Subversive subway – craig ward

Craig Ward is an artists typographer and I think this work is an interesting example of a combined methodological – practice…. ie autographic typography.

This resinates with me as I am trying to methodological practice; autographic embodiment (or autographic ornemenutionation)….

  • maybe I should turn inwards and think about the material traces we harness on a day to day basis from within our bodies… the bruised knees of children indicating a data set about generational activities – ie falling forwards.
  • the action of picking ones nails as an indication to an anxious disposition….

Contractions of Time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective – Nato Thompson (E-Flux)

Article on how the relational aesthetics have attempted and are attempting to break away from the capitalocene temporality of attention deprived society of the spectacle….

If products demand to be produced and consumed in ever-expanding contexts, they may also be adapted to durations more suitable to electronics than to what our bodies can endure. And without a doubt, the accelerated pace of disembodied consumer desire ultimately alters the basic structure of our bodies. “The consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is a twitchy, agitated interpassivity, an inability to concentrate or focus.”2 We are plugged in. We are in the matrix. We are atrophied hunger machines.

And in left-leaning art culture, pointing the finger at capitalism is no more novel a diagnosis. Certainly, the dominant social order is responsible for the present social order—the system perpetuates itself and we are its subjects. And the self- help industry would be much more compelling if its balm for depression and spazzed-out children included a radical redistribution of wealth, but that goes without saying.

Any cultural formation that comes into being now necessarily does so according to the terms of a general cultural shift toward the twitchy, the disinterested, the agitated, the dyslexic, and the bipolar.

The return of the body and of prolonged time resists the dematerialized, agitated nature of the current era. Abramovićʼs performance brought the world of spectacle into the two forms of experience many considered beyond its purview: the body, and time. If spectacle is meant to be consumed rapidly, and from a distance, then Abramovićʼs performance rendered the spectral character of fame human flesh, placing it front and center for the long term.

the phrase “The Artist is Present” captures a heightened sense of engagement—as though,

  • how does he know it captured a heightened sense of engagement

Operating against the grain of contemporary temporality may not only be a hallmark of the arts, but also the delineation of their discursive boundary. How do we know it is art? Because it takes so long to appreciate, it couldnʼt be aimed at a typical consumer. Because it is so annoyingly long it must be interesting.

At times in tension, at times in collusion with capitalist scarcity, the scarcity of experience encourages forms of art that are not as easily distributed as—and thus more distinguishable from—the mass produced goods of the broader market. Massive installations, sculptures, performance, civic institutions (the museum), time-based relational aesthetics all find value in their experiential distinction from larger markets. Museums offer special opportunities to experience the body in space. In this spasmodic era, we find the arts recalibrated as a temporal, spatial, and bodily escape.

  • place. spacial opportunities to expeierence the body in space. We need to experience these things against the body? seems to boil down to scale – temporality structure is just a translation of or allusion to another temporal metabolism.

At Creative Time, Paul Ramirez Jonasʼs project titled Key to the City allowed the general public in Times Square to briefly participate in a ceremony that provided them with a key to the city of New York. This object, to all appearances an ordinary house key, awarded to the public in a brief but intimate moment at the heart of NYC spectacle, is not only symbolic, but also functional, in that it opens a myriad of locks across the five boroughs. These unmediated interpersonal projects take as their starting point a specific experience, a poetic moment, that is registered, digested, appreciated, and completed.

But what else can a museum or public art organization do? Without question, certain temporal limits are necessary for artistic projects to be brought to a general audience. Were the discreet embodied moments of Abramovićʼs retrospective limited simply by the duration of a conventional museum visit? Is there really any value in a critique that calls for a duration so extensive that no public institution can actually host it?

  • surely concepts of outdoor, autographic interventions are an answer to this?

Can it really be the case that market-friendly forms are simultaneously, and conveniently, the highest form of political content? Now that information has become a

commodity and advertising codes have penetrated the very essence of what it means to communicate, we can no longer pretend that art remains magically outside this logic. While it would be wonderful if the gesture could somehow escape this trap of cultural production, the museum and gallery are not safe-zones immune from capital and power. As a result, we must continue to view artistic gestures with the special skepticism reserved for all cultural production. Reflexivity alone wonʼt save it. An advertisement that tells you itʼs an advertisement is no less edifying, just more contemporary.

  • very nice quote explaining the skeptisms necessary of all ‘products of culture’… even those with intention to inform and engage an audience with something like the 6th mass extinction

So while there are certainly merits to discussing the limits of the gesture, the commodification of the present nevertheless plays out across the body and time.

Slowness has emerged as a strategy for resisting the consumable flow of information and developing a form of social cohesion that withstands the frenetic needs of capital

The artist Tania Bruguera has said that it is time to put Duchampʼs urinal back in the bathroom. That is to say that bringing life into art can no longer be considered an important gesture. Rather, life should be viewed from the epistemological vantage point found in some contemporary art. If one is interested in a more ambitious and meaningful project, perhaps it isnʼt enough to depend on the niche market that is art. As accelerated time comes to characterize not only survival in the arts, but also the default condition of the public, we find forms of meaning that resist the tide of capital and gravitate toward not only the long term, but also the profoundly civic.

Jakob Jakobsen and Henrietta Heiseʼs Copenhagen Free University, which closed its doors in 2007, used a long- term approach to emancipatory public education; the Chicago-based artist collective Incubate works as “radical arts administrators” on alternative funding models for cultural production; the artist Caroline Woolardʼs skill-share trade site OurGoods offers a Craigslist approach to swapping services in order to escape the logic of capital. In all of these approaches, we find a civic form of participation whose goals are infrastructural in scope. They all propose a means of connecting people over an extended period, and offer a response to the problem of shrinking time. In the long run, these works may find their resistance to consumable capitalism to have worked all too well. The production of cultural meaning that resists the flow of capital will need to ultimately produce forms that contribute to radically altering culture. If the civic is a space of long-term engagement with subjectivity, then perhaps the cultural producer interested in producing meaning must find a way to overcome the economic and temporal logic of the attention-deprived.

Earliest record of physical visualisation (indexical design)

The earliest data visualizations were likely physical: built by arranging stones or pebbles, and later, clay tokens. According to an eminent archaeologist (Schmandt-Besserat, 1999):

“Whereas words consist of immaterial sounds, the tokens were concrete, solid, tangible artifacts, which could be handled, arranged and rearranged at will. For instance, the tokens could be ordered in special columns according to types of merchandise, entries and expenditures; donors or recipients. The token system thus encouraged manipulating data by abstracting all possible variables. (Harth 1983. 19) […] No doubt patterning, the presentation of data in a particular configuration, was developed to highlight special items (Luria 1976. 20). “

Clay tokens suggest that physical objects were used to externalize information, support visual thinking and enhance cognition way before paper and writing were invented.

  • if its about creating a code, surely with there right key (or frame) sounds could become a tangible way to understand data… self inscribed sound such as standing in a certain place, finding a position with the correct whether/wind…

Introduction of Human Perception in Visualization – Sternadt & Manuel R. S. Tavares2

However, these attributes are not frequently characterized by space or temporal component. That makes the task of representing them with an adequate graphical approach even more complex. Thus, the attributes of the data to be represented must be characterized according to different criteria. 

The adequate identification of those criteria is considered determinative to characterize them visually, and, because of that, it is considered one of the most important and complex steps of any computational visualization system. 

  • idea that ‘attributes of the data’ must be counted for so that they are relevant to the reaction wanted… 

The perceptions are different according to the physical characteristics of the stimulus and they are interpreted in function of the previous experiences associated to that stimulus, making the brain able to extract knowledge. This continuous flow of sensations generates what it is known as perception. 

“The perception process acquires information from the environment through the use of the sensorial mechanisms of vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. This information is integrated and interpreted.”, (Gupta 2000: 221). The reply of a specific sensorial organ is the consequence of its adaptation to the stimulus type involved. Thereafter, there is an expected agreement between a sensation and the stimulus that produces it. 

  • this just confirms and opens up thoughts on sensual and interactive designer objects

The Gestalt Theory is based on the following principle: It is not possible to have knowledge of the whole through the parts, but of the parts through the whole; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 

  • look up what t.moprton says about this … can’t remember whether he agrees or disagrees 

Petro-Melancholia- The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief – Stephanie LeMenager

Rob Nixon refers to the “slow violence” of neoliberalism as the occluded referent of “disaster,” which in a modern risk society is often a misnomer.4 From the Greek astron, or star, “disaster” suggests an unforeseen calamity arising from the unfavorable position of a planet. The BP blowout confirms disaster criticism’s focus on the expectedness of the so-called unexpected while pointing to a different aspect of how ecological collapse can obscure human social and technological histories. Here the prob- lem is proximity. The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body.5 Decoupling human corporeal memory from the infrastructures that have sustained it may be the primary challenge for eco- logical narrative in the service of human species survival beyond the twenty-first century. 

  • must look up ‘incorporating practices’ Paul Connerton. sounds quite like Judith Butlers performativety
  • also decoupling human corporeal memory (from the coded understanding of nature as separate and oil as engrained and distant etc) is probably the term idea I was looking for when subverting Debords ‘spacial alienation’ or spacial amnesia… (i used spacial memory)
  • (what better way to re-encode/incorporate practice/perform than to literally embody. WEARABLE. Companion. Interactive. Autographic.

The BP blowout poses a unique representational challenge be- cause it follows an unusual episode of de-reification, a failure of the commodity form’s abstraction. This “disaster” did not work as spectacle, in Guy Debord’s sense of the mystification of modern means of production through screen imagery.6 The continuous vid- eo feed available on the Internet of oil shooting out of the damaged well—however that might have been manipulated by BP—read as a humiliation of modernity as it was understood in the twentieth century, which is largely in terms of the human capacity to harness cheap energy. Unlike anthropogenic climate change, which resists narrative because of its global scale and its as-yet-limited visibil- ity, the Deepwater Horizon rig localized a plethora of visible data, more than could be disappeared by the hundreds of thousands of pounds of Corexit that BP poured into the Gulf. The BP blowout resembles Hurricane Katrina in its manifestation of “events” that support predictions of environmental catastrophe (e.g., peak oil, global climate change) that otherwise might be dismissed as effects of scientific modeling or Left fear-mongering. Yet, just as Katrina did not result in a changed national affect toward black, urban pov- erty, the BP explosion has not, it seems, spurred Americans to re- consider loving oil. 

  • despite the spectacle in this instant technically not holding up in the typical way – the means of production and infrastructure that fuel the colonial capitalistene lying unseen behind the ‘appearances’ of mass media culture and its blurriness/confusion/automoisation – the fact we are totally and entirely desensitised to imagery of this sort and receiving it on this medium meant we took no serious notice or action (despite it manifesting an “event” that support predictions of environmental catastrophe.
  • Also aligns itself with susan schoppi and ‘nature represents itself’. Interested in the sincere ways we can anthropomorphise in order to reduce this inherited gap between humans and their technology and nature and it’s resources. 

Poem – Someone will lay a plaster vault for me to ride, like long boxes children pull down flooded roads. In my plaster boat I’ll ride Gulf shores
till I vanish like a rig in the sun.22 

The poem suggests the Leeville cemetery, one of many Cajun burial sites that have floated out to sea due to subsidence. Serpas’s poetry invites an openness to personal extinction (“If only I could give the land my body— / . . . I would lie against the marsh grass and sink, / . . . and welcome the eroding Gulf—”), as if humans count primar- ily as matter, our corpses sandbagging the wetlands (79). To live in such a world is to be sculpted by subsidence, with that geological artist linked tenuously to the rigs, whose silhouettes against the sun make them appear as symptoms of distant intelligence. Serpas and the MMS interviewees offer a vernacular poetry of human species collapse: heroic, Catholic, melancholic. Feeling ecological means the discomfort of surrendering historical thinking, with its linear- ity that honors the perceived arc of human lives, and welcoming breakdown of the human into “marsh grass and sink.” This or- ganicist vision is not unfamiliar in environmental discourse, yet it takes on force, and threat, in a place where human bodies literally fight back the ocean because of the technologies meant to extend human energy and comfort. Feeling at home in a petrol “world” creates an affective drag on thinking through human survival. 

  • I think she is stating some interesting points about a ‘vernacular poetry of anthropocentric manifestations of the effects of the slow violence of oil extraction

Jennifer Wenzel’s analysis 
of Nixons Slow Violence

Instances of slow violence considered here include climate change, soil erosion and deforestation, bioaccumulation of industrial toxins (including the long aftermaths of spectacular disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl), marginalization of local communities in the name of resource extraction or infrastructural development, and ‘‘precision’’ or ‘‘smart’’ weapons like cluster bombs and depleted uranium that keep killing indiscriminately long after the cessation of hostilities. In addition to the physical damage done to people and ecosystems, Nixon consistently draws attention to the discursive aspects of slow violence: the representational regimes of invisibility, ‘‘spatial amnesia,’ 

  • links between spacial amnesia and studio practice experiments that use the senses to engage with spacial memory…
  • also almost direct link the ‘the spectacle’ as Debord calls it ‘spacial Alienation’

Slow violence, Nixon writes memorably, is violence ‘‘in the passive voice’’ (131). Its dilated temporalities demand that we rethink, in yet another way, the post in post-conflict, post-Cold War, postcolonial, postapartheid. 

What most distinguishes Nixon from other postcolonial ecocritics in the US and the UK is his unapologetic anthropocentrism. This stance reflects not an antipathy to nature an sich but rather a strategic rejection of the ‘‘antihuman environmentalism . . . (under the banner of universalism)’’ (5) that has characterized some Western environmental thought and policy, from colonial conservation to deep ecology. 

  • inline in an indirect way with morton and defo inline with peter frame (must eventually read communism chapter) (oh and maybe how to b anti capitalist)
  • being unapologetically anthropocentric is what autographic, human centred design is. harnessing the world of affecticious objects via anthropocentric frames … routes to get us nearer to making change

Even if the seconds-long attention spans of the digital era pose an additional, urgent challenge to apprehending the dilated temporalities of slow violence, new media’s potential for instant connectivity promises the emergence of a new generation of ‘‘writer–hacktivists. 

‘‘the multiple temporal orders that we inhabit’’ 

Like Edward Said, Nixon writes as a public intellectual with a ‘‘belief in the value of multiple publics’’ and ‘‘varied public registers’’ for creating ‘‘imaginative coalitions that may help redress environmental injustice’’

Nixon helpfully identifies several literary modes and genres salient to this kind of activist work—the postcolonial pastoral, the environmental picaresque, the movement memoir. 

  • (and I’m proposing an autographic approach via wearable, interactive design…?)

19/11/20 – quick thought on touch and Debords S.O.T.Spectacle

Guy Debord writes about sight being the sense with the highest potential to abstract us from reality. I think this is relevant to my project in two ways:

  • I’m thinking about sensorial (or sensual, haven’t quite decided what word yet) experiences of data sets and the lack of connectedness to information and ways of doing this through ornamentation and how personal and intimate ornamental embodiment practices are/have the potential to be… ie; touch, hearing, taste etc – places to interrogate engagement
  • SECODNLY – I studied Graham Harmens tripple O during lock down and our practice viva and came to some interesting conclusions on what it means to touch something when in the contact of consumption… ie; the local market vs. the online experiences of purchasing something. I concluded that touch was necessary to access the real qualities of an object.
  • I now wonder whether using a sensory perception of ‘sight’ (which in Debords view is a weakest and most easily manipulated sense) may merely allow us to access the sensual object… whilst the metaphorical and/or aesthetic experience alludes to the real object (essence of) that is the subject matter.
  • Should this be something I discuss with Sean? ACTUALLY first, in order to answer this question i think look up ‘real qualities’ section in a new theory of everything book… (below are the diagrams I redrew for the essay that helped me understand the practical nature by which harman thinks the aesthetic experience happens)

Quote from medium website: https://medium.com/@mdowns1611/commentary-on-debords-the-society-of-the-spectacle-chapter-1-37b2e105614a (has good definitions of marxist terminology)

Other website that helps translate issues spoken about in the spectacle

‘Alienation is separation — separation from ourselves — and the spectacle is the perfection of this sort of separation’

  • nice summery of what the issue of the society of the spectacle really is 

18. For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings — tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behav­ior. Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seenvia different special­ized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adapta­ble to present-day society’s generalized abstraction. This is not to say, however, that the spectacle itself is percep­tible to the naked eye — even if that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle reestablishes its rule. We live in an inverted world. If the real world becomes images, then images become the most real of things. These images attract and entrance us precisely because we take them to be real. We cannot experience the real directly anymore. The real is not something we can reach out and touch. The “real” is only visible in spectacular images. This is why the spectacle puts all the emphasis on visual experience. This is a very McLuhanite insight. McLuhan pointed out that different media-forms produce different types of societies as well as different types of subjectivities. For Debord, sight is the most abstract of the senses, that is, the one most capable is distancing itself from concrete experiences. Consider how we use the word “see” to refer to understanding abstract truths, for example, “I see why the circle cannot be squared”. We often say we can “see” these truths, but never that we can touch, hear, taste or smell them. Thought and seeing have long been associated. Given how abstract things have become in the consumer society, it’s no wonder the spectacle puts us in a sensory mode wherein visual experience is dominant. This is also no coincidence, since sight is the most easily tricked of all the senses and the spectacle is in the business of deception. However, the spectacle is not itself visible to the eye. This sounds strange, but what he means is that the spectacle is ultimately the way in which images are arranged and configured in relation to one another and, more importantly, how human beings are brought to relate to each other in consumer society. Remember what Debord said in thesis 4: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle is a social system, a social network, and not just a huge stockpile of images. I mean, it is a stockpile of images but one that mediates social relations among people. To say that the spectacle is “immune from human activity” means that any effort on our part to get control of the spectacle, to bend it to our will instead of to capital’s, is an effort in futility. The spectacle is far too pervasive and elusive for us to regulate it. Our simple concrete activities cannot correct it. When it comes to the spectacle, our activities do not factor in. Baudrillard was always quick to highlight the unilaterality or irreversibility of the code, of the simulation. Debord is getting at this as well. Average human activity cannot force the spectacle into a dialogue. If “dialogue” enters the equation, then it’s a simulated type of dialogue like that of a call-and-response format. If the dialogue is scripted, then it’s not really a dialogue at all — it’s a monologue in the simulated guise of a dialogue. Think about how scripted and predictable arguments on the internet are. No one is really engaging in active dialogue. Monologue is the structural default setting of the spectacle. If flows into us, it gives to us, and nullifies every attempt we make to give something back to it. It does not want us to be able to openly challenge it, reverse it, actively problematize it. It wants us to shut the fuck up and simply enjoy what it gives. This is precisely the issue with representation taking on a life of its own — the spectacle, imagistic capital, is like Ultron. Once representation usurps reality, real referents, once it has become unmoored from concrete things, it makes all the rules.

  • The types of aesthetic experiences I am interested in simulating aren’t specifically un reified… they still entirely intend to have an mystic aura but I guess one that is ‘speculatively more real’

19. The spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision. Indeed the spectacle reposes on an incessant deployment of the very technical rationality to which that philosophical tra­dition gave rise. So far from realizing philosophy, the spec­tacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation. The spectacle is not just the zenith of capitalism but also has a deep connection to Western philosophy. The Western philosophical tradition has all sorts of blindspots in it. These have been pointed out by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, etc. The spectacle inherits all of these weaknesses. Western metaphysics has always been visucentric (based on sight). Think about how substance ontology describes everything in terms of visual properties. Substance ontology is visual ontology. This is one of it’s presuppositions. It never argued that reality itself is structured in the way that visual experience is, but, instead, blindly presupposed it. Why isn’t reality like hearing or touching? Why must it be like our experience at all? Don’t get me wrong. There have been philosophers that have challenged the validity of our experience, but I don’t really know of any that approached this in something like a McLuhanite manner. Activity, both nonhuman and human, might not be reducible to the parameters of visual perception. Just a thought. The spectacle is the technological outgrowth of the technical rationality that grew out of Western metaphysics (this is something Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, etc., would agree with). Debord claims that the spectacle doesn’t realize philosophy — it philosophizes reality. But what does this mean? What’s important is not that the spectacle is the purest realization of the technological rationality of Western philosophy, but, rather, that the spectacle comes to undermine what philosophy took reality to be. Put differently, the spectacle inverts reality and representation. It makes images into realities and realities into images. This is what it means for the spectacle to philosophize reality. This also involves negating concrete human reality by turning us into detached speculators of images. The spectacle turns all of us into “philosophers” insofar as it distances us from reality and forces us into never-ending contemplation of the consumer world. You’re not concretely living when you’re abstractly contemplating.

  • Also I like the word visucentric!!! (based on sight… Im interested in anti-visucentricity)
  • Also the idea of pseudocyclical time – is also applicable to data visualisations as well as commodified goods

Quotes from the actual texts: (in order that they appear in the text)

“But for the present age, which prefers the sign
to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, …truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.” 

  • thinking about ‘what people engage with’ and how representations are key… how can I prove that they are more key when they are more illusionary, representationally visceral as opposed to ‘trunfullinessly’ allured to via data and graph 

 But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation. 

  • things such as false consciousness align with anthropocentric/cosmological confusion confusion

The society based on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclist. In the spectacle-the visual reflection of the ruling economic order-goals are nothing, development is everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. 

  • good argument / reference for neoliberalsim’s void of forwards thinking yet has ‘development and progress’ (Ie GDP growth) stamped all around this void’s rim. Doughnut economics esque argument for the necessity of visualisations due to the power of them.

(17) The first stage o f the economy’s domination o f social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having­ human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage, in which social life has become completely occupied by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually real. 

  • ontological shifts…

The spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autono­mously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunite 

  • the spectacle creating a lack of community and unconscious – a bid for why the opposite to the spectacle – the sensual and the connectedness – may allow for a reversing of this and an engendering of COLLECTIVE ACTIONS

(28) The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. ….. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the condi­ tions that engender “lonely crowds.” The spectacle is simply the common language ofthis separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness. 

  • this I think holds true to ‘connectedness’. Different terms but this ‘language of separation’ is contemporary communication and comparison that exists on social media platforms and the way in which we interact with news and upsetting yet equally distant and temporally elongated information

(153) like all spectacular com­modities, at a distance and as desirable by definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life, whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itselfat a higher level ofintensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life. 

155) While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the pseudocyclical consumption of developed economies con­ tradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in their sys­ tem of production. Cyclical time was the really lived time of unchanging illusions. Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality 

161) As Hegel showed, time is the necessary alienation, the ter­ rain where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself In total contrast, the current form of alienation is imposed on the producers of an estranged present. In this spatial alienation, the society that radically separates the subject from the activity it steals from him is in reality separating him from his own time. This potentially surmountable social alienation is what has prevented and paralyzed the possibilities and risks ofa living alienation within time

163) The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all­ embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of a federation of independent times-a federation of playful individual and collective forms ofirreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization ofauthentic communism, which “abolishes everything that exists in­ dependently of individuals.” 

^ Translation: Citizens of the Spectacle are estranged from the present through spatial alienation that separates them from their own time. What is needed is a federation of independent times all simultaneously present: the authentic temporal realization of authentic communism which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals” 

  • I find this interesting because he not only identifies this spacial alienation that separates us from our own time. He claims under authentic communism there would be no grand order of time (what he calls pseudocycical time) because everyone would have the fulfilment and consciousness to be able to have ‘playful individual and collective’ forms of time (that he calls irreversible time that is simultaneously in the present 
  • maybe the idea of the spectacle is too dated and reductionist in lots of way but it does nicely align itself with temporality dictation which is almost exactly what slow violence speaks to. we all live on pseudo cyclical time and therefore find it next to impossible to see the perspective of / care about metabolism that are vastly distant in both relational spectrum of time frame and distance from the souse the information is reaching us via. (eg phone screen, graph, data, factoid)

169) The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own special technique for molding its very territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of this project. Urbanism-“city planning”-is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor. 

(170 The capitalist need that is satisfied by urbanism’s con­ spicuous petrification of life can be described in Hegelian terms as a total predominance of a “peaceful coexistence within space” over “the restless becoming that takes place in the progression of time.” )

  • This could be a useful quote if I mention the ‘conservation’ dialogue of certain environmentalist movements – something that is irrational and un ecological in Peter Frase’s opinion as evolution in defined by the forwards notion of time and therefore there is no retracting to a previous form of ‘the environment’ and should therefore maybe gun to think more thoughtfully about the choice of ‘environmental decor’.

171) While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation. 

179) The most revolutionary idea concerning urbanism is not itselfurbanistic, technological or aesthetic. It is the project of reconstructing the entire environment in accordance with the needs of the power of workers councils, of the antistate dictatorship of the proletariat, of executory dialogue.

  • he wasn’t very hung up on planetary needs, those beyond society

192) The spectacular consumption that preserves past culture in congealed form, including co-opted rehashes ofits negative manifestations, gives overt expression in its cultural sector to what it implicitly is in its totality: the communication of the incommunicable …….. The critical truth of this destruction-the real life of modern poetry and art-is obviously concealed, since the spectacle, whose function is to use culture to bury all historical memory, applies its own essential strategy in its promotion of modernistic pseudo­ innovations

  • feel these phrases have some poetic utility.
  • also the spectacles function as

215) The spectacle is the material “expression �f the separation and estrangement between man and man.”

220) In contrast to the logic of false consciousness, which can­ not truly know itself, the search for critical truth about the spectacle must also be a true critique. It must struggle in practice among the irreconcilable enemies ofthe spectacle, and admit that it is nothing without them. By rushing into sordid reformist compromises or pseudo-revolutionary collective actions, those driven by an abstract desire for immediate effectiveness are in reality obeying the ruling laws ofthought, adopting a perspective that can see nothing but the latest news. In this way delirium reappears within the camp that claims to be opposing it. A critique seeking to go beyond the spectacle must know how to wait.

  • Im not sure I agree or at least my project is to prove why this might not be true. I guess I”m not attempted to our throw capitalism, merely exploring strategies to outstretch an arm of understanding across and through the thicket of thorns that is the society of the spectacle…

18/11/20 – Studio Practice thoughts

A speculative realist METHODOLOGY

T. Mortons ideas of AESTHETICS as the tool

  • relating to distant/slow forms of violence and therefore attempting to ‘coexist with non humans more effectively’ through an aesthetic experience
  • ‘Cosmological Confusion’ of living in the anthropocene of inherited devisions of knowledge
    • Bruno Latours idea of SENSITISATION mentioned by Kodwo Eshun from the Otolith Group and the example of this becoming embodied more spiritual as Charlotte King had taken to thinking her body was able to predict seismic activity (ideas of spiritualism have also been mentioned along the way – Lo-TEK indigenous design Julia Watson and human AS nature thoughts)
    • I am interested in this idea of ‘confusion’ (referenced by Eshun and in the Digital Earth article ‘Searching the Planetary in every grain of sand’) ….
    • The fact that ‘rights of nature’ were being counted for in 2007 by Ecuadorians filing a law suit against the Chevron oil field drilling and a decade later the rights of AI are being considered by Estonian AI Task Force in their jurisdictional proposal, the Kratt laws, which would grant AI algorithms a legal personhood, allowing them to order groceries or services on your behalf, for example

AUTOGRAPHIC VISUALISATIONS as a tool for this aesthetic experience

  • harnessing material traces
  • making this experience embodied and SENSORIAL (or wearable)
  • Data Cuisine and indexical design possibilities that can be encoded into objects.

ORNAMENTATION as way to connect and embody these aesthetic experiences

  • we insert, drape, paint, wrap, squeeze and hang ornaments
  • these ornaments have the potential to make sound, to be textural, to taste, to smell, to visually grow/form marks.
  • The choice of sense must be interrogates as ‘eating something’ has quite different connotations to ‘hearing’ something… – as seen with Cooking Sections ‘Empire remains Christmas Pudding’
  • they have the potential to hold and express visual time frames – TEMPORALITY STRUCTURES – to express a coded implication when FRAMED
  • D. Haraway and companion species (from manifestly haraway)… instead of viewing the pet as a commodity, view ecology as a companion species
  • embodiment is also a way to critique the gallery as space for aesthetic interaction…

Issue of CONCERN

Haven’t quite committed to a subject matter, moment or sliver of research that I intend to follow the trail to a form of violence I would like to express more sensorially / aesthetically…

Silver became one of the starting points as its representative of materials so readily consumed for ornamentation now (and historically – Incan) and so distantly extracted (like most extraction practices). I guess so far I’ve only really read about the social issues it flags up and not the ecological…

Silver extraction practices in Potosi, Bolivia

  • the voyerstic mining tours for tourists, how they-re life expectancy is mid 40’s. They produce Silver and tourism for the westerners
  • The engrained violence of extraction practices… unmovable industry turned mindlessly into a tourist attracting
  • The post-colonial remnants of dangerous mining practices
  • indigenous practices and its histories – furnaces that harnessed wind – HUAYRA, that burned high altitude mosses – Yareta
  • the temporality structure of a bag a coca leaves – due to the darkness the minors chew a whole bag to know when the night has come above ground and their day of labour is over
  • the weird over lapping existences of the minors in the dark for a whole day of labour, the tourists that visit for an hour, the 2010 Copiapó mining accident in the San José copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert (a country that shares the same salt flats) that were trapped for 69 days… what do all these look like in coca leaves

CERCUMSTANCES

As I don’t want these designs to be commodified I must think about where they exists.

  • objects of dress risk being ‘fashionable’ and therefore commodified
  • what circumstances allow for dress to exist in isolation from fashion
  • what space to speculative objects exist in?

What is dress beyond capitalism?

  • is it worth thinking about these objects in the context of a future / multiple futures
  • there are many options within the hard and soft science fictions realms / post capitalist speculative writers.. but maybe its too hard to suss out what for and if dress has been been made functional in these ways…

TESTS TO PROVOKE THOUGHT

  • chewing time…. the performance of chewing is very different to the objects pre-chew
  • chewing is very different to swallowing
  • look into types of moss as material traces? rates of growth of certain materials? fastest growing materials? water hyacinth …… (maybe can’t go back there… but seems relevant as it absorbs heavy metals…)
  • different types of CHEWING GUM – gum comes from trees… we wouldn’t have gum without bats!! corona virus?
  • thinking about temporality structures – what are equivalents to melting ice? reference a sand timer
  • ways to make sound… bells and small flute like openings that react to wind…
  • you can’t wear jewellery in a gold factory…. is there anything interesting here?
  • using Peter Frase and Erik Olin Write and their use of four futures… find a combination of four scenarios and explore within these four overlapping circumstances?

QUESTIONS / QUARMS

  • feel like I need to question my reason for using embodiment practices more – read more of Joanne Entwistle – Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice – also maybe think of being more specific about ornamentation? from what period am I thinking about and what form of jewellery am I thinking about?
  • Am Still in search of a more potent (to me) subject matter….

17/11/20 – a thought on silver

I’m trying to zoom in a bit and pick something smaller to tackle than issues of slow violence… and therefore have been thinking about silver as its so commonly used in jewellery and has an interesting history with colonialism and extraction practices.

I actually went to Potosi, Bolivia on my gap year. It was once the silver capital of the world and rather rich because of it (Mexico being the being extractor and producer of silver currently). I remember the minors tour being offered to us but we were a gorp of three 19 year old girls and none of us really fancied the idea and felt a bit afraid of being in the mines. It’s hard to remember but I feel like a element of the discussions to whether to do the tour or not was due to the weird dynamic between tourists and local minor and the voyestics, post colonial undertones of the whole experience (possibly not in those words though…) yet equally I can’t remember if we really thought too hard about this.

Either way, I have just read another persons account of what it was like. The short white man traveller article was inoffensive yet riddle with hypocrisies. The authors ethics quickly flickered back and fourth and he sprinkled the writing with two it made him feel…

‘Upon visiting Potosí in Bolivia, I was torn by both safety concerns and the moral justification for visiting the mines. I went back and forth over whether I agreed with such voyeurism and in the end, vowed to look into companies and first-hand experiences as much as I could.‘

Despite the uneasy feeling these images give me, I was almost them. And is it wrong? The minors have capitalised off tourism… what is wrong with this

I especially like the mock tools provided for the photos… I want to think about this some more but I can’t figure out what it makes me think or feel just yet.

The most interesting and relevant thing I came across here was the fact the minors use the chewing of coca leaves as a way to tell the time of the working day. The amount of labour they do is translated into a bag of coca leaves (this is just what the westerner has said so i need to check this fact). When they finish the bag they know its roughly night time outside and tie to stop.

I want to do more reattach into chewing coca leaves. Also need to figure out what this means for material traces as this is more of the type that are participated in. Autographic experiential. Autographic cultural participatory…. (chewing spreads surely vary from culture to culture….)

What are the issues here? In terms of material extraction? is the extraction process both ecologically unethical as well as socially; the working conditions, life expectancy, accidents, ways in which people have died ie exploiting into pieces….

Is extraction practices a form of slow violence in that they are so embedded in the culturally informing colonial capitalsene that attempting to look beyond a populous undergoing the long term heath effects is almost capitalist realism in that there is no ‘out’….

17/11/20 – a thought on ornamentation

I can’t get embodiment practices out of my head and more specifically, bodily ornamentation. We drape, lodge, insert, squeeze, hook, wrap, paint onto out bodies. At first thought this all seems entirely anti-functional (in the most basic of it’s definitions) as it halters the action the body in lots of cases and so seems almost entirely tied up in socio-cultural fashion.

We tend to ‘engage’ with the aesthetic qualities and benefits of ornamentation in a very basic way in terms of aesthetics… we are expressing identity politics of ourselves and our culture and of a moment.

As I’ve there is such strong speculative realist argument (Morton) for the truthfulness of aesthetics over truthiness of data sets when it comes to being ecological… I wonder how this could be applied to these seemingly ‘useless’ yet so ‘personal’ forms of embodiment. We wear these things with very little layering to the experiencing of ‘wearing’ these things.

When you wear and earring you may feel it against your neck or hear it clank in some way if you move to fast and the wind blows.

The ring you wear has a certain textural feeling when you wear it on different fingers and will interact with different objects in different ways. The gem stone may get worn down over time and the metal may rust.

If you were to wear a metal grill the metal might react to left over bacterial in your mouth and that new bacteria might then linger on the metal whilst it say i draw and mutated and so then may have a slightly different taste the next time you wore it.

I feel these sensory platforms allowed for by the process of self adornment / garnishing / ornamenting should be infiltrated. A bit like the Data Cuisine workshop projects (indexical design website) this may entail providing codes. This would be the equivalent to ‘framing’. Anything and everything can be a material trace with the right framing. A translation of ‘data’ with a contextual surrounding. This is the autographic-way surely…

I’d quite like to envision scenarios or circumstances where these tools may be more fictionally, literally existing (if that makes any sense).

  • A post capitalism, democratised automated world, inevitably still one of mass migration and environmental destruction…
  • or automation has changed labour entirely and therefore the way we access time has changed… the working day is now (retracted in a worryingly agricultural revolution kinda way) to be defined by your ‘harvest’… what your objects produces ie; how well your object identified