. The suicide bombings and misguided drone strikes repulsed even those professional photographers who are attracted to such situations like moths to flame. Artists don’t have much to go on. That goes for the War on Terror in general, if one discounts the meager cinematic offerings embedded in the two decades of interventions in the Middle East. Hollywood has oversaturated its consumers with valorization of spies and super-warriors in special ops teams. None of these gained traction, even though American Sniper, Hurt Locker, Sole Survivor, Jarhead, The Outpost and others appealed to fragmented constituencies. The Bourne franchise, Blackhawk Down and TV series like 24 danced at the edges of the fundamental premise in the War on Terror, which was the inevitability of conflict, its necessity. Extreme violence could be construed as a consistency. It is hard to balance any of this with the foundations of art. It is facile to categorize corporate mass productions with art. The era, from 9-11 until the present, has no Goya. Nor has any meaningful theatre or dance arisen from the ashes of the “American Century.” When LBJ signed P.L. 89-209, the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act on September 29, 1965, he stated for the record, “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.” Johnson, himself, inspired no great art.

Katrina-Bush (“MGT,” Art for Humans online exhibit 2008)

This reflection opportunes an historical assessment of 21st Century Presidential Art and aesthetics. President George W. Bush, notoriously, became an artist, after leaving office, more or less in disgrace, having crashed the economy, failed to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, poured untold riches and lives into the mad cause of perpetual Imperial military misadventures and entanglements, committed war crimes by order, established the most pervasive surveillance and prison state in human history, and managed the biggest redistibution of wealth, from bottom-to-top, ever, etc. “Cultural producers” of impressive mediatic diversity responded with caricature, vitriol. The Right, in turn, characterized this critical expression as symptoms of the imaginary malady, “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” Scoffing at one’s political opponent aggravated and amplified legitimate ideological disputes. Social media was weaponized in sophisticated and blunt ways to refine the emotional traps installed in political discourse by players like Rush Limbaugh. The seeds for the crisis facing platforms like Facebook and Twitter today were planted then. As the stakes have grown, so has the interest in industrializing the exchange. The markets for data are more valuable now than the commodities and energy markets. With the shady IPO of Facebook, the virtual space for transmitting and receiving, then reacting to ideas and other stimulants, became the purview of Wall Street.

We should not have been surprised at what happened next. Assuming command, Obama basically pardoned his predecessor and his administration, the financial sector players who crashed the economy at the end of the Bush administration, and (looking “forward, not backward”) proceeded to extend and expand the worst Bush programs and policies. Incidentally, Obama went on to betray and punish the white artist - Fairey - on a technicality (for copyright infringement) who made him a graphic icon. Or at least, President Obama did nothing to intervene, as his iconographer was embroiled in a series of prosecutions. In a mostly forgotten media controversy, President Obama abandoned efforts to induct the creative communities that mobilized and organized on behalf of candidate Obama. The radio personality Glenn Beck fomented a scandal from a conference call for arts strategizing. Outrage was fomented via the right-wing talk show media monopoly. One result was the NEA individual artist grant would not be revived. A generational opportunity to resuscitate public art in the USA, in short order, was in Beltway terminology “thrown under the bus.” The Right-aligned caricaturists vengefully skewered Obama, evoking comparisons in some egregious instances to cartoonish racist stylizations of the 1800s. Graphic vitriol is as old as Presidential politics, an Americanized version of the seldom quaint cultural European tradition of political commentary expressed in cartoons.

Then, Obama oversaw the destruction of Occupy. This action was the precursor for what came next: the platforming of the most important reformation of the Art World in the new millennium, on the basis of offensiveness. People being offended by art is not novel. The type of newsworthy offensiveness toward art displayed in the past decade turns on a chrono-cultural construct that is different, within democratic society. The place of art in a free speech hierarchy is in flux. A rationale for destroying, damaging or displacing sculpture or painting in the public domain, now can be officially or extra-judicially carried out, rationalized or justified by criteria that is fluid and uncritical. Public discussion of these ticklish art matters are routinely fraught. “Obscenity” is a diagnosis for art that is ancient, with roots in religious utilization of creative expression contradicting dogma. The Nazis co-opted the maliciousness of relegating art to intellectual contraband. The culture war US Republicans of the 80s and 90s rode aesthetic outrage into prominence. History shows that the agents of art’s ignominy often turn out to be criminals, tyrants or both. Those taking the path to bloody power have often trod over art and artists in their first steps of ascension toward domination. Does anyone today remember the Meese Commission? For an excellent account, one recommends “The Pleasures of Looking | The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography versus Visual Images” by Carole S. Vance, contained in the anthology The Critical Image, edited by Carol Squiers (1990). Here is an extract:

The structure of viewing was an inversion of the typical context for viewing pornography. Normally privaate, this was public, with slides presented in federal courthouse chambers before hundreds of spectators in the light of day. The viewing of pornography, usually an individualistic and libidinally anarchic practice was here organized by the state — the Department of Justice, to be exact. The normal purpose in viewing, sexual pleasure and masturbation, was ostensibly absent, replaced instead by dutiful scrutiny and the pleasures of condemnation. (p. 47)

lock

∞

Katie Series #8, “Mimetic Junction Dance,” 2007

We might pause to reflect on many threads bound to this forgettable, hyperbolic episode of prosecuting the image and speech bundled in this modernized witch hunt, conducted as political spectacle during the Reagan Presidency. The relevance is sweeping in multiple areas of public political and cultural discourse. Noting the time frame, it is necessary to point out the massive surveillance state that would emerge within a decade of the Commission. The political decency campaign has often been employed to justify state enforcement power, including surveillance. An ancient tool in the bag of political dirty tricks, “ratfucking” is the vulgar term used by Nixon operatives, including Roger Stone - pardoned by Trump - and applicable to Bush Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff, Republican consultant and, currently, frequent FOX News contributor. The sanitized version, normalized throughout the political domain, is “opposition research,” which is attached to an astonishing array of distributive means. The careers of politicians like Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner were destroyed by revelations of sexual impropriety. The vulnerability of citizens of every type to such smears, based on what we now understand about Big Data collection, has without doubt had a chilling effect on free speech and therefore democracy itself. Our secrets belong to the government, are permanently captured in the Cloud, captured through software, hardware and networked peripherals. Black Mirror and other commercial cultural products, from the Bourne to the Bond movies, present the facts of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project as ubiquitous, inevitable, expeditious and necessary - or as a sign of dystopia. How can one stand against this untenable contemporary crisis, which is persists in violation of Constitutional guarantees of privacy?

It is breathtakingly easy to be drawn into the monopoly/social media rabbit hole for tabloid controversy, because, we have learned, those rabbit holes, intellectual cesspools, were designed effectively for trapping attention, and eliciting and aggravating human emotional responses. The latest “gotcha” clickbait is the currency of the social web. The terrifying refraction of the predicament manifests in the Chinese Social Credit System. While we are preoccupied with “Cancel Culture” (reference Dave Chappelle, The Closer, or any micro- or macro-furore, conducted mostly online, with Real Life repercussions), the organization of civilization is being reconstructed as a Panopticon. Orwell’s science fiction (1984) is manifesting as the default command and control complex for the 21st century. With disconcerting speed, the infrastructural devices for the consolidation of dominant power are clicking into place: prison state - check; surveillance state - check; global militarization - check; absolute privatization of the commons, or its inverse - check; monopolization of global distribution systems for energy, technology, commodities, food, water - check; monopolization of communication and messaging systems - check; constriction and control of transportation systems - check; cooptation of educational and medical systems - check... This is not a paranoid delusion. This is experience, daily reality, for billions of people.

“Spores,” from “Heartless01,” Nashville, 2001

The Orwellian vision is not a perfect fit for our contemporary dilemma, however, because the history of the 21st Century is prismatic. We can feel discomfited by the plethora of things that do not add up, but no one will appear to make sense of it all. We can wonder why there is nor effective representation for the Afghanistan “War,” without noticing the reality that twenty years of conflict and occupation are contained in a Black Box, opaque to our gaze. The imagery and narratives that could truly depict this history have been removed from public scrutiny, intentionally, to better facilitate the management of appropriate responses. That is why there have seldom been pictures of the carnage, and stories from over there, in the unedited voices of warriors and their casualties. The problem and prosecution of “leaks” is linked to this programming. Our gaze has been displaced, while the gaze of the powerful has been turned on us. Now, in the absence of war, the entire apparatus is being brought to bear on us. It started with minor things, like the censoring of images of American soldiers arriving in caskets draped in the Flag. Dissent against the conduct of imperial war was demonized, and a flag-burning became a clip that would be replayed in media hundreds of thousands of times. Political discourse was channeled into silos, “echo chambers.” Gridlock became the political Status Quo, except for a few habitual, blank-check requisitions, benefiting the military industrial complex and its prime beneficiaries, Dylan’s “Masters of War.”

It seems like ages ago, but one may recall that just prior to the Corona Virus pandemic, uprisings were happening across the globe. Mass media offered minimal explanation for the phenomenon, beyond the drone against populism, right-wing authoritarianism, left-wing revolution or labor troubles, and so forth. A simplistic analysis would be that people were finally fed up, with, well, pretty much everything. Business As Usual was repeatedly being disrupted. Elite concerns seemed to grow as some of these disruptions swelled into nascent social, civic liberty, anti-war, anti-globalist, anti-racist/fascist movements, with reactionary complements. Comparisons were being made to past eruptions of discontent that dislodged rulers, governmental-, economic-, or social hierarchies. The disparate causes and conditions of the protests, riots, street battles, etc., could coalesce into a bonafide and unified action against establishments and arrangements. The whispers, of fear or hope, that attend historical insurrectionist moments.

Barcode 010101010, “Barcodes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes,” Eureka, CA 2004

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practical solution. It conflicted with the tendency toward mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by more advanced rivals. - George Orwell, 1984 (p. 157), 1950

The timing of the pandemic could not have been better, if the objective was to shut down what was beginning to look like a transnational, or better, all-directional, rebellion against gross inequality, imperialism, colonialism, perpetual militarism, impoverishment, civic neglect, governmental malpractice, corruption, financialization, climate change denial, and more.. Some of the causes and demands of the riotous hordes were specific, others less so. A few were generalized, in the vein of Occupy. Here in America , discontent had been building, really since the invasion of Iraq. It was finally coming to a head. Political polarization was endemic. Rhetoric was giving way to “domestic terrorism.” The regularity of political or ideologically-driven violence was shocking. Bernie’s first Presidential campaign would happen in this context. The subterfuge against Bernie in the primary on the part of the Democratic Party establishment, whose candidate was Hillary, when it was made public, threatened to incite outright political violence and rebellion. The election of Trump was the last straw for millions of Americans. Just when the USA a appeared on the verge of a second Civil War, Covid hit.

Art History, and history itself, would be radically transformed, starting during the Obama Presidency, accelerating through Trump’s. Public sculptures would be defaced, torn down or systematically removed. Politicized violence centered on these events. The canon would be scrutinized for cultural transgressions and targeted for diverse actions, material and immaterial. Correcting colonialism would become the project, extending to the re-writing of historical texts, and the re-contextualization of all the Humanities and Sciences, according to a new ideology, which might be loosely described as inclusion. The social mediatic version, with hastag, became known as #woke, and merged with movements, like #BLM and #metoo. This development arced through the American Presidential administrations (Bush-Obama-Trump), eventually erupting in the streets, with proto-militant factions like Antifa and Proud Boys (ostensibly revolutionary and reactionary) engaged in open conflict across the nation. The Occupy template for social change had mutated, metastasized. President Trump’s ballyhooed Art of the Deal credentials proved limited. In the view of half the country, Trump was instead the ultimate provocateur, weaponizing social media with an effectiveness no one had managed before. If President Trump was an artist at all, he was what we used to call a New Media practitioner, one of the genre’s greatest, if not its preeminent user. Joe Biden, a lifelong political “bag man,” ostensibly cares nothing about art, although the same cannot be said of his son Hunter.

Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: “The more you kill, the more deaths you will cause” or “The very fact that you let more die will allow you to live more.” I would say that this relation (“If you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill”) was not invented by either racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: “In order to live, you must destroy your enemies.” But racism does make the relationship of war — “If you want to live, the other must die” — function in a way that is completely new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. - Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” (17 March 1976, p. 255)

fabric

∞

Neoconservative ideologues play on the tendency of Americans to think of ourselves as exceptional. Neocon usage of exceptionalism displaces accountability, subsuming calls for justice with conflation of patriotism and the indefensible. On the subject of desecration of icons of power, however, we must acknowledge America’s homegrown attacks on public images in scale and scope have been mostly unexceptional. The Taliban obliteration of ancient sites and sculpture, such as the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, has been more perversely grandiose, an ugly, stupid series of alarming spectacles. Jihadist Muslim violence encompasses shocking acts of small-to-medium scale “terrorism” like the Charlie Hebdo massacre, stabbings of random pedestrians, using moving vehicles to mow down European revellers, the by now prosaic suicide bombings and videotaped beheadings. The 911 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to date are the most consequential “acts of terror.” Because of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as the conflicts attained a recognizable form of contemporary asymmetric warfare, and because of the duration and cost of the conflicts, we have had the opportunity to analyze the scenario dimensionally, over time. This is a sign of normalization, which the August 30, 2021 de-occupation interrupted. One take-away from the ponderous catastrophe, this bloody imbroglio that has defined the first quarter century of the new millennium, is that it remains historically unexceptional, in practically every dimension, except with regards technology. The value of protracted war is in it use as an industrial research and development facility.

Street view of Joel Richardson and his artwork for Occupy with Art's production "Wall Street to Main Street" in Catskill, NY (2012)

Americans are notoriously concerned about Image. In this we are hardly unusual. We are conflicted. We both underestimate and overestimate the imaginary. The fearful negation of image and dismissal of artistic merit or value is not an American invention. The inclination of conquerors to dismantle public and social signs of the conquered is as ancient as conquest itself. However, we have added many tools and immaterial options to the art-denier, and to the image maker. We have pioneered a genre of creative negation, for political and cultural applications. Like many uniquely American innovations, the result is a global trend. Of course the French, maybe the Germans and Italians will clamor for credit, but attribution to European sources is profoundly wrong. The novel element is a synthetic turn on post-colonial, secular (or at best Deist) rebellion, defined specifically by the American sensibility towards Image. What is novelty in the latest iteration is the presumption of the revolutionary or violent fanatic, who attempts to obliterate the iconography of the perceived tyrant prior to the assumption of actual power. The adoption of a global media strategy to invert mass perception of power-holding and -articulation through episodic violence is novelty. Whether the approach is effective in the long-term is questionable. Further, it may be that the short-term effects are not causal, except in the overall rise to power of media industrialists. No matter how heinous the image, the for-profit media has benefited from human curiosity, our urge to see what cannot be unseen. The virtual visual taboo is not really understood, although valid pubic concerns are usually met with derision or suppression.

The problem is tricky. One does not wish to align with the contemporary cultural boogeyman, the Church, in an updated Inquisition. One does not wish to align with the historically maligned Censor, of whom there have been many, great and small - whose hate, whatever its basis, erases cultural humanity, behind the project of racial or tribal genocide, colonial or imperial conquest, and so on. In our “neo-historical” phase, the mediated masses proportionally experience history through electified screens, and are encouraged to decouple personal experience from current events, when the two domains of perception are not managed or sanctioned by top-down authority. The resulting disorientation among communities of tremendous demographic variety is integral to the manufacturing of contemporary malaise, a psycho-social phenomenon with vast political an economic implications. Differentiating between righteous indignation and the improper or unjust dispensation of power over the exercise of public, free expression in art is complicated by historicity itself. To valorize the toppling of statues of Stalin, Hitler, or Hussein, as acts of liberation, establishes a precedent for a specific heroic. What does one do when the represented mythologies of the past fail to meet uninherited expectations and criteria for heroism of the present day. If this is the standard by which public art is judged, in time all such expression is doomed.

Industries have emerged primarily to remedy what used to be called existential crisis, which afflicts the great majority of human beings, whose existence, we are repeatedly reminded, is more uncertain than ever. Which in itself is confusing, given our shared mortality. The remedies for mitigating death include “living it up” packages and products, which temporarily distract one from the inevitability of the end of life. Oblique treatments include therapies whose main goal is to “normalize” the individual, at minimum, or “optimize” her, at best, for continued performative participation in the Status Quo, at minimum, and transcendence of the Status Quo, optimally. Life insurance is meant to be a sign of death acceptance, that yields a fiscal upside for beneficiaries postmortem. Seen differently, such insurance is a sure-thing wager, pitched as a comfort for a future dead person still living. Wills are a legal mechanism for pre-death plans of postmortem distribution of the things, assets, one leaves behind when passing away, passing on, dying. In this they provide solace, for the future dead person and bereaved. The former will rest assured, that his post-life plans will be executed properly. The super rich approach estate planning with another mindset, that of the tax evader, or grifter.

All the above techniques speak to the human condition, which involves reconciling life and death, within some construct of acceptance, or non-acceptance, as it were. Contemporary techniques probably would seem strange to people living in other epochs, under other circumstances than what we denote as familiar. In the contemporary milieu, we are given to a convergent idea of all-at-onceness, which confuses, conflates and convolutes epochs and circumstances through the process of conflation, or flattening. In doing so, we lose the perceptual clarity that art, philosophy and religions appropriating both into their technical dogma, have traditionally afforded masses of people, who must balance individual experience with collective, dimensional interpretation. Under the auspices of collectivity, through the apparatuses of connectivity, the individual struggles to integrate negotiated solutions to death in life, as a means to acceptance of both life, on its own terms, and the terminal moment, a condition of finitude. Unsurprisingly, many of the temporary answers to technical questions about life and death fail to satisfy anyone troubled by mortality.

Novad MegaZine, End of the World Edition, no.ONE, Vol.ø 2012

The existential negotiation is converted by the managerial complex into a gamble, a game, in which one wagers not only one’s life, but its quality, moderated by the cost-benefit analysis. Actuarial statistics are the medium. The odds are posted routinely in mass media, framed as advisory information. Excess living, we are cautioned increases the odds of an early demise. One day we learn that certain foods and drink decrease the chances of contracting disease. The next, we are told by legitimate sources, often supported by clinical and scientific proof contained in government or corporate-funded studies, that the opposite is true. We are left to judge the validity of advice, based on some preponderance of evidence, although we are cautioned in doing so, because new evidence is always emerging, old theories are being reevaluated, and so on. Eventually, one may become exasperated, realizing rules for existence are impossible in the absence of coherence or conclusion, which science and medicine cannot and will not guarantee. The riskiness of life intertwines with factual impermanence.

Life is already strange enough. Knowing one will surely die eventually only heightens the strangeness. Any truth-oriented definition of insanity unfortunately is destabilized by the shift from assigned values and amorality of globalism, with its drive for productive homogenization. The globalist mindset recalls the board game Risk, which is inspired by the models for conducting war and empire throughout history, likely evolving with humans, from prehistorical strategic mapping conducted with sticks and pebbles on the ground, which children playing war use even now. Much of this martial data visualization has been computerized and networked over the past several decades, for first-world, global military applications. One of the attractions of war is its indifferent remediation of the life-death quandary. The soldier means to kill and not be killed. Simple enough. For the rest of us, life is left to be treated, as if it were a disease, with for-profit cures, none of which work well enough to ensure everlasting life, freedom from death. It is never clear whose “side” the clinician is on. Exceptions are hellholes like Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, where the euphemism for therapeutic intervention was the “Enhanced Interrogation Technique.”

“Bubblegum Old Hickory,” acrylic and ink on canvas, 2014, David Lusk Gallery, Nashville, TN

How can one not be a Fatalist, or a Nihilist? The Psychiatrist is employed by the Army! Religious fanatics blow themselves to pieces for the promise of a paradisal afterlife! They target the Innocent (whoever that is, since we all have been adjudicated complicit by wags of every sort)! Is there any limit to contrivance of blame, in the pursuit of truth, disguising the urge to avenge our powerlessness against death’s surety? “Waterboarding” was temporarily revived as an ersatz “truth serum” for use on terrorists, which was sanctioned by maverick psychiatric professionals employed by the US military and intelligence agencies. Institutionalized torture, it seems, recedes, but does not ever entirely disappear. Torture is peculiar form of insanity, designed to inflict maximum pain on a person, meanwhile sustaining him or her on the verge of death, with the possibility of survival as the carrot. Contemporary culture has found the subject to be of interest, for reasons that are provably false, to the broad public. Torture is preventative? Torture yields vital intelligence? Torture may prevent mass destruction? The other guy does it, so why don’t we? The use of cultural and mass media to rationalize the Bush-era torture programs remains a stain on our nation. The Bard vividly described the spiritual sickness of the complicit. The bloodstains on the hands of Lady MacBeth, visible to her alone, can presumably be cleansed by an early justice that will never appear:

“Doctor
You see, her eyes are open.

Gentlewoman
Ay, but their sense is shut.

Doctor
What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.

Gentlewoman
It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus
washing her hands: I have known her continue in
this a quarter of an hour.

LADY MACBETH
Yet here’s a spot.

Doctor
Hark! she speaks: I will set down what comes from
her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.

LADY MACBETH
Out, damned spot! out, I say!–One: two: why,
then, ’tis time to do’t.–Hell is murky!–Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power to
account?–Yet who would have thought the old man
to have had so much blood in him.

Doctor
Do you mark that?”

— Shakespeare, MacBeth, Act 5, Scene 1

Cousin Margaret, Selfie Series, 2017 — Cousin Margaret, *Selfie* Series, 2017

wedge

∞

The contemporary culture of Self (whose social media correlate is the Selfie), is the industrial antidote to the inequitable realities of power, property and prestige. The realization is grim: for a huge proportion of the global population, those who own no hard assets of transferable value, or are “upside down” in debt, the abstract “self” is what superficially remains one’s possession. To witness the possession of oneself, through the lens of the commons, one must surrender self-possession to the machinery of human consumption. The last bastion of autonomous identity falls with the click of a send button. One’s possessive reality of self is transformed mechanically thereby into a thing, a product, a brokered image, whether one comprehends the transaction or not. The person is transmuted into data, compressed, shared, traded, monetized, stored in the Cloud, etc. We become exploitable, with as much “metadata” - self-context - as the system can harvest. Identity is reduced to a name, numbers, comprising a profile, to which an image can be attached. The lines bordering censorship and regulation are dangerously blurred, because the divisions between industry, information and government are evaporating. The value of facial and vocal recognition, of other bio-markers, augments the human analog with a digital doppelgänger. The willing participant in this exchange is assumed to be motivated by sufficient rewards systems. In early phase social media, affirmation was communicated through “likes.” After the asymmetry of the exchange became obvious, incentives to self-promotion, in conjunction with product promotion or performance, became money, celebrity, travel, etc. The pioneer model online for the current industrial complex democratizing self-marketing was developed for the pornography business, which for many years generated the most profits and traffic among all web-based ventures.

Although candidate Trump was embroiled in a series of sex scandals, these did not appear to negatively affect his poll numbers or popular support, much to the exasperation of his political, personal, cultural opponents and enemies. When he secured the Republican nomination, Trump flipped the narrative on Hillary Clinton and her operatives, by using a range of media options to displace her accusations. He cleverly pointed out former President Bill Clinton’s sexual profligacy, painting the Clintons as hypocrites. The specter of Jeffrey Epstein haunted the discourse, and many prominent figures in and out of politics were implicated circumstantially, including Trump. When Trump was revealed to have had an affair with former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, shortly after his present wife had given birth to Trump’s son Barron, the repercussions were not nearly enough to alter the election. Over the next four years a pattern began to emerge. Those around him, sometimes those closest to him, suffered for his “sins.” When a fuller biographical account of Trump’s circumstances was pieced together, the story explaining his “success” contradicted the ones he had told over the years. We learned as a nation that Trump’s “truth” was mutable, and that the person holding the office of President was not necessarily the one we were voting for or against on the ballot. The problem with fake news is impossible to solve when news is made by fake people for real, material gain.

“Donny the Clown,” Not an Artist Series, Art for Humans Tumblr 2018

The history of Presidential portraiture begins with the first, President George Washington. I have held a portrait of Washington in my own hands, during a high-end art installation job in Beverly Hills. The artist was Gilbert Stuart, who painted an estimated one hundred copies, based on a single sitting with Washington. The one I carried with surgical gloved hands throughout a famed California mansion, pausing periodically to hold the painting in place, while the owners and designer, Barbara Guggenheim, discussed its proper placement in this luxurious room or that one, was a smallish copy of the original POTUS, valued in the millions of dollars. The purchaser was a tech and media mogul, worth billions, with a major collection of Name pieces. The rest of the story of my experience belongs elsewhere, but suffice to say that Suffice to say that the mysterious profundity of art historical portraiture can be visceral and ponderous.

Reflecting on the Presidential portrait, one can discern among the number, nearing fifty all told, that over the few centuries since the country’s founding, the picture and image have significantly diverged, both eventually synthesized via multimedia. Andrew Jackson was the subject of much portraiture, and also the President who managed his own image and personal mythology for popular effect, in a modern sense. His image was reproduced in a variety of media, including photographs. The advent of photographic Presidential portraiture was a game-changer. President Lincoln stands out as a curiously photogenic subjective study, whose image invites a psychological angle in the reading of his historical record. The creation of Presidential legend, veering toward heroism, belongs to securely to Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, who was able to attach a strong narrative to his image, which by then was beginning to move. FDR was the first President to gauge his own physical limits in terms of media, which helped him secure four terms in office, his last cut short by death, in spite of prodigious handicaps, based also on performance under duress.

Hamilton’s grave, Lower Manhattan, September 2010.

“Ike” Eisenhower’s Presidency owed substantially to popular familiarity achieved through wartime propaganda. JFK was the first celebrity President. The Kennedy First Family was the first competitive within the spectrum of global Royal imagination. The Kennedy clan was the first American operative political dynasty for the modern or multimedia age, although the British Royal Family still is preeminent. The Kennedy’s phenomenal rise to political heights foreshadowed the concept of political branding. The assassinations of JFK and RFK, and Teddy’s Chappaquidick scandal cut short that trajectory, but also clearly marked a new phase for the Presidential image, one that has its shadows, plots and conspiracies. Nixon was particularly well configured for creative negation, and arguably the first President whose caricature is more recognizable than his analog version. Ford served as the first Presidential non-entity, tasked primarily with damage control and other mundane management operations. He too, like his immediate predecessor, was the object of effective satire, for his purported clumsiness, the first post-media anti-hero to hold our nation’s highest office. Carter was crushed as a result of his principled unwillingness to contest on behalf of his mediated image. Then came Reagan.

Reagan was the great consolidator of media power for the Oval Office. He was the first contemporary Presidential Imagician. A professionally trained actor, Reagan possessed theatrical discipline an order above every President who preceded him. Throughout his tenure he rarely if ever broke character. His messaging was impeccable. The Reagan era broke and re-directed post-War solidarity and patriotism in a momentous rebuttal of the Sixties’ revolutionary impetus. The cultural and economic reformation, connecting the 68ers with a coalition of feminists, workers, civil rights advocates and other movements was roundly squashed and replaced by feel-good Capitalism. “Greed is Good” became a rallying cry for the beleaguered financial sector, which set about its consolidation centering on ideological and political economy. “Iron” Maggie Thatcher emerged as the trans-Atlantic version of Reagan. Smashing unions was conducted with renewed vigor, starting here with Air Traffic Controllers, and in the UK with miners. The removal of regulation on business, reduction of civil services, erosion of rights and lowering of taxes on the wealthy were just a few of the systematic objectives embraced by Reagan conservatives. The rejection of American interventionism was reversed, and incrementally replaced by escalation of Cold War and reconstitution of shadow war activities on the global stage.

COLLOSSUS (detail), mixed media art and text, September 2010

Reaganism was consolidated into a political myth, method and ideological brand. After his two terms, the elder Bush became the first meme President (“Read my lips: No new taxes!”), and due to a number of factors failed at re-election. Image was one of those factors. He was defeated by Clinton, whose two terms set the table for our current Status Quo, even if that metaphorical table was installed by Reagan. Context and undercurrents help bring the Big Picture into focus. To contextualize 9-11, we must review major post-War developments in the Middle East, especially those pertaining to oil, finance and the new politics for ancient religions. Some developments, like the US switch from the gold standard to the Petrodollar, and the formation of OPEC, were more specifically post-Vietnam events. Other historical keys include, obviously, the establishment of a Jewish nation in Palestine, and the victorious Allies’ imposition of somewhat arbitrary borders, which converted a largely tribal region into a regional collective of largely abstracted or artificial nationalities. Cultural, historical and religious awareness in all these conversion measures was sorely lacking. The geopolitical pastiche would begin to crumble almost immediately. The global economic consequences resonate through to our present day.

“Consumable pseudo-cyclical time is spectacular time, both as the time of consumption of images in the narrow sense, and as the image of consumption of time in the broad sense. The time of image-consumption, the medium of all commodities, is inseparably the field where the instruments of the spectacle exert themselves fully, and also their goal, the location and main form of all specific consumption: it is known that the time-saving constantly sought by modern society, whether in the speed of vehicles or in the use of dried soups, is concretely translated for the population of the United States in the fact that the mere contemplation of television occupies itfor an average of three to six hours a day. The social image of the consumption of time, in turn, is exclusively dominated by moments of leisure and vacation, moments presented at a distance and desirable by definition, like every spectacular commodity. Here this commodity is explicitly presented as the moment of real life, and the point is to wait for its cyclical return. But even those very moments reserved for living, it is still the spectacle that is to be seen and reproduced, becoming ever more intense. What was represented as genuine life reveals itself simply as more genuinely spectacular life.”

— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (153), 1967

We have to dig beneath the surface, the dimensions of attention attraction and image projection, through the processes of mediation, to excavate the subterranean immaterial that erupts materially, which, we are informed, no one could possibly foreseen. On the contrary, we discover, most events of significance are entirely predictable, even banal. This is definitely so in the case of the 9-11 attacks and the August 30, 2020 de-occupation of Afghanistan. Much of the necessary forensic analysis has already been accomplished by brilliant, neutral historians. Through their work we can arrive at a more comprehensive knowledge of the precedent relationships connecting a string of incidents, for instance: the Iran hostage crisis during the Carter Presidency (1979); the bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut in Reagan’s first term (1983); the deadly Mogadishu operation under (Clinton 1993) that inspired the book and movie Blackhawk Down; the World Trade Center bombing (also 1993), and others. While the United States was engaged in Cold War and a nuclear arms race with China and the Soviet Union, the Middle East was undergoing a radical transformation, fueled by the enormous wealth accumulating there, concentrating in the coffers of brutal regimes and dynasties, some of which were and are fundamentalist in their religio-cultural beliefs and practices. These societies are not democratic. In some respects they operate as creative political anachronisms, inspired by civilizations that achieved their zenith centuries ago. The bitter struggles between Arab and Jewish peoples are profusely documented, and persistent. Volatility, violence and repressive religious extremism are indelible characteristics identified with the region, but so is brutal poverty linked to acute inequality.

“Chimera,” Novad MegaZine, End of the World Edition, no.ONE, Vol.ø 2012

“What appears familiar, self-evident, ordinary, everyday, natural, certain, and suggested is also the most uncanny: the murderous grimace in the mirror of our acts. Humanity has been misappropriated, repurposed as fighting machine. The human-all-too-human deserves trust neither from us nor from things. Its father is war, its manner devastation, its principle hatred, its result untimely death. Just as everything can become destructive, and every truth can be reinterpreted metaphysically, so has the familiar become incomprehensible when it no longer appears to us as existent.”

— Wolfgang Schirmacher, "Living in the event of technology," Inscriptions 4 (p.7, January 2021, Article 93)

spare

∞

Occupy Wall Street was a powerhouse, a creativity engine. Multi-disciplinary to the core, we channeled concepts through working groups like OWS Arts & Culture, Occupy with Art, Occupy Museums. Some of the many proposals were actualized as events, interventions, performance, exhibitions, direct action - established activist nomenclature often fell short in describing what was happening, and how. Affiliated, or “affinity” groups, pulled off spectacular stunts, like glitter-bombing Mitt Romney and the banner-drop at MoMA, but much more was in play and at stake. Salons were formed. Enclaves for occupational artsy life, like “Magic Mountain,” were popping up. Connections were being made between Occupy and movements of the 60s and 70s, sometimes through people who showed up and out for both. Marches were indicating a neo-Situationism. The signs, puppets, and community art championed by previous generations of leftist culture warriors were re-purposed by Occupy… A familiarity with activist art history, as such, will recognize the script that was superimposed on OWS by those who crushed it. The details of the complicated and rich exchange that occurred, which was global, have been Disappeared, expunged, culturally, historically. What could be has been co-opted, the rest erased. The nascent Occupational Art movement was ghosted.

The transmutation of Occupy into fodder for industrial marketing and commercial art and State propaganda has become easier with time passing. The approach is incremental and systematic. The Occupy reality has not been represented. Instead, the public has been fed a steady stream of distortions and gross fantasies, such as the mobs in The Joker or the armies of Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. Superhero franchises have been utilized both to villainize unacceptable forms of dissent and prop up Power. It is an ancient practice, and its contemporary iterations are routine in most aspects. Those of us who were there know. The reactionary processing of OWS was immediate, began almost on Day 1, whichever one that was. Liberty Square was a content epicenter for a few weeks, and the convergence upon the site by exploiters of astonishing variety became a routine subject at A & C working group meetings, eventually leading to the publication of The Statement of Autonomy. A few anomalies have appeared and been handled. Mister Robot being one. What should interest any true artist is the Unspeakable, what cannot be permitted, what will not be funded or shown.

Occupy produced much notable printed matter, including posters and the Occupy Wall Street Journal. One of my favorite Occupy-related print projects, to which I contributed, was the Novad Megazine, “End of the World, Vol:0, No 1.” The Novadzine was published to coincide with the “end” of the Mayan calendar cycle on December 12, 2012. The Megazine was remarkable in many respects, a collaboration that reflected the complex dynamics which suffused OWS. The Chimera was our mythological animal spirit/spirit animal. The assembly of the material was effected through a rich exchange mostly conducted virtually. The Occupy content and context merged in the design. The production was influenced directly by the movement, through its ethos, its pathos, its eros, its logos. Occupy with Art had done some exploratory work centered on the Book, which was natural. Most occupiers in Arts & Culture were writers or artists of some kind, and Occupy did seem to operate within the sense of self-awareness, from its beginning — one of its unusual dimensional features. It demonstrated a Meta-quality that still evades recursion. Much more can be drawn from this. Bruce Sterling was thinking along these lines in 2005.

How do people know what to expect from their things? Every culture has a metahistory. This is not the same as their actual history, an account of places and events. A metahistory is a cultural thesis on the subject of time itself. Metahistory is about what’s gone by, what comes next, and what all that is supposed to mean to sensible people.
…What is needed is the energy for effective intervention without the grim mania of totalitarianism. We need to take action without any suffocating pretense of eternal certainty. So we need a new concept of futurity whose image is not the static, dated tintype of the past’s future. We need a dynamic, interactive medium—we need to invent a general-purpose cultural interface for time.
Metahistories to date have had the static character of a sacred oracular text. What we need to invent is something rather more like a search engine. We need a designed metahistory.
- Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things (p. 37, p. 42)

Our occupational project had the great good fortune to be aided by an “Anarchivist,” Jeremy (“Jezz”) Bold, whose manifold contributions included the highly trained librarian’s understanding of history expressing itself through us, and vice versa. The buzzword was “lens.” The value of archival practice In Real Time was prominently on display throughout the production. Realism balanced the composition, which was situated in a projection of the ideal society. Continuity itself became the architecture for the array of disparate images, complemented by a great variety of word-based communication. The signs of protest mingled with the Sign, and it began to not matter so much which was which. Dividing lines among the academic or disciplinary constructs were softened with color and digital patina. One cannot underestimate the importance of the virtual medium. The network, the devices and software accelerated and facilitated every facet of the project. We knew the crackdown was coming. The park had been cleared. Peaceful demonstrators were being bashed by cops. The infrastructure of Occupy was infiltrated from within and subjected to a sophisticated all-directional assault. The occupiers were amateurs against pros. Everything we did we did facing imminent obliteration. I think that is a key to good art.

“Katie” Series #3 (“Look out your window”), 2007

filament

∞

The proximity of the War on Terror, its “distanceless” quality, abuts the incalculable space inhabited by those who have lived the direct experience of the War’s violence and its “collateral damage.” In the culture writ large, those maimed, killed and terrorized are consigned to referential zones. At least since the advent of the printing press, the reality of war has diminished its romantic value, for justifying and rationalizing the exploits of empires and nations possessing the conceits of empire. Photo and video documentation almost as soon as they were invented became tools for propaganda. Fast global network communications have both thoroughly demystified and confuse the violence imprinting itself on us. Our image of war now is like a puzzle with so many pieces it is effectively impossible to assemble. If one is obsessive enough, the puzzle may be eventually solved, but the solution will hardly produce a gratifying image from the parts. The puzzle becomes only a picture of obsession, not a graphic union.

Fukuyama lamented:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. - Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History?” The National Interest, Summer 1989)

One goes too far to claim he was wrong. Prediction after the fact yields a blurry picture, closer to an impression. Like a figure whose form emerges in a dense fog, the closer one is to him. The Time is not sad for everyone. A few folks are doing excessively well at what Fukuyama posits to be history’s end. Those few are creating for themselves a new direction for history, one which places them securely at its pinnacle. Fukuyama confuses the attributes with the means, which is understandable. Chronological displacement encourages both convolution and confusion, as well as conflation and other analytic foibles. About the “museum of human history:” we have instead the Museum of Ice Cream, Meow Wolf, immersive van Gogh and Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors; the museum is being disrupted by the Selfie. Art is being disrupted by the NFT, essentially a trade-able digital provenance machine. Philosophy will forever be the right implement to make sense of change. The question is whether the Few will continue to tolerate philosophers, or Truth. Fukuyama failed to recognize that the political and economic ideologies, their most noted proponents on the global stage, a few religions and name-brand philosophers would by now be subsumed in the fortunes of the globalist oligarchy. The heroes of Davos consider themselves to be the greatest creators and thinkers of the age, and they abhor competition, unless its outcome is assured, and they emerge as winners.

pod

∞

Humans, as a rule, require hope, which requires vision. George Washington Carver is credited for saying, “Where there is no vision, there is no hope.” The quote resonates nicely with President Johnson’s, above. But art has no true relation to speechifying, affirmations and aphorisms, although these modes of communication have their own value. One does well to consult a sober reference, an experienced hand, a pro, for whom both analysis and production have merits. The historical perspective is good enough, on its own terms, but much better as application. Few late 20th Century points of view bear the incisiveness of Donald Judd’s. His observations on the arts and culture, and the threats to them, are pertinent still, even though the scenario is exponentially worse now. In “Una Stanza Per Panza,” which should be required reading for art students, Judd pronounces:

Art doesn’t have to exist; there is no assurance that it continue. It has lapsed before and is disappearing now. Architecture doesn’t exist. There is no architecture that we have heard of; all the known architects, all architects building internationally, are not architects. Music hardly exists in this century; dance hardly exists. But imitations exist which claim the names, and also, in great quantity, construction and sound which do not concern themselves with names. Both the imitation arts and the nameless arts are boring and depressing because they lack the essentials of their claimed or unclaimed nature. Architecture is not comprehensible, is not spatial, and is not even functional. Music is nearly without sound and time. Both are dependent on a vague and squalid language of the past. Visual art is hurrying to this condition. Most of it is a new form of commercial art which exaggerated the attitudes of the earlier avant-gardes, as does the well-known commercial architecture which pretends to innovation. Also much of the present visual art is boring, repetitious and superficial and endlessly dependent on the past, which is misunderstood if the name of art is claimed and consequently unknown as a reality. Or, if work is called art only in a vague, descriptive way, the past is reduced to only forms to select. Art is increasingly literary and as literature is bad.

“Una Stanza Per Panza” was republished in the October 2021 Brooklyn Rail, with an introduction by Caitlin Murray, the Director of Archives and Programs at the Judd Foundation. The original was published in 1990 in serial format (refer to the BR article for details), as part of a campaign the artist waged against “a rouge’s den” of collectors, institutions and press hacks, in defense of his work and ideas. His was a courageous stand for the artist and the art, and the autonomous correlation of the two, as a fundamental right. It was a stand, furthermore, against every apparatus of their exploitation, beyond direct compensation, as agreed upon contractually. Judd’s analysis of the unique multi-dimensional domain occupied by art, across sectors and classes, is necessary, if only for one unfamiliar with the occupation to begin to recognize the effects of money, in the context of property and ownership. Art lays bare the contraption of possession in society. In so doing it operates symbolically, a metaphor for enslavement and the persistent reliance of capitalism on subjugation. The intervention by Power to edit and thereby make wrong that which the artist conceives correctly situates the discourse as a moral one, one in which the binary of Good and Bad are effective, and the answer to which is which is in the hands of a Maker.

Sculpture by Donald Judd, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2006)

mint

∞

What does the art-truth procedure look like? Light in the darkness? Schopenhauer points out: “Accordingly, every work of art really endeavors to show us life and things as they are in reality; but these cannot be grasped directly by everyone through the mist of objective and subjective contingencies. Art takes away this mist.” [p. 98, The Essential Schopenhauer, “On the Inner Nature of Art” (ed. Schirmacher, 2010)]

Another world is (still) possible, to paraphrase the occupier projection on the Brooklyn Verizon building (November 17, 2011). That projection became known as the “Bat Signal,” a designation whose meaning the Covid 19 outbreak has perhaps affected. If David Graeber’s pre-figurative anarchic revolutionary vision remains unrealized, its transformational logic persists, because it is as old as humanity itself. One might argue that the persistence of resistance is a function of Hegelian logic in truth. How else to explain the resilience of both, the whack-a-mole incidence of anti-globalist messiness and the boomeranging switch from falsehood to the true? The “many-headed Hydra,” post-Occupy, has more in common structurally with the Taliban than it does with any of the faceted states of being associated with Michael Bloomberg in his various manifestations, public or private - dots org, com, edu or gov. The materialization of “sides” in the global war amounts to a realization among allies. Any sign of resistance is countered with symbolic violence in the extreme. If a new world is to reveal itself in our future, it will unlikely be recognizable to the ordered one foundering in the contemporary morass. Appearance will reflect the life lived on the defensive. The mask is the face of the new. It is worth pondering now the histories of masks, searching in that history for clues about the psyche which desires masking, and the transformative possibilities enabled therefrom.

In closing it is satisfying to evoke Hegel, whose revolution-inspired thinking still is transposable in these fraught, anti-historical and desperate times. We might fool ourselves, believing that the upheavals we face are unique. They are not, and neither are the solutions and answers properly formed to meet the challenges of the day. Yet the mysteries of human existence are wrapped in the cycles of remembrance and forgetfulness. Pain is often the wages of both, and wars are waged on account of either. When people gather together, as we did at Occupy Wall Street, the reason is in great measure obscured by activity in all directions. One type of movement draws attention to itself, and OWS was such a movement. Another type generates derivative motion, and so much of the powerful external intervention directed at OWS was intended to prevent as much as possible Occupy’s proliferation. It was viewed as a viable threat to globalism, and it was shut down, evicted, beaten back, by the likes of Obama, and shadowy figures who have never claimed credit. Today, one can judge the legitimacy of OWS in its absence, a tragic fact. Because the world and its people would be in a better place, if we had responded with open minds and hearts to the peaceful redress of grievances put forth in Zuccotti Park over those few months.

The sins of our era are outlined beautifully in Hegel’s litany. They are transgressions of truth, traps of falsehood, mapped for the mind like a country stroll. One glimpses ghosts, shades of memory in the text, figures come and gone. If there is anything to gain by looking back at our cited events, and those that transpired in the interstices, it is truth. The truth winds through 9/11, Occupy Wall Street, and the US de-occupation of Afghanistan like so many strands of DNA. Human history after is shaped in our image, and that shape, if we accept the science, is a double helix. Manipulation of its code, to speak metaphorically (or not), can produce plague or perfection. It is not settled science, whether form makes fate, however. Freedom, both to- and from-, remains in the domain of choice, for now, and choice begs for truth. We neglect both by closing our eyes to the lessons behind our backs. Hegel:

Consciousness, therefore, suffers this violence at its own hands; it destroys its own limited satisfaction. When feeling of violence, anxiety for the truth may well withdraw, and struggle to preserve for itself that which is in danger of being lost. But it can find no rest. Should that anxious fearfulness wish to remain always in unthinking indolence, thought will agitate the thoughtlessness, its restlessness will disturb that indolence. Or let it take its stand as a form of sentimentality which assures us it finds everything good in its kind, and this assurance likewise will suffer violence at the hands of reason, which finds something not good just because and in so far as it is a kind. Or, again, fear of the truth may conceal itself from itself and others behind the pretext that precisely burning zeal for the very truth makes it so difficult, nay impossible, to find any other truth except that of which alone vanity is capable — that of being ever so much cleverer than any ideas, which one gets from oneself or others, could make possible. This sort of conceit which understands how to belittle every truth and turn away from it back into itself, and gloats over this its own private understanding, which always knows how to dissipate every possible thought, and to find, instead of all the content, merely the barren Ego — this is a satisfaction which must be left to itself; for it flees the universal and seeks only an isolated existence on its own account…

ENDNOTES

America from its inception has been and remains a Thing, at the minimum, in the German sense (das ding). Our three cited events represent, in turns, a violent fracturing of the American assemblage, which was in essence an attack on its semblance (9-11), a prohibited attempt to re-assemble the global US with a radically different image under different rules of order (OWS), and a disassembling of the project to forcefully recreate an imaginary American self-image upon a distant foreign sovereign, its land and people (8-30-2021). The subtext of colonialism is impossible to extract from the configuration. The first two events occurred in Manhattan, which compounds conquest with slavery with a broad theory of Capitalist Civilization and innumerable episodes of resistance and capitulation to the enterprise over time. The most recent, the de-occupation of Afghanistan, preceded by the less harried retreat from Iraq, indicates a substantial shift in the topology of hegemonic adventurism abroad. We find ourselves, perhaps, at a critical historical juncture, as the architecture of a priori Western Civilization is threatened, internally and externally. The challenges are dimensional and existential, given the profound destructive power of the major players and the extreme environmental factor. Survival of the USA as a democracy is uncertain, as has been demonstrated over the past two decades. The scientific evidence that Climate Change is a prime hazard for the future of humanity is overwhelming. Alarm at the possibility of a third World War seems to grow with every day passing. The geo-social, -economic and -political problems of population, inequality, displacement, logistics, disease, food and so on, compound one another, to create a cataclysmic swarm effect.

If there is a promising solution for the situation, it will require a massive humanitarian cohesion, one which is opposed by those who benefit from chaos, waste and destruction, those whose magical, perhaps mad, vision of the future invests in space travel, singularity, cloning and other much darker projects, like genocidal euthanasia. Instead, one hopes that other great minds will prevail. One thinks of Buckminster Fuller, with some input from McLuhan. Those men are gone, now, however, and humankind will need to look elsewhere for inspiration. OWS, before its eviction, positioned itself as a platform for that search. Greta Thunberg represents a generational shift in prioritization and outlook. Whatever and whoever emerge in the near-term to address the overarching crises that inflect all contemporary discourse, the plans must be comprehensive, inclusive decisive, and logistically viable. Such a monumental and unprecedented project would require the re-definition of management, of governance, really, the basic rules set for human relations, to restore homo indomitus in communion with Nature and the Universe, yes, but also with a technological future. Such a project, therefore, would require more than science and any ideology of political economy. The collaboration implied in the demand for the requisite and fundamental change requires a profusion of interdisciplinary networks. The value of art and philosophy in tandem to serve as a secular binding of mind, emotion and spirit in truth is inestimable. The accord makes “space” for science/technology to collaborate with the humanities on equal grounds, on the basis of truth. Without truth we will not survive. Then, any image of America, or any other thing, collective or individual, will not matter, will make no difference to anyone at all. The ultimate question is whether meaning will die with humanity. None of us will have the opportunity to pose or answer that question or any other, anymore. From “The Doors” (1967) anthem, “The End”…

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes, again

Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free
Desperately in need, of some, stranger's hand
In a desperate land

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

∞

In “The End,” Jim Morrison goes on to notoriously, vulgarly disposition Freud’s Oedipal Complex, merging the projects of psychoanalysis, poetry and Rock’n’Roll. Killing the Father (King) and fucking Mother, in a Howl for unbecoming the human being and recreating the Thing. Morrison’s lyrics represent a stunning reversal, captured on vinyl, tape, film and video - in multimedia. The End blurs the reality of desire, of violence and sex, to infuse and empower the deconstruction of “everything that stands,” expressed in a poetics of unfocused rage and loss, within the soaring electrified anthem performed by the Doors, whose band name is a reference to Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. The strange, dystopian, rawkus, raw, Dionysian dreams and visions of Morrison ended in overdose, with his body interred in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery. “The End” has been played over and over, since the song’s release in 1967. In 1928 Paul Valéry envisioned a time when music, among the arts, would be made ubiquitous, through “he amazing growth of our techniques.” Valéry’s brief, dreamy essay, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” fantastically sketches the Internet age that would materialize less than a century later, and the future utility of music in technically enhanced contemporary life, as a transmitter of joy, emotion and beauty. He states, “I do not know whether a philosopher has ever dreamed of a company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality.” The phenomena Valery imagines, and the post-reality of Jim Morrison, present a problematic mesh. The mesh is further complicated, when one remembers that Walter Benjamin quotes Valéry’s essay, to open “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). An argument can be made that, of the two essays, “The Conquest of Ubiquity” is today more germane in post-Internet media theory, although the value of either to aesthetics is arguable. Or perhaps we must entertain the concept that, in the End, Aesthetics must join painting, indeed The World itself, and all Things, thinking human and otherwise, in imaginary, repeatable, technologically effected Death, a media phenomenon.

“Marshall McLuhan theorizes that all media are actually multimedia, that no media can exist in isolation. “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph. If it is asked, ‘What is the content of speech?,’ it is necessary to say, ‘It is an actual process of thought, which is in itself nonverbal.’” [ p. 8, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1994] W. J. T. Mitchell agrees with McLuhan, claiming that “All media are mixed media.” [p. 215, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, 2005] Mitchell however makes one slight modification to McLuhan’s media theory. While McLuhan claims that the content of a particular media has to be an older medium, Mitchell disagrees. Mitchell explains that where McLuhan “went wrong was in assuming that the ‘other’ medium has to be an earlier medium (novels and plays as the content of film, film as the content of video). The fact is that a newer and even nonexistent medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium.” [p. 216, ibid.] According to McLuhan and Mitchell there are no boundaries that theoretically exist between the term media and multimedia, as all media are in actuality multimedia (or mixed media).”

— "multimedia," The Chicago School of Media Theory

This concept of multimedia contradicts Benjamin, but not Valéry.…And “The End” was the soundtrack for the opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola’s award-winning film Apocalypse Now, in 1979, which was an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” In A.D. 64, Nero “fiddled” while Rome burned, which seems to have not actually happened. The unpopular Emperor has been vilified, by an ancient precursor to the contemporary meme, ever since. He blamed Christians for the conflagration that consumed the city. Today, as has been pointed out, much of the Earth is on fire: Australia; the Western USA; the Amazon; Russia; Greece; China… We must reckon with the absence of any Emperor on which to pin the fiery cataclysm, or any of the other, many cataclysmic events plaguing the world. Instead, we must accept that humanity is subject to an invisible Empire, equally, or at least proportionately, virtual and actual. The consortium of individuals and powerful syndicated network monopolies they control and/or are served by exist beyond our senses’ capacity, beyond full comprehension by anyone, even those who comprise this consortium. It is a Thing, in every meaning of the word, replete with plausible deniability, typified by risk aversion, whose most overt characteristics are its undeniable realities, which put life itself at risk. For what, we ask? Meanwhile, the non-Emperors use their boundless resources to shift blame to everyone and anything but themselves and the instruments of their power. The process of mass obfuscation is increasingly abstract, even as the masses yearn for greater clarity, mistaking it for greater simplification, an impossible proposition under the current circumstances. The obstacles to true representation are too many, too difficult, insurmountable. One only has to ask someone in power for a solution, especially one that involves the redistribution or abolishing of property and prestige on a grand scale, or reproductive equality.

Through the fractal lens of dimensional history, our existence and experience of occurrences over time spiral, like strands of DNA, through a medium of consciousness, of thought, into the absence of self-awareness, the Thing (-in-itself). The cycles of humanity echo through the ages, apparently patterned, but with mutations, deviations and anomalies. The imperfect resonance of our stories inform the inherently flawed things with which we mostly concern ourselves on a daily basis, and determine those unfortunate things that will in time be abandoned, perceived as nothing, whether they are or not. We continue the exercise of imagining a constellation of possible worlds, while the one we occupy becomes increasingly uninhabitable. On the bloody other hand, the (non-)imperial, empirical imagination cannot conceive of its own demise, which is implied in the quote of Hegel above, a function of the mind. So, it projects destruction on all the subjects of Empire. A time may come when the plight of the non-emperor Emperor becomes “historically” equivalent to the that of Tyrannosaurus Rex and the rest of the terrible lizards. The non-emperor Emperor of the contemporary age in a near- or distant future may mysteriously disappear, or at best only evolve to be vestigial. The zombie hordes of their diseased imaginations may eat them alive. It is doubtful that an escape into Space, deus ex machina, will be their salvation. Nor will re-embodiment, ad infinitum, solve their dilemma, which is a matter of unsustainibility. The Machines will not obviate the future human question, by Singularity, following a protracted phase incremental conquest by conversion. Nature possesses and administers its own truth, which contains no permanent conception of rich and poor, in the sequences of Time’s unfolding. The radical Christians will again be blameless, at least by their own script. They have their own feverish dream of the future with which to contend, contained in the Book of Revelations. …A fact that many confused commenters, pundits and social critics tend to conveniently forget, or ignore, at their own, and our, peril. Framed as a terrifying pre-truth on the subject of spiritual liberation, the End Times are something for which a great mass of this world’s people pray for, fervently, repetitively, over millennia. It is hard to say how much these prayers will affect the real outcome, because we still, in spite of all the evidence, underestimate the power of collective visualization - which, keep in mind, is the main concern of Art.

drench

∞

The great American author Cormac McCarthy has written a defining literature of our continuous End. The overarching dread of terminal destiny fulfilled spans narratives that adhere to the norms of chrono-linear drama. Within the construct of past, present and future McCarthy expertly traces the action of the characters, giving their stories sufficient realism to generate reader belief in the general hypothetical, short of expectation, past hope. The Road is the most emotionally provocative text, an exercise in despair, set ambiguously in the future. Blood Meridian, confronting an imaginary past, dispenses with the historical tropes of nation-building, rescinding the foundation myths of the American West, by locating the story in a dreamscape as horrible as Conrad’s Africa and Coppola’s Vietnam. Another classic cinematic reference would be Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God. God’s wrath, for McCarthy’s central characters, is a suspect in each casualty’s demise. “War is god,” McCarthy’s Judge pronounces. Tellingly, the dangerous productions of Apocalypse Now and Aguirre punctured the fictitious reality assigned romantically to movie-making, and real blood was spilt. The urge to visualize viscerally had mortal consequences. No Country for Old Men is the third installment of McCarthy’s triptych, for the purposes of our analysis, a parallax configuration to the writer’s intentional Border Trilogy. Anton Chigurh, the relentless fixer, represents a terrifying alternative to God’s wrath. Killing or mercy, for Chigurh - “all things being equal,” when “things could go either way” - is determined by the toss of a coin. The fact of Anton’s mercilessness is made an outside issue within the rules of chance. No Country for Old Men is perched precipitously between past and present, but by the end, we are beset by the feeling that our best days are behind us, and those were bad enough. The future, if one fearlessly studies the signs, is grim. The prospects for a good life, lived on the right side of things, are grim indeed. In The Road, cannibalism is an option, for survival, that must rejected, on grounds that stipulate survival on principle. The boy child, who is willing to die rather than feed on people, embodies the future of mankind. About him the man said, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” (p. 4, 2007). For McCarthy, the child is the covenant for our divinity in a post-Apocalypse world. Upon the body of the boy, and in his belabored breath, the origin of not only the Man-God covenant hinges, but also the origin of all things. For “In the Beginning was the Word.”

Foucault writes in The Order of Things, “The Retreat and Return of the Origin,” (p. 329, 1970):

In modern thought, such an origin is no longer conceivable: we have seen how labour, life, and language acquired their own historicity, in which they were embedded; they could never, therefore, truly express their origin, even though, from the inside, their whole history is, as it were, directed towards it. It is no longer origin that gives rise to historicity; it is historicity that, in its very fabric, make possible the necessity of an origin which must be internal and foreign to it…

What is historical or not is adjudicated. The date September 11 is not a federal holiday in the USA, probably because conservative lawmakers are loathe to give government workers another paid day off - they already have ten for God’s sake. History, per se, has not ended. It is run more like a business, because everything is. Originality is a cliche, the instant it is posted on Instagram. Hyperbole lost its zing during the pandemic lockdowns. The withdrawal of US forces and attached civilians, culminating on August 30, 2021, in hindsight, was a logistical miracle. The metrics are phenomenal. Why are events, which mass media elevate to a historical status, as directed by politicians or business interests, prone to dissolve, in a few days’ or weeks’ time? History and memory are ruptured, after a prolonged bout with Nemesis. The word “living” idiomatically links experience to both history and memory, affirmatively in the context of sharing, and preservation. Recently, the historical, memorial public art is being re-evaluated, sometimes by mobs, who destroy or deface those they find objectionable. The criteria is subjective. Reactions to the wave of violence against “plop art” (a term coined by architect James Wine in 1970) rarely manifest as outrage on behalf of the artist who made the art or the art on aesthetic terms. The mob enacts its criticism destructively. The process by which art enters the public domain is more interesting. A different type of Mob governs the iconography of public space, with serious implications for society. Generally speaking, the same Mob governs art and history education. We are seeing the returns on those investments, or lack thereof. Children who are taught to love and respect their art and history do not typically defile it. Those raised without art and history have no love for either, and, one wants to say, will be prone to join mobs when they congregate to vandalize carvings and paintings. No one understands this better than Banksy, the first and greatest post-contemporary anti-artist.

September 2010, NYC, 14th Street/Union Square Station, L Train platform

Notes on the Format + Final Word:

The MegaZine concept reflects cinematic technique. It (the MegaZine) may be thought of as static cinema presented in the descending linear order of the infinite scroll.
The temporal construct of the MegaZine may be imagined as a shaped dynamic lattice consisting of instantaneous, simultaneous perceptual nodes, to which wire-like connectors may be affixed, to which wovenform events (people, places, things) may be presented. The presentation is ambiguous and ambivalent, in that the events are neither clearly autonomous nor contingent, though an argument can be made for either condition, as the discursive point of origin for further analysis, critique or linkage.

The secret is to oppose to the order of the real an absolutely imaginary real, completely ineffectual at the level of reality, but whose implosive energy absorbs everything real and all the violence of real power which founders there. Such a model is no longer of the order of transgression: repression and transgression are of the old order of the law, of the order of a real system of expansion. In such a system, all that comes into contradiction with it, including the violence of its opposite, only makes its expansion accelerate. Here the virulence comes from the implosion. — Jean Baudrillard, “Our Theatre of Cruelty,” Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader (eds. Chris Kraus and Sylvere Lotringer)