Interview conducted on 15-03-2013 by Arie Altena.

"In de ontwikkeling van een thema speelt een aantal factoren een rol. V2_'s activiteiten zijn gericht op de relatie tussen kunst en technologie, een breed terrein dat varieert van robotica, internet en radio tot kunstmatige intelligentie en virtual reality – een terrein dat nog niet strikt is afgebakend en waarin mengvormen floreren. Ook heeft het werken met mediatechnologie sociale, politieke, economische en culturele implicaties. Een thema dient als kader waarbinnen de complexiteit van het werkveld van V2_ kan worden afgebakend, terwijl een grote diversiteit mogelijk blijft. Het bindt de soms zeer diverse activiteiten van DEAF en vormt een rode draad voor het publiek. Daarnaast moet een thema aansluiten op de actualiteit en praktijk van kunstenaars en wetenschappers. Het thema van dit jaar, Data Knitting – het verknopen van informatie –, raakt aan een maatschappelijke actualiteit. Veel organisaties zijn bezig hun archieven digitaal te ontsluiten en stuiten daarbij zowel op problemen als op nieuwe mogelijkheden. Data Knitting appelleert aan de basisvoorwaarden van een goed functionerende informatiesamenleving waarin de productie van kennis, via het vergaren, verwerken en bewerken van informatie een essentieel gegeven is. Dus hoe informatie te interpreteren, ordenen en ontsluiten, en hoe de politieke, sociale en culturele implicaties ervan te begrijpen? 
Deze thematiek is niet nieuw. Mensen hebben door de eeuwen heen allerlei methodieken ontwikkeld om de wereld om hen heen te beschrijven. De Wunderkammer, een voorloper van het 19de-eeuwse museum, is daar een goed voorbeeld van. Europese ontdekkingsreizigers en handelaren bezochten in de 17de eeuw exotische oorden en namen voorwerpen, teksten, tekeningen en zelfs inboorlingen mee. Al deze informatieve objecten werden naast elkaar tentoongesteld en construeerden kennis over delen van de wereld, net als digitale databases nu, waarin metadata onze kennis structureren. DEAF03 Data Knittingraakt aan de vraag hoe we de wereld, als een complex geheel van samenhangende delen en processen, begrijpen en interpreteren."

DEAF03 stelt dus methodes voor informatievergaring en –verwerking centraal vanuit een artistiek perspectief. Hoe wordt het publiek hier tijdens het festival in betrokken?

"De tentoonstelling biedt een goede introductie op de thematiek voor een breed publiek. Zij laat interactieve werken zien, die een directe deelname en beleving van de toeschouwer verlangen en laten zien hoe de media een bepaalde realiteit aan ons opdringen, die we niet alleen dienen te consumeren, maar waarin we ook moeten participeren. De tentoonstelling, maar zeker ook de vele presentaties, symposia en workshops tijdens DEAF gaan in op de vele aspecten van Data Knitting. Zo is een onderliggende vraag in het programma wat de sociale, economische en culturele inzet van kennisproductie is. Hoe wordt informatie als bouwsteen gebruikt voor het produceren van kennis en wie beheren deze bouwstenen (informatie)? Dus wie vergaart informatie, wie controleert bepaalde informatie, voor wie is bepaalde informatie wel of niet toegankelijk, wie heeft de copyrights over specifieke informatie en wie bepaalt welke informatie wel of niet ontsloten kan worden?
De verschillende programmaonderdelen en projecten brengen ieder een ander facet onder de aandacht. Zo kunnen bezoekers van Pockets Full of Memories zelf een archief bouwen en spelen met de database die daaraan ten grondslag ligt. Can You See Me Now? toont de manier waarop virtuele informatieomgevingen gekoppeld kunnen worden aan een harde, fysieke leef- en speelomgeving. Naast de tentoonstelling speelt ook de festivalwebsite een belangrijke rol in de publieksparticipatie. Bezoekers kunnen hier informatie over het festival vinden, maar ook de presentaties volgen via video streams waar chatboxen en e-mail aan gekoppeld zijn. Kennisoverdracht vindt plaats in seminars, workshops en een tweedaags symposium met internationale topsprekers uit kunst en wetenschap. Deze laatste activiteiten richten zich op een meer specifiek publiek. Daarnaast worden het thema en enkele subthema's uitgewerkt in een reeks publiekspresentaties. Het muziek- en performanceprogramma Playing Data laat uiteenlopende interdisciplinaire performances zien, waarbij de inzet van diverse media en het bespelen van databases en digitale archieven de rode draad vormen. Op De Avonden van… geven drie gastcuratoren, Lev Manovich, Siegfried Zielinski en Sadie Plant, met de door hen genodigde gasten een persoonlijke visie op Data Knitting. In het programmaonderdeel Open Territories presenteren kunstenaars projecten waar men aan werkt en die aansluiten op de thematiek. Al deze presentaties vinden plaats in een publieke Arena die is vormgegeven door Atelier van Lieshout. Het publieksdebat staat dus hoog in het vaandel tijdens deze editie van DEAF."

Is DEAF03 een soort Wunderkammer, niet van exotische oorden, maar van de complexe en dynamische wereld om ons heen?

"Inderdaad, met een bonte verzameling aan installaties, concerten, projecten en sprekers. Zo kan een paleobioloog in het kader van het symposium een lezing geven over fossielen, terwijl in Pakhuis Las Palmas bezoekers van de tentoonstelling een beeldarchief bouwen en in Calypso muzikanten experimenteren met software waarmee zij beeld en geluid kunnen koppelen. DEAF03 laat zien en horen, debatteert en stelt vragen over de rol en betekenis van informatie en kennis in onze technologische cultuur en laat hiervoor kunstenaars, wetenschappers en andere experts aan het woord die hun onderzoek en projecten presenteren. In de publicatie Information is Alive kan men een goede weerslag vinden van de vele projecten, debatten en onderwerpen die tijdens DEAF03 aan de orde komen."

Your re­cent work em­pha­sizes that it is not pos­si­ble to con­ceive of ma­te­ri­al­ity (in­clud­ing ob­jects) apart from pro­cess­es of de­ma­te­ri­al­iza­tion and ab­strac­tion (2008: 101). Such pro­cess­es have very dense, in­ter-​in­flu­enc­ing, ex­per­imen­tal con­cep­tu­al ed­ifices in the art of the 20th cen­tu­ry. In your track­ing of the ob­ject in art his­to­ry, you draw on Adorno’s read­ing of Lukacs’ His­to­ry and Class Con­scious­ness, com­posed at the near ex­act same his­tor­ical mo­ment of Hei­deg­ger’s de­politi­cized phe­nomenol­ogy. Adorno em­pha­sizes that this tra­jec­to­ry of Marx­ist thought (how­ev­er flawed) has been im­por­tant­ly ner­vous about build­ing up ob­jec­ti­fi­ca­tion, nor­ma­tive com­mod­ity re­la­tions and alien­ation to­geth­er as in­sep­ara­ble and mu­tu­al­ly re­in­forc­ing con­cepts and pro­cess­es. You have sug­gest­ed that ob­jec­tiviza­tion is in­evitable but that alien­ation isn’t nec­es­sar­ily, yes?

I’m es­pe­cial­ly in­ter­est­ed in this quote you pull out from Adorno, which ar­gues that what is im­por­tant is to com­bine ‘tena­cious op­po­si­tion against that which ex­ists: against its thing­ness, with a staunch re­jec­tion of at­tempts to iden­ti­fy thing­ness as evil’ (Lüttick­en 2010: 1). Can you elab­orate on what is meant by the first and sec­ond parts of this quote? How does it link to the dis­tinc­tions you are mak­ing (di­alec­ti­cal­ly and his­tor­ical­ly) in your re­cent work be­tween art ob­jects, ‘things’ and com­modi­ties? I sus­pect this is where the read­er might com­pre­hend how the cri­tique of the com­mod­ity – the fact of art’s com­mod­ity sta­tus – is not equiv­ocal to ut­ter dis­en­chant­ment with art as cat­ego­ry, nor with the re­al­ity of art mak­ing/ap­pre­ci­ation in terms of ma­te­ri­al in­quiry.

Sven Lüttick­en (SL): First off, I have to con­fess to be­com­ing some­thing of a bored teenag­er in the face of on­to­log­ical dis­cus­sions. For bet­ter or worse, I think his­tor­ical­ly, not on­to­log­ical­ly. The be­ing I deal with is his­tor­ical be­ing; you might say that, when deal­ing with the his­tor­ical trans­for­ma­tions of the ob­ject in its var­ious guis­es, you ul­ti­mate­ly end up with a kind of his­tor­ical on­tol­ogy. So I’m in­ter­est­ed in the very fab­ric of the ob­ject and/or the thing chang­ing, and of course I’m look­ing at this from the van­tage point of art – us­ing the art ob­ject as my the­oret­ical ob­ject. And it’s a high­ly in­sta­ble ob­ject, which is good. In the words of one Rus­sian Con­struc­tivist crit­ic, the mod­ern art­work went from be­ing an ‘ele­phant’ to be­ing a ‘but­ter­fly.’ That is a bril­liant­ly suc­cinct way of sum­ma­riz­ing some­thing about a trans­for­ma­tion on which you could write an ele­phan­tine book.

Adorno’s think­ing was it­self shaped by the de­vel­op­ment of mod­ern art, by the trans­for­ma­tions of the mod­ern art­work. My in­ter­est in Adorno in this re­spect stems part­ly from the fact that if you read his work it is patent­ly clear that La­tour’s at­tempt to as­cribe to pret­ty much the whole of mod­ern phi­los­ophy (and cer­tain­ly to Hegelian and Marx­ian phi­los­ophy) a crude sub­ject/ob­ject di­choto­my needs to be ques­tioned. Adorno con­stant­ly prob­lema­tizes and his­tori­cized both terms. He notes that ‘ob­ject’ is ‘the pos­itive face of the non-​iden­ti­cal;’ in oth­er words, ‘a ter­mi­no­log­ical mask’ (1966: 193) As the oth­er of the sub­ject, the ob­ject would ap­pear to be the uniden­ti­cal, what can­not be as­sim­ilat­ed by the tri­umphant sub­ject and by a rea­son that is in­creas­ing­ly show­ing it­self to be in­stru­men­tal. How­ev­er, pre­cise­ly as the sub­ject’s neat po­lar op­po­site, the ob­ject is re-​ap­pro­pri­at­ed by rea­son; it is iden­ti­fied and made ra­tio­nal and pro­duc­tive. The ob­ject, in oth­er words, is al­ways al­ready a com­mod­ity-​in-​wait­ing.

Now as for the thing, for thing­ness in Adorno, a cru­cial pas­sage for me is: ‘In thing­ness there is an in­ter­min­gling of both the ob­ject’s non-​iden­ti­cal side and the sub­jec­tion of peo­ple un­der the pre­vail­ing forms of pro­duc­tion – their own func­tion­al re­la­tions, which are ob­scure to them’ (192). So the ob­ject does have a non-​iden­ti­cal side, which is to say: it can­not be com­plete­ly as­sim­ilat­ed by the sub­ject. This is the thing: the ob­ject in­so­far as it is more than an ob­ject, or less than one. The thing is both lack and sur­plus. This is clear­ly high­ly sug­ges­tive in terms of mod­ern art’s ap­pro­pri­ation of com­mod­ity-​ob­jects.

On the oth­er hand, for Adorno, Ding­haftigkeit al­so stands for the reifi­ca­tion of hu­man re­la­tions. The Ger­man term for reifi­ca­tion is Verd­inglichung, which lit­er­al­ly might be trans­lat­ed as thingi­fi­ca­tion. This very term could cause one to lapse in­to an ide­al­ist dis­par­age­ment of the thing­like, which is what Adorno cau­tions against. In any case, the rei­fied thing­ness of so­cial re­la­tions is it­self a so­cial­ly pro­duced state. Adorno warns that ‘the pri­ma­cy of the ob­ject notwith­stand­ing, the thing­ness of the world is al­so il­lu­so­ry. It tempts the sub­jects to as­cribe to the things them­selves the so­cial con­di­tions of their pro­duc­tion. This is elab­orat­ed in Marx’s chap­ter on the fetish …’ (Adorno 190).

Verd­inglichung, in oth­er words, is part and par­cel of com­mod­ity fetishism. Now, the com­mod­ity fetish ac­cord­ing to Marx is a thing brim­ming with ‘the­olog­ical whims’ (1867: 4). It ap­pears to be en­dowed with au­tonomous life, as a kind of quasi-​sub­ject. In fact, its ‘be­hav­ior’ on the mar­ket can how­ev­er be ex­plained through the la­bor the­ory of val­ue – this is Marx’s con­tention. The com­mod­ity’s val­ue is root­ed in la­bor – in ab­stract la­bor, which is to say in la­bor val­ue sold by work­ers to cap­ital­ist en­trepreneurs. The com­mod­ity that re­sults from all of this is it­self pseu­do-​con­crete: we may be able to hold it, to touch it, but it is in fact shot through with eco­nom­ic (and tech­no­log­ical) ab­strac­tion. You might say that this is the mod­ern ob­ject par ex­cel­lence: it has been as­sim­ilat­ed and ‘sub­jec­tivized’ through in­stru­men­tal rea­son. W.J.T. Mitchell speaks of the ‘or­dered ranks of ob­ject­hood’ (2005: 112).

I want to ar­gue that while con­tem­po­rary ‘thing the­ory’ re­sponds to a gen­uine shift in the­ory cor­re­spond­ing to a shift in the mode of pro­duc­tion – of pro­duc­tion in the widest sense, stand­ing not just for in­dus­tri­al pro­duc­tion but so­cial pro­duc­tion tout court – we are not deal­ing with an ab­stract break. On the con­trary: the sug­ges­tion of such an ab­stract break with much-​ma­ligned ‘moder­ni­ty’ can gen­er­ate a fa­tal obliv­ion to con­ti­nu­ities and to the on­go­ing en­tan­gle­ment in the di­alec­tics of ob­jec­tiv­ity and sub­jec­tiv­ity.

The one pre­cur­sor who is most fre­quent­ly ac­knowl­edged by con­tem­po­rary the­orists of thing­ness is Adorno’s old arch neme­sis, Hei­deg­ger, to whom the cur­rent use of the term thing can of course be traced back – the thing as third term that desta­bi­lizes the sub­ject/ob­ject di­choto­my and cov­ers any num­ber of hy­brids. How­ev­er, to me (but again, my in­ter­est is his­to­ry rather than on­tol­ogy), the work of thinkers like Adorno and Ben­jamin is ac­tu­al­ly more pro­duc­tive. In their work, too, we are deal­ing not with some es­sen­tial­ized sub­ject/ob­ject di­choto­my but rather with a ques­tion­ing of such a sta­ble di­choto­my; how­ev­er, this ques­tion­ing al­so ac­knowl­edges that the no­tions of ob­ject and sub­ject can­not be wished away, since they are in­trin­si­cal­ly bound up with moder­ni­ty as not just a philo­soph­ical regime, but a so­cial and eco­nom­ical one. And, of course, an aes­thet­ic regime. For me, mod­ern aes­thet­ic prac­tice is it­self a cru­cial form of ‘thing the­ory’ – and the same can be said for con­tem­po­rary art.

ROR: If ‘spec­ula­tive re­al­ism’ is nec­es­sary, ac­cord­ing to Gironi, it is be­cause it ‘cau­tious­ly moves (con­form­ing to the Marx­ian-​En­gel­sian les­son) be­tween sim­plis­tic (and, to­day, plain­ly un­sci­en­tif­ic) re­duc­tion­ist ex­cess­es on the one hand and the yield­ing of pre­cious ter­rain to the ide­al­ism that lurks in an ex­ces­sive­ly logi­co-​ra­tio­nal­ist un­der­stand­ing of ‘mat­ter’ on the oth­er’ (2012: 380). Is it so easy to bring this prob­lem­at­ic in­to art giv­en the dis­tinct­ness of art as cat­ego­ry? I guess my ques­tion is, broad­ly, can art his­to­ry shed light the ‘cau­tion’ Gironi men­tions?

SL: Art his­to­ry as a dis­ci­pline tends to be so cau­tious that it nev­er makes it to the oth­er side of the street! But yes, for me, art his­to­ry is cru­cial in that is it­self some­thing of an il­le­git­imate dis­ci­pline, one taint­ed by the im­pu­ri­ty and opaque­ness of its ob­ject –art his­to­ry is of­ten treat­ed with a kind of pa­ter­nal­is­tic benev­olence (and this is al­ready putting a pos­itive spin on things) by ‘mas­ter dis­ci­plines’ such as phi­los­ophy and semi­otics or lit­er­ary the­ory. But in a strange way, even though the dis­ci­pline is ev­er more marginal­ized, it is al­so tri­umphant – de­spite it­self, one might say. Af­ter all, art his­to­ry was al­ways a dis­ci­pline of un­sta­ble sub­ject-​ob­jects, of vi­su­al and ma­te­ri­al facts that were al­so his­tor­ical acts, of things that were ac­tants.

Art his­to­ry is one of three main man­ifes­ta­tions of the ‘aes­thet­ic turn’ around 1800. In the late eigh­teenth and ear­ly nine­teenth cen­turies, three in­ter­con­nect­ed dis­ci­plines came to con­sti­tute art as an es­sen­tial ob­ject with which the mod­ern bour­geois sub­ject as­sured it­self of its ten­uous grasp of the world: philo­soph­ical aes­thet­ics, art crit­icism and art his­to­ry. All these forms of aes­thet­ic dis­course re­volve around the ob­scure ob­ject of aes­thet­ic de­sire that is the work of art – in its var­ious medi­um-​spe­cif­ic in­car­na­tions. Lit­er­ature and mu­sic held the promise of a high­ly sub­jec­tive art, and in that sense they were quintessen­tial­ly mod­ern; Taine phrased a com­mon­place thought when, in his phi­los­ophy of art, he stat­ed that mu­sic ‘con­vient mieux que tout autre art pur ex­primer les pen­sées flot­tantes, les songes sans formes, les de­sires sans ob­jet et sans lim­ite…(bet­ter adapt­ed than any oth­er art to ex­press float­ing thoughts, form­less dreams, ob­ject­less lim­it­less de­sires…)’ (1875: 1)

How­ev­er, if the aes­thet­ic be­came a cru­cial sphere of mod­ern bour­geois thought, promis­ing – in Ter­ry Ea­gle­ton’s words – a ‘resid­ual­ly com­mon world’ (1990) in the era of in­hu­mane ab­strac­tions and di­vi­sions of labour, aes­thet­ic thought need­ed to re­turn time and again to vis­ible and ma­te­ri­al ob­jects: paint­ings and sculp­tures. Such works of vi­su­al art con­sti­tut­ed ob­jects that coun­tered the tran­scen­den­tal sub­ject of ide­al­ist phi­los­ophy not with blunt and dead ma­te­ri­al­ity, but with a form of ob­ject­hood that seemed it­self trans­formed through and in har­mo­ny with the sub­ject. Art his­to­ry, as it was found­ed or re-​found­ed around 1800, was the dis­ci­pline that sought to re­al­ize the ‘aes­thet­ic project’ for­mu­lat­ed by thinkers from Kant and Schiller to Schelling and Hegel with an im­mer­sion in the minu­ti­ae of at­tri­bu­tion and mean­ing – in the pro­cess some­times los­ing sight of why art mat­tered in the first place.

As Georges Di­di-​Hu­ber­man has em­pha­sized, the ob­ject of art his­to­ry be­longs to a world of sens­es and is there­fore nev­er quite ra­tio­nal. In­deed, art’s sta­tus as ex­hibit­ing a form of mute rea­son that dif­fers from con­cep­tu­al think­ing is what made it in­dis­pens­able to the aes­thet­ic the­ory that emerged on the thresh­old from the En­light­en­ment to Ro­man­ti­cism. To­day, of course, art ha­bit­ual­ly em­ploys me­dia and tech­nolo­gies that are them­selves prod­ucts of tech­no­log­ical rea­son (of pur­po­sive ra­tio­nal­ity, as Adorno would say), but in ways that are more or less un­rea­son­able, or at least ex­hib­it a some­what ob­scure ra­tio­nal­ity.

ROR: La­tour de­rides his­tor­ical ma­te­ri­al­ism as a hyp­ocrit­ical the­ol­ogy, while at the same time much of his re­con­sid­er­ation of the ac­tu­al ma­te­ri­al prac­tices and con­cep­tu­al at­tach­ments of sci­en­tif­ic labour­ers has seemed ex­treme­ly ripe for in­ter­pel­la­tion and re­work­ing by me­dia or trans­me­di­al artists in­ter­est­ed in, for ex­am­ple, me­dia ar­chae­olo­gies (re­al or fan­tas­tic), nat­ural­ized soft­ware log­ics, post-​hu­man ap­proach­es to aes­thet­ics and so on. It seems to me al­so that La­tour’s con­cep­tions of ‘ac­tants’ (which in­cludes both ‘things’ and im­ma­te­ri­al con­cepts) might at the same time be con­ducive to work­ing through art’s his­tor­ical trans­for­ma­tions at the scene of ex­hi­bi­tion (and crit­icism), for ex­am­ple, and es­pe­cial­ly how artists make in­stal­la­tions of ob­jects, con­cepts and things ‘work’ as art. Where does La­tour’s work fit in­to all this for you?

SL: La­tour’s de­vel­op­ment of the no­tion of the ac­tant seems to be to be one of the most pro­duc­tive as­pects of his work, though I would say that there’s a whole la­bor of dif­fer­en­ti­ation ahead of us. I’m afraid this will have to amount to some form of his­tor­ical ma­te­ri­al­ism – or per­haps one should say di­alec­ti­cal ma­te­ri­al­ism – which ar­tic­ulates the dif­fer­ent forms of agen­cy in­volved and their in­ter­re­la­tions. Such a dif­fer­en­ti­ation ob­vi­ous­ly must not re­sult in some Bor­ge­sian en­cy­clo­pe­dia, in an in­co­her­ent list; it must in­volve pre­cise yet mu­ta­ble re­la­tions, which al­so means that it must in­clude an­tag­onisms. And per­haps one has to rein­tro­duce the terms ‘sub­ject’ and ‘ob­ject’ in the pro­cess.

At the risk of mak­ing the good peo­ple shud­der, I would like to sug­gest that there is much to be learned here from Marx, who in the Grun­drisse wrote on the ‘pro­duc­tion of con­sump­tion’ – which could well be tak­en for a les­son in aes­thet­ics. In­deed, in this as in oth­er re­spects, Marx’s po­lit­ical econ­omy takes up tropes and prob­lems from aes­thet­ic the­ory: ‘pro­duc­tion thus not on­ly cre­ates an ob­ject for the sub­ject, but al­so a sub­ject for the ob­ject. […] It thus pro­duces the ob­ject of con­sump­tion, the man­ner of con­sump­tion and the mo­tive of con­sump­tion. Con­sump­tion like­wise pro­duces the pro­duc­er’s in­cli­na­tion by beck­on­ing to him as an aim-​de­ter­min­ing need’ (1857). Marx, the aes­thet­ic po­lit­ical economist who once read Ru­mohr’s Ital­ienis­che Briefe to write an (aban­doned) es­say on Chris­tian art, here shows that the ob­ject-​sub­ject di­choto­my was in fact a di­alec­tic equa­tion in which both parts for­ev­er desta­bi­lized each oth­er – and this was nev­er more clear than in re­la­tion to vi­su­al art, whose man­ifest­ly sol­id ob­jects were al­so in­tan­gi­ble bear­ers and pro­duc­ers of sub­jec­tiv­ity.

I’m re­mind­ed here of the Book Sprint phe­nomenon, and of the email in­ter­view that we’re do­ing right now – though ‘right now’ is, of course, the wrong term, since we’re not in the same place or in the same time zone. A Book Sprint is a way of pro­duc­ing an ob­ject (a new-​me­dia ob­ject re­me­di­at­ing a pa­per book) un­der cer­tain eco­nom­ical and so­cial con­di­tions. This takes the form of a pro­duc­tion pro­cess in which not on­ly an ob­ject is cre­at­ed, but al­so ‘sub­jects for the ob­ject’ – first and fore­most, the peo­ple di­rect­ly in­volved, for here the pro­duc­ers are al­so the first con­sumers. The book-​in-​progress func­tions as an ac­tant im­pact­ing the peo­ple pro­duc­ing it, who have set up the whole pro­cess in re­sponse to the ex­igen­cies and anti­nomies of con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al and in­tel­lec­tu­al prac­tice. As some­one who usu­al­ly spends years on mak­ing a book, I find this vague­ly threat­en­ing, but com­pelling. Per­haps we’re deal­ing with a new kind of but­ter­fly book, a new type of ob­ject that may al­so be an un­ruly thing. The na­ture of the in­ter­re­la­tions be­tween this me­dia ac­tant and the hu­man agents re­mains to be in­ves­ti­gat­ed in much greater de­tail.

In some ways, the books thus pro­duced will no doubt be symp­tomat­ic of the time con­straints, but new qual­ities may be set free that make up for the im­per­fec­tions. What we’re do­ing now is not part of a book sprint strict­ly speak­ing, but I’m cer­tain­ly feel­ing the pres­sure, and we don’t have time to do things ‘thor­ough­ly’ – or ‘prop­er­ly.’ It cer­tain­ly forces me to think on my feet, which is good, but it will re­main a rather sketchy af­fair.

ROR: Think­ing in terms of the eco­nomics of both art and phi­los­ophy’s trans­formed dis­cur­sive in­dus­tries – glob­al ex­hi­bi­tionary com­plex­es, mas­sive­ly ac­cel­er­at­ed pub­lish­ing cy­cles, net­worked dis­tri­bu­tion – the way in which art and phi­los­ophy ne­go­ti­ate each oth­er is chang­ing. Or per­haps the in­dus­tri­al links be­tween art and phi­los­ophy in the form of pub­lic­ity, shall we say, have al­ways been this same prob­lem­at­ic, at least since the 60s.

Ei­ther way, it seems that cu­ra­to­ri­al and artis­tic in­dus­tri­ous­ness can be­come some­what awk­ward when it as­sumes it­self to be in­vest­ed in con­tem­po­rane­ity by re­work­ing (es­pe­cial­ly post-​Deleuzian) phi­los­ophy with­in art works of ex­em­plary ‘re­duced’ scenes of non-​lin­guis­tic thought. Liam Gillick has called this the ‘sin­gu­lar­ity’ prob­lem – the con­junc­tion of cu­ra­to­ri­al-​philo­soph­ical labour re­duced to con­cepts and ‘in­stances’ of art, where each (philo­soph­ical con­cept, artis­tic ob­ject) in­vest in mak­ing the case for the oth­er in a too-​cir­cu­lar fash­ion. At its worst it as­sumes that the con­tem­po­rane­ity of art is on­ly to be found in its sym­met­ri­cal ‘pro­gres­sive’ track­ing of ‘prop­er­ly’ philo­soph­ical labour. Some­times this verges on syco­phancy even.

While that is the risk, I won­der if we can think about how these is­sues are crit­ical­ly and know­ing­ly ne­go­ti­at­ed by artists and cu­ra­tors. It’s in­ter­est­ing, for ex­am­ple, that while the artists were cu­rat­ed in­to this V2 show for their al­ready-​dis­played in­vest­ments (across an oeu­vre) in ex­per­imen­tal­ist eco­log­ical in­quiry and non-​an­thro­pocen­tric ma­te­ri­alisms, they were in­vit­ed to cre­ate new works that specif­ical­ly en­gaged with Levi Bryant and Gra­ham Har­man’s work in the con­text of the larg­er ‘turn’ to­wards so-​called an­ti-​cor­re­la­tion­ism thought in OOO and SR. In oth­er words, they were in­vit­ed to re­me­di­ate philo­soph­ical ma­te­ri­al (not nec­es­sar­ily to ‘do’ non-​lin­guis­tic non-​phi­los­ophy) for a strand of phi­los­ophy in­vest­ed in think­ing mat­ter from out­side the hu­man. Whether this is even pos­si­ble in in­sti­tu­tion­al­ized art that nev­er goes with­out a spec­ta­tor is a very good ques­tion – Smith­son has ex­per­iment­ed with this among oth­ers – but it is per­fect­ly ob­vi­ous to the artists that this prob­lem­at­ic is there. Fur­ther, de­spite cu­ra­to­ri­al se­lec­tion and over­sight of the com­mis­sion, it is al­so the case that the artists re­work such ma­te­ri­al through what­ev­er as­so­ci­ations and re­la­tions of their choos­ing.

In this case we note that philo­soph­ical ma­te­ri­al has been per­haps un­pre­dictably turned to­wards hu­mour and pro­fa­na­tion, and al­so di­alec­ti­cal­ly to­wards fail­ure, pos­si­bly this be­ing the les­son of con­cep­tu­al art. I won­der (al­so in re­la­tion to the first ques­tion) if you can com­ment on the sur­plus val­ue of specif­ical­ly, com­edy and pro­fa­na­tion, re­gard­ing these kinds of deal­ings with the on­tic in con­tem­po­rary art. This sort of pro­fane tin­ker­ing can seem like a great re­lief. Is there any rad­ical philo­soph­ical con­tri­bu­tion that artists make by pro­fan­ing their dis­in­vest­ment in sys­tem­atized and over­ly tax­on­omized on­tolo­gies, with­out re­duc­ing such to ni­hilism?

SL: In gen­er­al I would say that artis­tic prac­tice is tin­ker­ing, brico­lage, even in ‘con­struc­tivist’ art, which Schwit­ters desub­li­mat­ed as col­lage and as­sem­blage. ‘The­ory,’ too, can be among the ma­te­ri­als of artis­tic brico­lage. But ul­ti­mate­ly the work of brico­lage is its own mode of do­ing the­ory; im­pure the­ory, ar­tic­ulat­ed in the form of sug­ges­tions. As an art crit­ic or art his­to­ri­an you ef­fec­tive­ly con­tin­ue this work, de- and re­assem­bling the as­sem­blage.

Now, con­cern­ing an­ti-​cor­re­la­tion­ist thought as ‘a strand of phi­los­ophy in­vest­ed in think­ing mat­ter from out­side the hu­man:’ I’m not that well-​versed in the lit­er­ature in ques­tion (but the more I read Har­man, the more I ap­pre­ci­ate La­tour). The main sub­ject of an­ti-​cor­re­la­tion­ist cri­tique would seem to be Kant. Kant’s ‘cor­re­la­tion­ist’ take on sub­ject and ob­ject was sub­ject to cri­tique pret­ty much right off the bat, with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Ide­al­ist phi­los­ophy ‘solved’ the prob­lems of Kant’s phi­los­ophy by sub­sum­ing the world to thought; the on­tic be­came a re­flec­tion of the Ich or the un­fold­ing of Geist. And art was of such fun­da­men­tal im­por­tance to Schelling and Hegel in par­tic­ular be­cause it showed the un­fold­ing of Spir­it in the form of art­works that were sub­ject-​ob­jects.

But if art be­came cru­cial for phi­los­ophy – for the phi­los­ophy of the ‘aes­thet­ic turn’ – be­cause it showed mat­ter to be im­bued with spir­it, mod­ern art en­gaged in a flir­ta­tion with var­ious forms of base ma­te­ri­al­ism, with mat­ter con­ceived to be out­side the hu­man. The ship­wreck of spir­it. The Bataille of the jour­nal Doc­uments is, of course, a prime ex­am­ple of such a project – which in this case was it­self a tru­ly aes­thet­ic hy­brid of the artis­tic and the philo­soph­ical, and which was in ef­fect one episode in Bataille’s crit­ical long en­gage­ment with ide­al­ism, and with Hegel in par­tic­ular. To­day, in the col­laps­ing An­thro­pocene, to think mat­ter from out­side the hu­man ob­vi­ous­ly pos­es dif­fer­ent chal­lenges, as the ma­te­ri­al fab­ric of our plan­et has been in­ex­orably al­tered by hu­man in­ter­ven­tion. This was some­thing rec­og­nized by Smith­son. On the one hand, he turned en­tropy in­to some­thing of a fetish, seem­ing­ly sub­ju­gat­ing his­to­ry to a nat­ural law (the sec­ond law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics); on the oth­er hand, he was well aware that hu­man ac­tiv­ity ac­cel­er­at­ed en­tropy, and that a cos­mic giv­en had there­by be­come a so­cial and po­lit­ical prob­lem – which be­came the ba­sis of his aes­thet­ic project.

By now, plan­et earth is it­self the ul­ti­mate art­work, a sub­ject-​ob­ject out of con­trol, an ac­tant act­ing up in ways we can­not con­trol. We may want to think mat­ter from out­side the hu­man, but mat­ter it­self won’t let us.

Works Cit­ed

Theodor W. Adorno, Neg­ative Di­alek­tik, Frank­furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966; trans­la­tions from Adorno by SL, adapt­ing E.B. Ash­ton’s En­glish trans­la­tion, Neg­ative Di­alec­tics, Lon­don: Rout­ledge, 1990.

Fabio Gironi, ‘Be­tween Nat­ural­ism and Ra­tio­nal­ism: A New Re­al­ist Land­scape’, JCR 11.3 (2012): 361-387.

Sven Lüttick­en, ‘Art and Thing­ness, Part Two: Thingi­fi­ca­tion’ e-​flux 15 (2010); http://www.e-​flux.com/jour­nal/art-​and-​thing­ness-​part-​two-​ thingi­fi­ca­tion/

Karl Marx, ‘Pro­duc­tion, Con­sump­tion, Dis­tri­bu­tion, Ex­change (Cir­cu­la­tion),’ Chap­ter 1 of Out­lines of the Cri­tique of Po­lit­ical Econ­omy (Grun­drisse), 1857;

http://marx­ists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grun­drisse/ch01.htm

W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pic­tures Want? The Lives and Loves of Im­ages, Chica­go: Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press, 2005.

Hip­poly­te Taine, Lec­tures on Art: Vol­ume 1, H. Holt and com­pa­ny, 1875.

Bi­ogra­phies

Sven Lüttick­en is an art his­to­ri­an and crit­ic based in Utrecht. In 2004, he was grant­ed the Prize for Art Crit­icism of the BKVB fund, Am­ster­dam. He teach­es art his­to­ry, crit­icism and me­dia the­ory at the Vri­je Uni­ver­siteit, Am­ster­dam. Lüttick­en pub­lish­es reg­ular­ly in in­ter­na­tion­al art and cul­ture mag­azines in­clud­ing New Left Re­view, Texte zur Kun­st and e-​flux jour­nal, and con­tributes to cat­alogues and ex­hi­bi­tions. His book, Idols of the Mar­ket: Mod­ern Icon­oclasm and the Fun­da­men­tal­ist Spec­ta­cle, was pub­lished in June 2009 by Stern­berg Press. He has al­so cu­rat­ed the ex­hi­bi­tions Life, Once More: forms of reen­act­ment in Con­tem­po­rary Art (Witte de With, Rot­ter­dam, 2005) and The Art of Icon­oclasm (BAK, ba­sis voor actuele kun­st, Utrecht, 2008/2009). He is present­ly work­ing on a book about film, video, reen­act­ment, and the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his­to­ry, His­to­ry in Mo­tion (to be pub­lished by Stern­berg Press in the spring of 2013).

http://sven­luttick­en.blogspot.com

Rachel O’Reil­ly is a writ­er, crit­ic and cu­ra­tor with a back­ground in com­par­ative lit­er­ature, and mas­ters in me­dia and cul­ture (Uni­ver­si­ty of Am­ster­dam). Her ex­hi­bi­tions in­clude The Leisure Class (co-​cu­ra­tor) at The Gallery of Mod­ern Art (Bris­bane, Aus­tralia) and Videoground for Mul­ti­me­dia Art Asia Pa­cif­ic. Her re­cent work brings to­geth­er in­stal­la­tion art prac­tices, aes­thet­ic phi­los­ophy, po­et­ics and po­lit­ical econ­omy.

Rick Dol­phi­jn (RD): Re­gard­ing the re­la­tion be­tween spec­ula­tive think­ing and the arts I feel very close to the work of Bri­an Mas­su­mi whose ideas on this re­la­tion might seem to come close to Bo­gost’s, but in the end prac­tice a very dif­fer­ent pol­itics in which the arts are giv­en a much more promi­nent role. Ac­cord­ing to Mas­su­mi, art shows us the tech­niques of ex­is­tence, or the tech­niques of re­la­tion, which is pret­ty much the same thing. Let me ex­plain his ideas by means of an ex­am­ple, con­tem­po­rary dance (which is al­ways a nice in­ter­min­gling of sub­ject, ob­ject and change), and how Mas­su­mi con­sid­ers dance in his last book. He quotes a per­son­al con­ver­sa­tion with chore­og­ra­pher William Forsythe who stat­ed, ‘a body is that which folds’ (Mas­su­mi 2011: 140). Forsythe’s par­tic­ular con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion (in dance) of the body of­fered Mas­su­mi a start­ing point to dif­fer­en­ti­ate be­tween con­tem­po­rary and mod­ern dance. Ward­ing off any em­pha­sis on rep­re­sen­ta­tion and on the use of metaphors (both of which, in my view, hap­pen in the def­ini­tion of Bo­gost), Forsythe’s art of­fers Mas­su­mi a way to get rid of the idea that the dancer us­es its body as a means to ex­press an in­ner feel­ing. This no­tion of in­ner feel­ing is so promi­nent in con­cep­tions of mod­ern dance (Mas­su­mi gives the ex­am­ple of Martha Gra­ham’s sym­bol­ic use of ges­ture). Con­tem­po­rary dance, in con­trast, ex­press­es pure move­ment, Mas­su­mi states. Thus, where­as in mod­ern dance the body dances (bod­ily move­ments cre­ate the dance), the dancer in con­tem­po­rary dance comes to be in the dance (move­ments cre­ate a danc­ing body). An epic ex­am­ple of the lat­ter would be Pina Bausch’s Café Müller where the chairs in the café did not sur­round the dancer cre­at­ing the mise-​en-​scene in front of which the dancer danced: the chairs are in­volved in the dance no less than the dancer. The chairs, the bod­ies of the dancers and ac­tu­al­ly ev­ery­thing else some­what com­plic­it, make up for the raw ma­te­ri­al from which the dance is ab­stract­ed.

This is im­por­tant (keep­ing in mind Mas­su­mi’s def­ini­tion of art as that which shows us the tech­niques of ex­is­tence): Forsythe’s def­ini­tion shows us that con­tem­po­rary dance over­comes the du­alisms that gave form to moder­ni­ty/mod­ern dance. On the one hand, it has no in­ter­est any­more in the op­po­si­tion be­tween the dancer and the world (which it was sup­posed to re-​present or dance-​to). Con­tem­po­rary dance does not con­sid­er the body ‘al­ready in ex­is­tence,’ filled with po­ten­tial­ities to be re­al­ized when­ev­er the sit­ua­tion (the dance) asks it to. On the con­trary, the body is ac­tu­al­ized in the dance, which means that it is on­ly through the act of fold­ing (the dance) that it (the ‘body’, the fold) re­al­izes it­self. On the oth­er hand, this means that the fold­ing ac­tu­al­iz­ing a bod­ily whole is not con­se­quen­tial to (Aris­totelian) mem­ory or an­oth­er agen­cy from which the body is or­ga­nized in ad­vance. Rather, the body (in­clud­ing the mind) hap­pens in the fold, which is to say that it is on­ly be­cause of the fold­ing that its uni­ty ap­pears.

MK: In Hal Fos­ter’s key text, The Re­turn of the Re­al (1996), and his chap­ter on the artist as ethno­gra­pher, he de­scribed how ‘the old artist en­vy among an­thro­pol­ogists has turned the oth­er way: a new ethno­gra­pher en­vy con­sumes many artists and crit­ics. If an­thro­pol­ogists want­ed to ex­ploit the tex­tu­al mod­el in cul­tur­al in­ter­pre­ta­tion, these artists and crit­ics as­pire to field­work in which the­ory and prac­tice seem to be rec­on­ciled’ (Fos­ter 1996: 181). The pro­cess of mak­ing, in this case, mak­ing art, is ob­vi­ous­ly very tied up in con­tem­po­rary no­tions of what artists do and how they do it – so as it be­comes ac­cept­able to con­duct art as re­search. Is there or will there be a sim­ilar drive to con­duct phi­los­ophy in a dif­fer­ent way, to present it in non-​aca­demi­cised forms, non-​tex­tu­al forms?

RD: The pro­cess­es of mak­ing art are cru­cial, as I ex­plained above. But al­so when you do phi­los­ophy, the pro­cess­es are the on­ly thing that mat­ters. Phi­los­ophy is an equal­ly cre­ative pro­cess com­pared to mak­ing art, yet a dif­fer­ent one. For where­as art is all about cre­at­ing sen­sa­tions, about blocks of sen­sa­tions to fol­low Deleuze (and Guat­tari) more pre­cise­ly, phi­los­ophy is all about cre­at­ing con­cepts. Philoso­phers tend to cre­ate con­cepts through lan­guage, by break­ing it open. In that, they act some­what sim­ilar to po­ets, yet po­ets are not in­ter­est­ed in cre­at­ing con­cepts. They aim at some­thing en­tire­ly dif­fer­ent (very par­tic­ular blocks of sen­sa­tion) which is not of our con­cern here. Phi­los­ophy has al­ways had a very dif­fi­cult re­la­tion to academia, which is in many ways its mon­strous child. Es­pe­cial­ly in our days, to do phi­los­ophy is in­creas­ing­ly rare with­in academia. There are ex­cep­tions of course and I think that Rot­ter­dam should be very proud of its phi­los­ophy fac­ul­ty. On av­er­age, how­ev­er, phi­los­ophy does not hap­pen too much with­in phi­los­ophy fac­ul­ties. OOO, spec­ula­tive re­al­ism and al­so new ma­te­ri­al­ism are very strong new de­vel­op­ments in phi­los­ophy yet they don’t or hard­ly hap­pen at phi­los­ophy fac­ul­ties.

But let us re­turn to the is­sue of lan­guage. There is no rule that says that philoso­phers should con­cep­tu­al­ize by means of lan­guage. And I be­lieve that there are many artists that, in do­ing their artis­tic work, prac­tice some sort of phi­los­ophy (cre­ate some sort of con­cept). If we lim­it our­selves to the work of Deleuze – whose def­ini­tions we are now fol­low­ing – we can­not but agree with him that there is much phi­los­ophy go­ing on in the paint­ings of Fran­cis Ba­con (he con­cep­tu­al­izes ‘the fig­ure’ in that sense), in the nov­els of Kaf­ka (who con­cep­tu­al­izes ‘the state’), in the movies of Go­dard (who con­cep­tu­al­izes ‘time’). Deleuze (a philoso­pher), when read­ing these three bright minds, treats their work no dif­fer­ent from how he would treat more ac­cept­ed meta­physi­cians, though this does not mean, of course, that the works them­selves, are not works of art any­more. They are prod­ucts of art, but there is phi­los­ophy go­ing on in them.

To­day we see an in­creas­ing num­ber of cre­ative peo­ple, some­times fol­low­ing the ideas of Deleuze, pro­duc­ing work that is more and more both a work of art as well as a work of phi­los­ophy. The best ex­am­ple in this is prob­ably Reza Ne­garestani (2008), by all means a cen­tral fig­ure with­in con­tem­po­rary think­ing. His nov­el/philo­soph­ical trea­tise en­ti­tled Cy­clono­pe­dia: com­plic­ity with anony­mous ma­te­ri­als is about a fic­tive ar­chae­ol­ogist Dr. Hamid Parsani. It con­structs a phi­los­ophy of oil and per­haps it is al­so at the same time a po­lit­ical man­ifesto that pro­claims the lib­er­ation of the Mid­dle East. For those in­ter­est­ed, this book is al­so about An­cient Per­sian mys­ti­cism (the Cult of the Druj) and Love­craft’s Cthul­hu. Giv­en Ne­garestani’s cur­rent in­ter­est in math­emat­ics I’d say that the long await­ed se­quel (the Mor­ti­logu­ist) will al­so aim to write the ex­act sci­ences.

No­ta Bene, I’m not say­ing that what Ne­garestani does is nec­es­sar­ily ‘new’ to our times. In a way Al­bert Ca­mus, much more so than his con­tem­po­rary Jean-​Paul Sartre, per­formed some­thing sim­ilar with The Plague, and there are many more mo­ments in his­to­ry (no­tably in the his­to­ries that find their ful­crum out­side of the West) where re­search and art as you call it, hap­pen to­geth­er (in the same voice).

MK: In your re­cent book with Iris van der Tu­in, you write: ‘new ma­te­ri­al­ism al­lows for the study of the two di­men­sions in their en­tan­gle­ment: the ex­pe­ri­ence of a piece of art is made up of mat­ter and mean­ing. The ma­te­ri­al di­men­sion cre­ates and gives form to the dis­cur­sive, and vice ver­sa’ (Dol­phi­jn and van der Tu­in 2012: 91). Think­ing of the ex­pe­ri­ence of a piece of art, rather than the mak­ing of it for a mo­ment, what do you think about how au­di­ences read ex­hi­bi­tions as op­posed to texts? In the case of this ex­hi­bi­tion, OOO/SR was a point of de­par­ture, but it can eas­ily be read as an ex­hi­bi­tion about na­ture, giv­en the leg­ible forms con­tained with­in (moun­tains, tongues, fin­gers, gar­dens, clouds). Is it in­evitable that we de­fault to na­ture when at­tempt­ing to get be­yond the hu­man?

RD: That de­pends en­tire­ly up­on the def­ini­tion of na­ture that you use. Be­ing a Spinozist, I’d say that na­ture is not a set of Laws that we came up with (as in the Laws of Na­ture) that you seem to pre­sume with your last re­mark, but rather sig­nals the end­less changes in which we ‘hap­pen’ to­geth­er with ev­ery­thing else. Our ‘hap­pen­ing’ or our ac­tu­al­iza­tion works ac­cord­ing to res cog­itans (thought) and res ex­ten­sa (ex­ten­sion), which are the two di­men­sions we (Iris and me) talk about in the quote above. In­ter­est­ing­ly enough, na­ture, Spinoza al­ready tells us, is not lim­it­ed to these two ‘mo­di’; we are. And it is about time that we re­al­ize this. Ac­tu­al­ly, I be­lieve that a ‘whol­ly oth­er’ na­ture, or a def­ini­tion of na­ture that goes way be­yond how we or­di­nar­ily (in­clud­ing so many green ac­tivists) de­fine it to­day, is cru­cial for to­day’s ma­te­ri­al­ist think­ing. When Quentin Meil­las­soux, for in­stance, re­jects the pos­si­bil­ity of ex­plain­ing or even pre­dict­ing na­ture, not­ing (with Hume) that na­ture is rad­ical­ly con­tin­gent and that na­ture’s ‘meta­phys­ical foun­da­tions’ as they can on­ly come in­to ex­is­tence through con­scious­ness and lan­guage, smart­ly cov­er up that na­ture is a con­cept that has hard­ly been recon­cep­tu­al­ized since the reign of du­al­ism, of Kant. Con­se­quent­ly (and in line with Kant’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al­ism), na­ture has been ex­clud­ed from thought. For Meil­las­soux as for many oth­ers then, the con­cept of na­ture, as it sur­faces in pub­lic de­bates as well as in academia, on­ly serves as a ve­hi­cle for an ide­ol­ogy of ressen­ti­ment that is filled with morals invit­ing us mere­ly to ‘con­serve what ex­ists’ (‘it’ then be­ing the false and re­duc­tion­ist idea we have con­struct­ed from na­ture). For these kinds of rea­sons, Tim­othy Mor­ton even sug­gests to write an ecol­ogy that gets rid of the con­cept of na­ture al­to­geth­er, claim­ing that it is too soft to tar­get these days, it is too the­olog­ical. Mor­ton then writes an ecol­ogy with­out na­ture. In re­sponse to Mor­ton, Slavoj Žižek went even fur­ther and searched for an ecol­ogy against na­ture; against the idea of a sta­ble, un­changable, frag­ile equi­lib­ri­um that is per­ma­nent­ly be­ing harmed by cul­ture, by us-​un­able-​to-​know.

Now let me re­turn to the first part of your ques­tion in which you stress the as­pect of ex­pe­ri­ence. What comes to my mind im­me­di­ate­ly is that be­cause we are in the mak­ing, and this mak­ing takes place ex­per­imen­tal­ly or in ex­pe­ri­ence, I wouldn’t make a dis­tinc­tion be­tween the mak­ing of an art­work and the ex­pe­ri­ence of it. In oth­er words, both the art­work and the self come to be in the ex­per­iment. Lets take an ex­am­ple this time from the first of the arts (as Deleuze and Guat­tari call it), ar­chi­tec­ture. Re­cent­ly, Lars Spuy­broek wrote a beau­ti­ful book about the ecol­ogy of de­sign which in­ter­est­ing­ly echoes my pre­vi­ous point con­cern­ing the monist def­ini­tion of na­ture I ad­here to (though Spuy­broek him­self, for some rea­son, has prob­lems with ‘monism’). Es­pe­cial­ly his read­ing of the Goth­ic de­serves our at­ten­tion. We see art-​in-​the-​mak­ing/art-​in-​ex­pe­ri­ence when his study shows us that Goth­ic (so-​called) ‘or­na­men­ta­tion’ hap­pens-​in-​mat­ter. The Goth­ic is nev­er ide­al­ist (like the neo-​goth­ic or mod­ernist move­ment), which is to say that the de­sign al­ways hap­pens in ex­pe­ri­ence, in mov­ing with ‘the forms at work’ (which in­cludes ‘us’). Its two pri­ma­ry forces in ar­chi­tec­tural form, tes­sel­la­tion (from two to one di­men­sion) and rib­bon­ing (from one to two di­men­sions), hap­pen with the very par­tic­ular spa­tial­ity in which the de­sign and the event oc­cur.

The res­onances steer mat­ter in­to J curves and S curves, in­to arch­es and or­na­ments. That is why the Goth­ic, un­like ide­al­ist ar­chi­tec­tures, hap­pens all around us, trav­els in many dif­fer­ent un­fore­seen di­rec­tions and can re­al­ize it­self any­time, any place. To map vi­tal Goth­ic en­er­gy is to re­alise the om­nipres­ence of the curved gable as John Ruskin al­ready put it in the 19th cen­tu­ry. To study the Goth­ic is, there­fore, not about analysing in­di­vid­ual dwellings, but about map­ping the res­onance of dis­parates, as Spuy­broek claims: ‘It is not on­ly a change­ful­ness of columns, vaults, or trac­eries in them­selves, but al­so one in which columns trans­form in­to vaults in­to trac­eries’ (2011, 25).

For Spuy­broek, the Goth­ic played a cru­cial role in our his­to­ry (giv­ing form to it in many ways). It nev­er ceas­es to haunt the Ro­man, Carte­sian or Bauhau­sian lines that still or­ga­nize ur­ban life. The Goth­ic has al­ways been at work at the mar­gins of our built en­vi­ron­ment; and es­pe­cial­ly to­day, in the age of dig­ital de­sign, the Goth­ic proves to be more vi­tal than ev­er be­fore. Spuy­broek’s own de­signs are, of course, a won­der­ful ex­am­ple of how the Goth­ic is so im­bri­cat­ed with ex­per­imen­ta­tion in con­tem­po­rary dig­ital de­sign (which makes him ac­tu­al­ly speak of ‘the dig­ital na­ture of the Goth­ic’). Think, for in­stance, of his Wa­ter Pavil­ion at Neelt­je Jans in which the ceil­ings trans­form in­to the floor, in­to the door, in­to the or­na­ment, while one walks through it.

MK: Martha Buskirk in The Con­tin­gent Ob­ject of Con­tem­po­rary Art says that ‘the idea of the touch, tra­di­tion­al­ly fo­cused on a spe­cif­ic re­gion of the body in the search for ev­idence of the artist’s hand, has been frac­tured and dis­placed in­to the mul­ti­tude of ways artists use their bod­ies to act up­on ma­te­ri­als and al­so turn the pro­cess of rep­re­sen­ta­tion back up­on them­selves to record traces of their phys­ical pres­ence’ (Buskirk 2005: 256). Does this no­tion gen­er­al­ly sup­port the idea of new ma­te­ri­al­ism (and to an ex­tent, OOO/SR) as­sert­ing a fun­da­men­tal link be­tween the dis­cur­sive and the ma­te­ri­al in art?

RD: I wouldn’t know how to talk of ‘the idea’ of new ma­te­ri­al­ism. In the book we were map­ping a new ma­te­ri­al­ism, and I con­tin­ue to do that in my ar­ti­cles. I search for a monism that deals in par­tic­ular with mat­ter re­ceiv­ing form, with ques­tions of plas­tic­ity as Cather­ine Mal­abou talks of it. But you are right that the man­ner­ism (Deleuze talks a lot about this) or per­haps even gen­er­al, the em­pha­sis on feel­ing in­stead of on ra­tio as to­day even peo­ple in the cog­ni­tive sci­ences (think of An­to­nio Dama­sio) and in psy­cholin­guis­tics (think of my col­league at Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty Jos van Berkum) are in search for this, lies at the heart of my in­ter­ests. Spuy­broek too, talks of this when he con­cep­tu­al­izes how beau­ty gives form to life by means of the word ‘sym­pa­thy’. His en­tire book can be read as a man­ifesto for this old and beau­ti­ful con­cept that stress­es the non-​cog­ni­tive in­tra-​ac­tion by dint of which the in­di­vid­ual ob­jects are. Sym­pa­thy, in short, ‘is what things feel when they shape each oth­er’ (2011, 9). Spuy­broek shows us how ‘sym­pa­thy’ – re­vi­tal­iz­ing the way this con­cept was not yet ‘hu­man­ized’ at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry – gives form to us and to the world around us: sym­pa­thy might hap­pen be­tween us and a vase, be­tween a wasp and an or­chid, be­tween the oceans and the moon. They feel each oth­er… they give form to one an­oth­er in the re­la­tion, in the mak­ing.

All of the philoso­phers and thinkers that I have men­tioned here pre­fer to speak of feel­ing, of sym­pa­thy, of touch (think of Erin Man­ning) in­stead of con­scious­ness. All of them agree up­on the idea that the mind is a con­se­quence of the body (and has the body as its ob­ject) which does not mean that they are against meta­physics per se (al­though Meil­las­soux is), but rather that they would nev­er cut it loose from the physics, from the bod­ily move­ments and mod­ifi­ca­tions that cause it.

MK: From your po­si­tion as a philoso­pher, are there any oth­er points and is­sues with the in­ter­re­la­tion of OOO/SR and art and aes­thet­ics that you think are key to con­sid­er?

RD: Well… I think it is very im­por­tant to un­der­stand that OOO/SR/new ma­te­ri­al­ism are very strong forces that cut across phi­los­ophy, the arts as well as the sci­ences to­day for a good rea­son: the times we live de­mand this kind of think­ing. The var­ious crises that hit us to­day are dif­fer­ent from the ones that caused ’68 to hap­pen. Yet the call for a rad­ical eman­ci­pa­tion that was echo­ing all over the world for decades af­ter ’68 (in the­ory and in pol­itics) some­how comes back to us to­day. Our times too ask for an eman­ci­pa­tion that is re­mov­ing us from hi­er­ar­chies that in­volve race, class, gen­der and age but that al­so ask us to ques­tion our hu­man­ity as such, in oth­er words the an­thro­pocen­trism so cen­tral to our think­ing.

Even more so than af­ter ’68, the state of the earth draws us to re­think the du­alisms so strong­ly con­cep­tu­al­ized by Descartes and for­ti­fied by Kant, and they marked the way in which cul­ture drift­ed away from na­ture, how the mind was cut loose from the body, how man has alien­at­ed him­self from tech­nique. From the ear­ly 1960s it was Fou­cault who most elo­quent­ly not­ed the an­thro­pocen­trism cen­tral to all du­alisms. He named it sim­ply ‘man’ (re­fer­ring to Kant’s An­thro­pol­ogy) fore­see­ing the ‘end of man’ or the way this ‘re­cent in­ven­tion’ was dom­inat­ing (and blur­ring) our think­ing. He sug­gests that Kant’s fi­nal ques­tion, ‘Was ist der Men­sch?’, posed in his Log­ic and his Notes and Frag­ments sum­ma­rizes how the past two hun­dred years of mod­ern thought got locked up in his Sub­ject (the ‘I think’) con­clud­ing that ‘[The space of an­thro­pol­ogy] is en­tire­ly tak­en over by the pres­ence of a deaf, un­bound, and of­ten er­rant free­dom which op­er­ates in the do­main of orig­inary pas­siv­ity’ (Fou­cault 2008: 39). In his lat­er writ­ings, Fou­cault showed how this po­lit­ical ecol­ogy slow­ly but steadi­ly cre­at­ed ob­jects (pris­ons, schools, bar­racks, fac­to­ries) in or­der to in­stall the Sub­ject (the ob­ject of thought), to serve its ex­is­tence. Fou­cault in the end is not push­ing us to ‘ques­tion au­thor­ity’ but rather to ‘ques­tion re­al­ity’, as re­al­ity had been cre­at­ed and mold­ed ac­cord­ing to sys­tems of dif­fer­en­ti­ations that we named, or­dered and in­ter­nal­ized in a thor­ough­ly hu­man­ist way.

That was then. Fou­cault is still a very ur­gent thinker, don’t get me wrong here, but ‘dif­fer­ent­ly’; the class­es he gave at the end of his ca­reer (and that are now be­ing pub­lished) of­fer us this Fou­cault that has yet to be dis­cov­ered. At the start of the 21st cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, we live in such a dif­fer­ent po­lit­ical are­na. We are con­front­ed with such dif­fer­ent threats, all of which asks us to think anew. The eco­log­ical crises of to­day, which by all means have a much more rad­ical ef­fect on how we will soon live com­pared to the eco­nom­ical cri­sis, make Quentin Meil­las­soux (2006) con­clude that the end of man has yet to hap­pen. Meil­las­soux claims that even post-​crit­ical the­ory (in some ways even in­clud­ing Fou­cault, is part of ‘cor­re­la­tion­al­ism’ (as he con­cep­tu­al­izes an­thro­pocen­trism) and that the time has come to get rid of the ‘Kan­tian hor­reur’ that still dom­inates us (which does not mean that he wants to get rid of Kant, rather he pro­pos­es to rad­ical­ize it from with­in). Meil­las­soux claims that post-​crit­ical the­ory still re­duces the ab­so­lute re­al­ity of things to their pos­si­ble ap­pear­ance in con­scious­ness and lan­guage: the ‘two me­dia of cor­re­la­tion’ that de­fine the unique and un­touch­able ‘man.’ Cor­re­la­tion­al­ism (ex­plic­it­ly and im­plic­it­ly) claims that on­ly in con­scious­ness things can hap­pen, on­ly by means of lan­guage they can be ex­pressed.

Even Meil­las­soux, who seemed to be a rig­or­ous, al­most scholas­tic, philoso­pher in his Après la Fini­tude and his pub­lished and un­pub­lished work on God and fideism, now turns to art as his last book in En­glish The Num­ber and the Siren: the De­ci­pher­ment of Mal­lar­mé’s Coup de Des. As the ti­tle al­ready tells us, the book is on Mal­lar­mé, ad­dressed in a very math­emat­ical sense… com­ing close to nu­merol­ogy even. Be­yond this, many con­tem­po­rary schol­ars that are in­volved with new ma­te­ri­al­ism feel an urge to study con­tem­po­rary art. Bioart, think of Na­tal­ie Jeremi­jenko, is of course very pop­ular for those in­ter­est­ed in re­think­ing na­ture, but ac­tu­al­ly all per­for­mance art and in­stal­la­tion art – art forms that are all about mak­ing and ex­pe­ri­enc­ing/ex­per­iment­ing mat­ter – are more and more flow­ing in­to thought, while at the same time new ma­te­ri­al­ist thought flows in­to these art­forms, in­to the very way they re­veal to us the tech­niques of ex­is­tence: new life (and death) un­fore­seen.

Works Cit­ed

Ian Bo­gost, Alien Phe­nomenol­ogy, Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing, Min­neapo­lis: Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta Press, 2012.

Martha Buskirk, The Con­tin­gent Ob­ject of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Rick Dol­phi­jn, and Iris van der Tu­in, New Ma­te­ri­al­ism: In­ter­views and Car­togra­phies, Open Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2012; http://open­hu­man­itiespress.org/new-​ma­te­ri­al­ism.html

Hal Fos­ter, The Re­turn of the Re­al: Art and The­ory at the End of the Cen­tu­ry, Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

Bri­an Mas­su­mi, Sem­blance and Event: Ac­tivist Phi­los­ophy and the Oc­cur­rent Arts, Cam­bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.

Quentin Meil­las­soux, Af­ter Fini­tude: An Es­say On The Ne­ces­si­ty Of Con­tin­gen­cy, trans. Ray Brassier, Lon­don: Con­tin­uum, 2008.

Reza Ne­garestani, Cy­clono­pe­dia: Com­plic­ity with Anony­mous Ma­te­ri­als, Mel­bourne: re.press, 2008.

Lars Spuy­broek, The Sym­pa­thy of Things: Ruskin and the Ecol­ogy of De­sign, Rot­ter­dam: V2_ Pub­lish­ing/NAi Pub­lish­ers, 2011.

Bi­ogra­phies

Rick Dol­phi­jn is a writ­er and a philoso­pher. He is an as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor at the Fac­ul­ty of Hu­man­ities, and se­nior fel­low of the Cen­tre for the Hu­man­ities, both at Utrecht Uni­ver­si­ty, the Nether­lands. He in­ter­est­ed in what he calls ‘new ma­te­ri­al­ism’ a fresh wind in phi­los­ophy close­ly linked to pro­cess thought and per­haps in some ways al­so to OOO and spec­ula­tive re­al­ism. In his re­cent­ly pub­lished book ‘New Ma­te­ri­al­ism: In­ter­views and Car­togra­phies’, coau­thored with dr. Iris van der Tu­in, the ‘new tra­di­tion’ called new ma­te­ri­al­ism is sit­uat­ed in phi­los­ophy, in the sci­ences and in the arts. He is fin­ish­ing a book which is more ex­per­imen­tal and which deals with the ur­gen­cy of this new form of think­ing, en­ti­tled (for now) ‘Mat­ter of Life: earth cul­ture health’.

Michelle Kasprzak is a cu­ra­tor at V2_ In­sti­tute for the Un­sta­ble Me­dia.

Re­vi­tal Co­hen of Co­hen Van Balen (RC): We have been work­ing around de­signs for an­imals, an­imal de­signs and de­sign of an­imals for a while now. There­fore, ob­ject-​ori­ent­ed-​on­tol­ogy’s (OOO) ideas of things that are be­yond (or per­haps around) hu­man per­cep­tion are rel­evant to our prac­tice. We’re in­ter­est­ed in non­hu­man pres­ence and in­ter­ac­tions, in pro­cess­es that are be­yond hu­man con­trol. We ap­proach these pro­cess­es and sit­ua­tions from a spec­ula­tive point of view, not al­ways con­cerned with re­al­ity, rather with fields of pos­si­bil­ity.

Cheryl Field (CF): The thing that ap­peals to me most about OOO/spec­ula­tive re­al­ism (SR) is the egal­itar­ian po­si­tion these philoso­phies adopt. They of­fer a demo­crat­ic stance that is per­haps at odds with our nat­ural im­puls­es. It’s a very hu­man qual­ity to har­bour an an­thro­pocen­tric and an an­thro­po­mor­phic view of the uni­verse. For ex­am­ple, chil­dren will agree with state­ments such as ‘rocks are jagged so an­imals can scratch them­selves’ and ‘birds ex­ist to make nice mu­sic.’ These kinds of tele­olog­ical state­ments make in­tu­itive sense to us; they are the kinds of ex­pla­na­tions that come nat­ural­ly to hu­man minds. Sci­ence on the oth­er hand re­quires the kind of ab­stract thought that doesn’t sit so eas­ily. And I think that is where my work (which as you know is heav­ily in­flu­enced by my back­ground as a molec­ular bi­ol­ogist) and OOO/SR start to find com­mon ground – there’s a strik­ing re­sem­blance be­tween these philo­soph­ical po­si­tions and the uni­verse as de­scribed by sci­ence. Nei­ther of the pieces of work I made are meant to be di­agram­mat­ic of OOO / SR (there are bet­ter ways to do that than though art-​ob­jects I’m sure).

Karoli­na Sobec­ka (KS): My work hasn’t ex­plic­it­ly ref­er­enced OOO or SR ideas, but it was fol­low­ing a few re­lat­ed tan­gents. The most promi­nent might have been the non­hu­man per­spec­tive, as a lot of my work has to do with cre­at­ing re­la­tion­ship be­tween the view­er and in­ter­ac­tive agen­cy, rep­re­sent­ed of­ten by an­imals or ob­jects. I have been in­ter­est­ed in Jakob von Uexküll’s writ­ings. Uexküll made de­duc­tions about how a par­tic­ular an­imal ex­pe­ri­ences the world or what he calls its umwelt, for ex­am­ple, in­fer­ring the bee world from, among oth­er things, the struc­ture of their eyes and their be­haviours. This is kind of an ear­ly ver­sion of the ex­plo­ration of mul­ti­plic­ity of non­hu­man per­spec­tives that OOO en­cour­ages.

I was al­so think­ing a lot about ob­jects and how they rep­re­sent cul­tur­al mo­ments that they were cre­at­ed in. The Am­ateur Hu­man project is meant to be a kind of in­verse ar­chae­ol­ogy – look­ing at man-​made ob­jects and de­ci­pher­ing from them the be­liefs, de­sires and knowl­edge of peo­ple who cre­at­ed them – ex­cept in this case the ob­jects would be cre­at­ed to em­body this in­for­ma­tion, rather than ex­ca­vat­ed. The project was de­signed to re­flect on our re­la­tion­ship to en­vi­ron­ment in the mo­ment of en­vi­ron­men­tal cri­sis.

MK: Can you tell a lit­tle more about the works you cre­at­ed for the ex­hi­bi­tion, be­yond what we can learn from read­ing the short de­scrip­tions of them?

RC: We were in­ter­est­ed in the spe­cif­ic vi­su­al lan­guage of na­ture doc­umen­taries fol­low­ing noc­tur­nal an­imals, at­tempt­ing to look in­to a non­hu­man ter­ri­to­ry of night­shades and crea­tures guid­ed by their ears and noses in­stead of their eyes. Night im­ages of places and be­haviours not meant to be seen ap­pealed to us as they take bi­ol­ogy out of the realm of ‘da­ta’ and hold it with­in for­got­ten ter­ri­to­ries of won­der and mys­tery.

We want­ed to de­vel­op a work that will repo­si­tion bi­ol­ogy in the su­per­nat­ural ter­ri­to­ries of the un­known, the en­chant­ing and the un­spo­ken. Es­pe­cial­ly look­ing in­to an­imal-​plant sym­bi­ot­ic re­la­tion­ships, where one of the most beau­ti­ful and in­trigu­ing as­pects is the op­er­ation of very com­plex sys­tems with­out hu­man in­ter­ven­tion or in­clu­sion. Or­gan­ical­ly al­ter­ing the de­sign of biotopes and self-​en­gi­neer­ing bio­di­ver­si­ty, these in­ter­ac­tions are like the­atre that takes place on­ly when there is no au­di­ence. We want­ed to build a ‘set’ or scaf­fold for a po­et­ic in­ter­ac­tion be­tween an­imal and plant where the ex­changes can nev­er be ful­ly in­ter­pret­ed.

CF: I cre­at­ed two pieces of work for the ex­hi­bi­tion – the first was a se­ries of clock­work fin­gers ti­tled Nei­ther ready nor present to hand. The fin­gers were cast from life and mount­ed on brass brack­ets. The fin­gers and brack­ets wob­bly wild­ly, in a whol­ly un-​hu­man way, when they are wound up by the clock­work mech­anism. The sec­ond piece was ti­tled (C8H8)n, CSi, KAl2(Al­Si3O10)(F,OH)2, C, C, Ca­SO4, Fe3C, SiH3(OS­iH2)nOSiH3 and con­sist­ed of three turn­ing steel plates, on one face of each was a cast, pink, rub­ber tongue and on the oth­er face was a minia­ture moun­tain. There is some­thing un­can­ny about sen­so­ry and sen­su­al or­gans (i.e. fin­gers and tongues) be­ing dis­lo­cat­ed from the body. Both the fin­ger and the tongue are al­so fun­da­men­tal to our sense of hu­man­ness and to some ex­tent they are sym­bol­ic of our evo­lu­tion i.e. the op­pos­able fin­ger and thumb and the pow­er of speech and lan­guage have giv­en us the dom­inant po­si­tion on this plan­et. With both com­mis­sioned works, I want­ed to take that whol­ly an­thro­pocen­tric po­si­tion and play with it. The fin­gers are part prop, part fic­tion­al-​func­tion, part bi­ol­ogy, part whim­sy. Sim­ilar­ly, the tongue/moun­tains are an­oth­er means of re­clas­si­fy­ing or­dered struc­tures, if you will.

KS: This project was con­ceived as a set of ob­jects and in­stal­la­tions that ex­plored what a cloud is through many sets of lens­es – from their phys­ical ap­pear­ance to their sym­bol­ic use as an aid in myths, philoso­phies and rep­re­sen­ta­tions. OOO de­scribes each ob­ject as ‘with­drawn’ or un­know­able, be­cause any ob­ject (for ex­am­ple a tree) is a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent thing in an ant’s ex­pe­ri­ence, in my ex­pe­ri­ence, a cloud’s ex­pe­ri­ence, or its own. Nepholo­gies aimed to ex­plore cloud-​ness from sev­er­al sim­ilar­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.

For the ex­hi­bi­tion, I cre­at­ed one ob­ject, the Cloud­Mak­er (though I still plan to de­vel­op some of the oth­er Nepholo­gies). The Cloud­Mak­er is al­so part of the Am­ateur Hu­man project and is a per­son­al de­vice for weath­er mod­ifi­ca­tion. It con­sists of cloud-​mak­ing gear sent up in­to the at­mo­sphere in a weath­er-​bal­loon pay­load. As it reach­es spe­cif­ic al­ti­tudes it dis­pers­es Cloud Con­den­sa­tion Nu­clei (CCN), heat and wa­ter vapour. Mois­ture in the air con­dens­es in­to cloud droplets around the CCN, form­ing in­to small clouds. This method is in­spired by a geo-​en­gi­neer­ing tech­nique pro­posed to cre­ate brighter, more re­flec­tive clouds which shield earth from sun’s ra­di­ation, and thus part­ly coun­ter­act the cli­mate change.

The Cloud­Mak­er as a con­tin­ua­tion of the Am­ateur hu­man project is fo­cused on hu­man un­der­stand­ing of ‘na­ture’ and our place in it, or as Tim­othy Mor­ton would put it, on de­vel­op­ing our eco­log­ical aware­ness. It cen­tres on en­gag­ing peo­ple in en­deav­ours and con­ver­sa­tions that might seem bor­der­line ab­surd and thus re­veal­ing of par­tic­ulars of one’s ac­tions in the world.

The ‘meta-​sto­ry’ of the Cloud­Mak­er de­vel­oped in a re­al­ly in­ter­est­ing way as I was work­ing on it. Each cloud launch is ac­com­pa­nied by a sto­ry of its tra­jec­to­ry in the at­mo­sphere and of the ac­tu­al cloud-​mak­ing, but al­so, and in­creas­ing­ly more in­ter­est­ing­ly, by a sto­ry of its land­ing in some­one’s back­yard and pro­vok­ing a quite var­ied spec­trum of opin­ions from ran­dom (or at least not self-​se­lect­ed) part of the pop­ula­tion. For ex­am­ple, the first launch land­ed the cloud-​mak­er in a clump of trees on the bor­der be­tween an en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly pro­tect­ed wet­land and some­one’s yard. The prop­er­ty own­er was quite sus­pi­cious of me and of the Cloud­Mak­er, and would on­ly let me on his prop­er­ty af­ter I have been cleared by the lo­cal po­lice. In­ter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions en­sued, with the po­lice, the prop­er­ty own­er, and the lo­cal tree ser­vice, bring­ing up such is­sues as le­gal­ity of cloud-​mak­ing, so­cial and per­son­al re­spon­si­bil­ity, pri­va­cy, and law­ful en­force­ment of en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion.

MK: When con­front­ed with the main tenets of OOO & SR (re­think­ing cor­re­la­tion­ism (an act of di­vi­sion be­tween hu­man and world); a non-​an­thro­pocen­tric world­view; an in­ter­est in modes of on­to­log­ical lev­el­ling (a democ­ra­cy of things); a con­sid­er­ation of ag­gre­gate forces like cli­mate through cat­egories of au­ton­omy), how do you broad­ly see these as rel­evant to cur­rent vi­su­al & me­dia arts prac­tice?

RC: On­to­log­ical­ly, our prac­tice has oc­ca­sion­al­ly been de­scribed as part of vi­su­al & me­dia arts prac­tice; in the midst of it, caught up in the tur­moil. It doesn’t give us the best per­spec­tive to speak of the area in broad terms, nei­ther to sit­uate its tenets. We leave that to the oth­ers.

CF: Un­like the sci­en­tif­ic pro­cess, which is de­signed, wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, to re­move the hu­man from the equa­tion, the same is clear­ly not true for vi­su­al art. The work any artist makes can on­ly ev­er re­al­ly be a re­flec­tion of their per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence of the times in which they live. How then does that rec­on­cile with the no­tion in SR that ‘the re­al’ must be thought of in­de­pen­dent­ly of its con­nec­tion to mind or hu­man ac­tion? I’m not sure it can. We can try and stand out­side of our own ex­pe­ri­ence and noo­dle about ecol­ogy; pre- and post-​hu­man uni­vers­es; in­ter- and in­tra-​species par­ity, but ul­ti­mate­ly we are tight­ly teth­ered to the in­side of our own heads, to the most com­plex ma­te­ri­al in the known uni­verse – our brains – and there­in lies the rub.

KS: I think OOO and SR are re­al­ly in­spir­ing the­oret­ical dis­cours­es. The ter­mi­nol­ogy they in­tro­duce alone is a kind of bom­bas­tic nam­ing state­ment that forces re­think­ing and re­or­ga­niz­ing our as­sump­tions. It was re­al­ly in­ter­est­ing to delve deep­er in­to this think­ing when work­ing on this project. New ways of think­ing about is­sues such as glob­al warm­ing or re­la­tion­ship with and be­tween the non-​hu­mans (in­clud­ing things as well as an­imals) are re­al­ly re­vi­tal­iz­ing them. It’s even more in­ter­est­ing that those thoughts emerge ‘as we speak,’ and the philoso­phies are still shaped and formed in the on­line fo­rum post­ings, com­ments and the net­worked dis­course, which as prob­ably con­tribut­ed to its em­brace by new me­dia art com­mu­ni­ty in par­tic­ular. As Levi Bryant (2012) put it, talk­ing about the pro­lif­er­ation of OOO and SR: ‘its grow­ing pres­ence in aca­dem­ic de­bates has not so much been the re­sult of pre­sent­ing per­sua­sive ar­gu­ments – though hope­ful­ly it does that too – but the re­sult of how it has un­fold­ed in the ma­te­ri­al do­main of so­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nolo­gies and open-​ac­cess pub­lish­ing. In oth­er words, there’s a sense in which, as McLuhan put it, ‘the medi­um is the mes­sage.’

MK: Can you tell us a lit­tle more about the play with OOO thought in each of your works? Maybe Cheryl, you can elab­orate on the role of Hei­deg­ge­ri­an thought for you?

RC: The piece is the piece: an in­ter­face for a hare to lis­ten to sig­nals that have been bounced off the moon. The noise in these sig­nals is caused by ir­reg­ular­ities in the sur­face of the moon. A moon­flow­er is part of the de­sign of the an­ten­na. The moon­flow­er is a night­shade that cor­re­sponds to the moon, aim­ing as an an­ten­na. The moon­flow­er is a psychedel­ic plant. Hares eat all plants and flow­ers. Be­cause of its vi­olent mat­ing rit­uals, the hare has his­tor­ical­ly been per­ceived as a lu­natic. ‘As crazy as the March Hare.’ Lu­na­cy is the at­tri­bu­tion of men­tal ill­ness to the moon. East­ern cul­tures tell sto­ries of a hare liv­ing on the moon, en­gaged in sa­cred prac­tices that are be­yond our un­der­stand­ing.

CF: My most ob­vi­ous nod to Hei­deg­ge­ri­an thought is in Nei­ther ready nor present to hand. It tick­les me that by tak­ing a hu­man fin­ger or thumb and re­mov­ing it from the body and ac­ti­vat­ing it by me­chan­ical means in­stead of bi­olog­ical means, it ir­re­vo­ca­bly shifts the Hei­deg­ge­ri­an tool-​state of that fin­ger from be­ing ‘present-​to-​hand’ to ‘ready-​to-​hand’ which for a fin­ger is, frankly, next-​to-​use­less. Af­ter all, we need more fin­gers in or­der to ac­ti­vate (and wind-​up) the tool-​fin­ger. It is a tool no more, but an ob­ject nev­er-​the-​less. By lib­er­at­ing it from the shack­les of the hand, it with­draws from us and leads a life in­de­pen­dent of our an­thro­pocen­tric per­cep­tion.

KS: Clouds are bare­ly ob­jects at all and so, be­ing a kind of edge con­di­tion, seemed fit­ting for ex­plo­ration of ob­ject-​hood. Clouds have been his­tor­ical­ly used as philo­soph­ical aids in­clud­ing by Descartes, who was con­vinced that if he could ex­plain clouds, he could ex­plain ev­ery­thing, since they epit­omize the un­gras­pable.

Try­ing to make a tiny cloud in the at­mo­sphere is kind of like try­ing to make a wave on the ocean, and some OOO dis­cus­sion is re­lat­ed to the long con­ver­sa­tion re­gard­ing such po­et­ic/hu­mor­ous ges­tures of ab­sur­di­ty and fu­til­ity (Robert Bar­ry’s In­ert gas se­ries for ex­am­ple, in which he re­leased neon, he­li­um and oth­er in­ert gas­es in­to an at­mo­sphere). From the OOO stand­point, re­mov­ing con­sid­er­ations of what mean­ing or util­ity these ges­tures might have for hu­mans, we can see them and their prod­ucts as tru­ly ‘demo­crat­ic,’ ‘ob­jects-​for-​them­selves,’ rather than ‘for the gaze of a sub­ject, rep­re­sen­ta­tion, or a cul­tur­al dis­course’ (Bryant 2011: 19). Like La­tour’s ‘gal­lop­ing free­dom of the ze­bras,’ they ‘lack noth­ing’ with­out our gaze (49). Their in­vis­ibil­ity to hu­mans doesn’t take away from their ob­ject-​hood.

The ab­sur­di­ty of try­ing to make a cloud is in­stead of linked to the fact that clouds are just tiny ‘foot­prints’ – tem­po­rary lo­cal man­ifes­ta­tions – of the gi­ant ‘hy­per-​ob­ject,’ the cli­mate, so mas­sive­ly dis­tribut­ed in time and space that it is in­vis­ible to us, yet whose shad­ow looms in­to our world ev­ery­where, and whose re­al­ity, ac­cord­ing to Tim­othy Mor­ton, is more re­al than the ‘wet stuff un­der your boots’ (2010). It tow­ers above hu­man com­pre­hen­sion and makes at­tempts such as com­mer­cial or mil­itary weath­er mod­ifi­ca­tion ei­ther laugh­able or hor­ri­ble.

The in­vis­ibil­ity of mat­ter in this project is al­so part­ly re­lat­ed not on­ly to the ephemer­al na­ture of the ob­ject (po­ten­tial­ly) cre­at­ed, but al­so to the kind of me­di­ation that usu­al­ly takes place in por­tray­ing phe­nom­ena that are be­yond our im­me­di­ate ex­pe­ri­ence. Such ‘in­stru­men­tal­ly de­tect­ed re­al­ity’ is in­ferred from blips on mea­sur­ing or view­ing de­vices and pre­sent­ed to us in an en­hanced, il­lus­tra­tive ver­sion.

MK: Look­ing at the show as a whole, do you have any com­ments on the most sig­nif­icant syn­er­gies and con­nec­tions be­tween the works?

CF: Two things come to mind – pur­pose and hu­mor. What struck me about the ex­hi­bi­tion was that each of the artists built seem­ing­ly func­tion­al ob­jects, i.e. ob­jects that looked like they should ful­fill a pur­pose. Whether that was a fic­tion­al, a philo­soph­ical, a po­et­ic or a prac­ti­cal pur­pose (or in­deed many pur­pos­es si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly) was for the au­di­ence to de­cide. Al­so I have to ad­mit that I found the works in ex­hi­bi­tion re­al­ly fun­ny. There is some­thing slight­ly un­hinged (I mean that in a good way!) about the works in the show; the hi­lar­ious jour­nal that ac­com­pa­nies Karoli­na Sobec­ka’s tremen­dous­ly se­ri­ous cloud ma­chine and Tu­ur van Balen & Re­vi­tal Co­hen bonkers sys­tem for a hare to lis­ten to the sur­face of the moon… these are fun­ny, func­tion­al/non-​func­tion­al ob­jects. These works are about ideas be­come mat­ter, and mat­ter in­sin­uat­ing its way back in­to thought. Per­haps, in the end, this is the on­ly way we can tack­le a sub­ject like SR?

KS: All the projects are very dif­fer­ent ap­proach­es, and I think maybe thanks to those dif­fer­ences they com­ple­ment each oth­er, es­pe­cial­ly when con­sid­ered through OOO con­cepts.

One uni­fy­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic might be their un­can­ny-​ness: Cheryl’s tongues, moun­tains and fin­gers mix their fa­mil­iar­ity with strangeness, putting the view­er re­al­ly in the bot­tom of the un­can­ny val­ley. The moon gar­den for the hare and the gi­ant an­ten­na that com­mu­ni­cates with the moon (and the car­rots and the moun­tains and the clouds and ev­ery­thing else) is a re­al­ly won­der­ful sto­ry and a way of imag­in­ing the in­ter­con­nect­ed­ness of things, evok­ing Tim Mor­ton’s idea of ‘strange strangers’ (2010). The Nepholo­gies project al­so points to Mor­ton’s un­der­stand­ing of un­can­ny val­ley – where the more we come to know about some­thing the stranger it be­comes.

MK: Do any of you have fu­ture plans for your work(s)?

KS: I’m plan­ning to take the Cloud­Mak­er to places where it might find new res­onance. Wyoming, North Dako­ta, Texas, Utah, Col­orado and Neva­da have now or had in the past state’s weath­er mod­ifi­ca­tion pro­grams, so they seem a promis­ing launch­ing ground. I will al­so take the Cloud­Mak­er abroad to launch it in dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al, en­vi­ron­men­tal and le­gal set­tings.

Each of the launch­es sto­ries adds to the Launch Log – the ex­per­imen­tal doc­umen­tary I am mak­ing around the sto­ries of each Am­ateur hu­man ob­ject, which I’ll be work­ing on for the next few months. Even­tu­al­ly I al­so plan to de­vel­op oth­er Nephol­ogy and Am­ateur hu­man projects.

Works Cit­ed

Levi Byrant, The Democ­ra­cy of Ob­jects, Open Hu­man­ities Press, 2011; http://open­hu­man­itiespress.org/democ­ra­cy-​of-​ob­jects.html

—. ‘The Ma­te­ri­al­ity of SR/OOO: Why Has It Pro­lif­er­at­ed?’, Lar­val Sub­jects (2012); http://lar­val­sub­jects.word­press.com/2012/06/03/the-​ma­te­ri­al­ity- ​of-​srooo-​why-​has-​it-​pro­lif­er­at­ed/

Tim­othy Mor­ton, ‘Think­ing Ecol­ogy: The Mesh, The Strange Stranger, and the Beau­ti­ful Soul,’ in Robin Mack­ay (ed.) Col­lapse VI: Geo/Phi­los­ophy, Fal­mouth: Ur­ba­nom­ic 2010, pp. 265-293.

—. ‘Hy­per­ob­jects and the End of Com­mon Sense’, The Con­tem­po­rary Con­di­tion (2010), http://con­tem­po­rarycon­di­tion.blogspot.com/2010/03/hy­per­ob­jects-​ and-​end-​of-​com­mon-​sense.html

Bart Kalkman: DEAF Festival 2012 Animation: The Power of Things (Made in MSPaint)

Abel van der Drift and Mark Bouwman: Interview with Julian Oliver

Yun-Feng Fu, Jelle ’t Hart and Evie Hoonings: DEAF2012 Promo + Promo Wearable Technology + Interview with Bernard Foing 

Michel van der Burg and Sophie den Hartog: Compilation of DEAF2012 Recordings + Promo for Party in WORM + Evening of ... + Intro program DEAF2012. 

Tim van Helsdingen, Sjors Gerearts and John Lanser: Leader NANO supermarket + Compilation of DEAF2012 Recordings.

Dana Verbaan and Maite Klis: Registration Workshop Augmented Society (a movie about AR) + Terra Nova (a movie about the performance by Crew). 

Jelke Landman, Christiaan Kanis and Paul van Rijckevorsel: Interview with Philip Beesley

Entrance is free so bring your friends and join us for an easy going evening!

Here the artists Carolien Teunisse and Bram Snijders talk about their work that uses mapping projection in a transparent form, where hardware, medium and concept relate.

From the reflection on AR to a focus on the medium to an audio-visual installation:

Carolien Teunisse and Bram Snijders on RE: (2010) from V2_ on Vimeo.

also on: http://www.youtube.com/v/n4ExHH6_KFk?fs=1

Welke keuzes gingen aan het festivalthema, de kunstenaars en kunstwerken vooraf? Als geld ongelimiteerd beschikbaar was, was dit dan nog steeds de tentoonstelling die je had willen maken?

Geld limiteert altijd. Sommige werken of kunstenaars zijn eenvoudigweg te duur en dan moet je keuzes maken. Toen we met Olafur Eliasson begonnen, wilde ik heel graag het werk ‘The Weather Project’ (die zon) dat in 2004 in Tate te zien was. Dat ging budgettair niet, dus toen kozen we het werk dat Museum Boijmans van Beuningen onlangs aankocht. De installatie van Philip Beesley is een ander goed voorbeeld. Beesley’s werk is kostbaar. Om het voor hem toch interessant te maken om op DEAF te komen, hebben we hem een Evening Of en een plaats op het symposium gegeven. Gaandeweg werd hij steeds enthousiaster. Wat begon als een prototype groeide uit tot de installatie die nu in de tentoonstelling te zien is.

De laatste editie van DEAF was vijf jaar geleden. Waarom nu toch weer een editie van DEAF?

Na 2007 hadden we de conclusie getrokken: dit moeten we niet meer willen. Het organiseren werd een uitputtingsslag en de financiële impact op V2_ programma was enorm. Toen er op V2_ werd bezuinigd, viel het definitieve besluit. Twee jaar geleden zijn we op dat besluit teruggekomen omdat we om ons heen constateerden dat bij kunstenaars, publiek en onszelf behoefte aan inhoud bestond.

Inhoud?

Festivals die enkel laten zien dat mediakunst bestaat, zijn er al genoeg. Elektronische kunst moest de laatste jaren laten zien dat ze er was, dat werkt het beste door spektakel. Volgens mij zijn we die fase wel voorbij.

Doen andere mediafestivals dat dan niet?

Te weinig. Festivals als STRP en TodaysArt beginnen langzaam te zien dat ze ook op zoek zijn naar inhoud door ook dagprogramma’s te organiseren met symposia en workshops. Er is behoefte aan, dus dit is een goed moment.

Het festival heeft als thema ‘The Power of Things’ en gaat volgens de inleidende tekst over hoe de dingen zich tot elkaar verhouden. Hoe kwam de keuze voor de kunstenaars tot stand? Was er eerst een thema en toen de kunstenaars of andersom?

We hebben eerst een thema ontwikkeld en zijn toen naar werken gaan zoeken die dat konden uitdrukken. Het onderwerp The Power of Things is de uitkomst van een expertmeeting die vorig jaar plaatsvond. Daar kwamen professionals samen uit verschillende domeinen om te discussiëren over de grens van wat leeft en wat niet leeft. We kwamen op het punt dat je eigenlijk nooit van een voorwerp kunt zeggen dat het dood is. Zo kwamen we op dit onderwerp. We hebben gekozen voor kunstenaars die laten zien dat materiaal ook kracht heeft en invloed op ons dagelijks leven.

Wat bedoel je daarmee?

De boodschap is: mensen kennen de causale invloeden van materialen, maar ze zijn zich er niet van bewust. Neem het Catshuis beraad. Er zitten allemaal mannen aan tafel, maar wie of wat bepaalt de uitkomst? Het maakt ook verschil welke suiker er op tafel staat, hoe zacht de stoelen zijn en hoe de lichtval is. Het zijn hele belangrijke materiele invloeden op ons leven. Wat de Minister President voor ontbijt eet kan zijn humeur en zijn beslissingen beïnvloeden. Deze indirecte, kleine invloeden vergeten we vaak. En we staan er al helemaal zelden bij stil dat deze invloeden ook kunnen helpen bij het oplossen van problemen. Als mensen naar buiten lopen met een beetje meer van dat besef vind ik de tentoonstelling geslaagd.

Hoe gaat het nu verder met DEAF?

Dat hangt af van het succes van deze editie en hoe de organisatie zich voortzet. We hebben DEAF verzelfstandigt in stichting DEAF. Daarmee hopen we de samenwerkingen die we zijn aangegaan op een heldere manier voort te kunnen zetten. De relatie van V2_ tot deze partners moet de komende maanden vorm krijgen. Ik heb DEAF altijd gezien als platform voor de Nederlandse sector. In het verleden werd dat tegengewerkt door de positie van V2_. Partijen vonden het lastig om te investeren in een project dat alleen van V2_ afkomstig was. Door de verzelfstandiging van het festival is dat nu anders. Samenwerken maakt je altijd sterker. Je moet alleen oppassen dat niet alle festivals door dezelfde mensen, maar telkens in een andere samenstelling worden georganiseerd. Het zou heel leuk zijn om te horen van mensen buiten DEAF en V2_ dat zij het belangrijk vinden dat DEAF doorgaat. De reacties van het publiek zijn in ieder geval enthousiast.

JvB: Can you say something about the text you are writing for the book?

MvD: The chapter I am working on now will go back to the root of the New Aesthetic, the Tumblr-site of James Bridle. I wonder if the observations that people post there belong in the same 'conceptual bucket' as the artworks that are also posted. Basically the New Aesthetic-Tumblr is a collection of 'stuff' which shows how online digital culture has burst out into the physical realm. It is a very varied mix of stuff. There are things that people have stumbled upon in their urban environment, like advertisements whose graphic designs feature digital glitches or pixelated-images, but also examples of military camouflage that looks like pixels. These observations sit next to (new media) artworks that intentionally make a point about the difference between the online and offline realm, and how these sometimes seem to clash or have a problematic relation. I think that the artworks that make such a point, that intentionally make a statement about the relation between the virtual and the physical realm, are very different from much of the other 'stuff' posted on the New Aesthetic Tumblr, like things that people accidentally happened to stumbled upon. I am still in the phase of structuring the chapter and sharpening the argument though, so I can't explain my exact argument in great detail yet. In general lines I am trying to put to words what I thought and felt when I first looked at the New Aesthetics Tumblr: do these artworks really belong here?

The group is quite diverse. You are one of the curators, others have an academic background. How is it to write as a curator amidst such a group?

We are definitely facing a big challenge in bringing together the theoretical and the practical perspectives, both represented in the group. But it's a positive challenge, and a great way to exchange ideas between the two domains. In this stage of the booksprint it begins to look like the theorists will frame the problem and the different theoretical positions, while the practitioners (all curators) connect these positions to concrete projects. So the theorists are focussing on the introduction and the concluding chapters right now, while the curators on the other hand fill the middle chapters of the book with examples of and discussions on specific artworks and exhibitions. Among these discussions we do a close reading of the New Aesthtic-tumblr and blog, by looking at it as an online exhibition.

What for you is the New Aesthetic? And why is it not the New Aesthetics?

Well, the New Aesthetics (plural) movement is actually a bit older than the New Aesthetic (singular) initiated by James Bridle's Tumblr. That is something which I, by the way, only found out in the course of this project.

Yesterday Nat Muller stated that according to her it is already radical to be able to talk about aesthetics in the context of new media art at all ...

She is right. Look at our recent DEAF2012 exhibition for instance. In response to that, some critics claimed that it was ridiculous to have a discussion on such a fundamental aspect of the world as beauty in these times of crises. I don't agree with that view; in my opinion this is the ultimate moment to have discussions on fundamental aspects of the physical world and see a huge role there for new media art. Till quite recently new media art was almost exclusively about 'things on a screen', ignoring that new media technology is actually out there in the world, or at least has its impact there. In that sense, I am very excited about the New Aesthetic movement, as it underlines that technology is 'in the world' and has moved 'out of the screen'. The question then however, is whether or not the New Aesthetic is doing a good job at critically assesses this move. Or is it just a new label for things that new media art has been addressing for a long time already?

Joris van Ballegooijen

Ik spreek de in Groningen wonende kunstenaar Steven Jouwersma op donderdagmiddag 30 augustus 2007 als hij druk bezig is met het bouwen van zijn installatie Dia-Exit op de begane grond van het V2_-gebouw.

Arie Altena: Kun je uitleggen wat je precies aan het bouwen bent?

Steven Jouwersma: Eigenlijk bouw ik dezelfde installatie die ik eerder heb laten zien in het Tschumipaviljoen in Groningen. Het principe is gelijk, maar omdat de locatie een heel andere is, zijn er toch wel wat verschillen. Ik heb dia's verzameld door het ruilen van appeltaarten. Ik zette advertenties waarin ik vertelde op zoek te zijn naar oude dia's, in ruil voor een appeltaart. Zo heb ik in een jaar tijd ongeveer 40.000 dia's verzameld. Ik heb in de loop van de tijd allerlei ideeën bedacht om iets met die dia's te doen. Uiteindelijk heb ik besloten om ze te vernietigen omdat ook ik geen tijd heb om ze allemaal te bekijken en geen plek om ze op te slaan. Ik heb er wel een paar uitgehaald die ik echt niet kwijt wil, maar de rest gaat weg. Ze worden vernietigd door de bezoeker van Dia-Exit die een voor een door de dia's heenklikt en ze daardoor vernietigd.

Voor de versie in het Tschumipaviljoen, een glazen kubus op een kruispunt in Groningen, heb ik een systeem van elektronische timers gebouwd, met een diaprojector en een soort glijbaan vol dia's. Buiten stond een grote rode knop, als je daar op drukte kreeg je de volgende dia te zien en werd de vorige vernietigd. Dat apparaat werkte wel, alleen liep het nogal eens vast. Dat heb je nou eenmaal met dia-projectoren. Een opzuigsysteem leidde de dia's naar hun vernietiging. Ik had een professionele shredder van het leger kunnen overkopen, zo een waarmee ze archiefmateriaal vernietigen, en daar belandde de dia in. Aan het einde lag er in het Tschumipaviljoen een hele berg dia-gruis. Er zijn daar in totaal ongeveer 7.000 dia's vernietigd.

Wat ik in V2_ bouw volgt hetzelfde principe, maar ik gebruik geen dia-projectoren meer. Wel jammer, maar het levert gewoon te veel problemen op. Ik heb gekozen voor een viewer, een soort bakje waarin van boven een stapel dia's wordt gelegd. Er gaat er steeds maar een in en als die in de viewer schuift, drukt deze de vorige eruit. Het wordt van boven gefilmd met een camera en dat beeld wordt groot op de muur geprojecteerd. De dia wordt daarna opgezogen, dat is nu niet echt meer nodig, maar ik vind het wel mooi om te zien hoe zo'n dia door een transparante buis naar boven fladdert. Even wordt alle aandacht er op gevestigd. Dat is ook een bevestiging voor de bezoeker dat het echt gebeurt. Je ziet een kartonnetje voorbijfladderen, op weg naar vernietiging, en daarop staat het plaatje dat je juist nog zag en dat niemand ooit nog zal zien.

Het diagruis was in het Tschumipaviljoen niet goed zichtbaar. Jammer want het is erg mooi, er zitten namelijk allemaal van die kleine stukjes film in. Daarom bouw ik nu een grote lichttafel van twee bij drie meter waar de hele installatie op staat en waar de bezoeker op moet stappen als hij een volgende dia wil zien. Het fungeert een beetje als een schavot. Het staat midden in de ruimte, je wordt uitgelicht als je erop staat. De kapotte dia's belanden op de lichtbak. Als je met je hand door dat gruis heen gaat dan zie je allemaal kleurtjes liggen. De informatie van al die losse dia's wordt samengevat in dat gruis. Je weet dat alle informatie van de dia's plaatjes in het gruis aanwezig is, maar het is een geheel geworden. Dat vind ik veel rustgevender om naar te kijken. Je hoeft niet te kiezen naar welke dia je wilt kijken. Alle informatie is er in principe nog, maar omdat het zoveel kleuren bij elkaar zijn wordt het grijs. Net zoals wanneer je alle geluidsfrequenties mixt ook ruis krijgt.

AA: Is dat jouw idee over al die dia's die je thuis hebt liggen? Dat het in feite een bak ruis is?

SJ: Als je 40.000 dia's heb, dan heb je misschien niet alles van de wereld, maar wel heel veel. Als je alles in een dia zou plakken, of als je alle dia's over elkaar heen zou projecteren, dan kom je waarschijnlijk op een soort grijze massa uit, met een licht oranje tintje omdat de dia's allemaal oud zijn. Het gruis dat op de grond ligt doet ook denken aan televisieruis, omdat de diaraampjes wit, grijs of zwart zijn. Ik vind het prettig om op zo'n manier over de dia's te denken, dat is een stuk rustgevender dan dia's ingedeeld in categorieën, van jaartallen en labels voorzien, waar je dan doorheen moet zoeken om dat ene plaatje te vinden. Ik ben alweer bezig om plannen te maken voor het gruis, bijvoorbeeld om het in een plexiglas kubus te gieten. Dat is vrij duur. Ik ben een prototype aan het maken om te zien hoe dat werkt: een blok gruis.

AA: Wat me opvalt aan Dia-Exit is dat het een heel theatrale installatie is. Je licht het uit, het is een schavot. En je werkt ook met geluid. Hoe zit dat?

SJ: Er zitten heel kleine condensator-microfoontjes in de shredder. Ik gebruik software om alles aan te sturen -- in plaats van elektronische timers zoals in het Tschumipaviljoen. Het is wat ge-upgraded. Omdat ik een camera en een beamer gebruik kan ik ook beeld gaan mixen. Het kan zijn dat het beeld even verdwijnt als de dia wordt weggedrukt door de volgende. Maar dat is allemaal finetunen, dat moet ik nog uitproberen. Ik ben ook van plan om een knop te maken die, als je hem ingedrukt houdt, bovenin het beeld statistieken toont, hoeveel dia's er in totaal vernietigd zijn bijvoorbeeld. Omdat er dus software tussenzit, kan ik ook het geluid bewerken. Misschien voeg ik wat delay toe, zodat het allemaal net even wat meer knettert. Het geluid van de shredder zelf heb ik eigenlijk helemaal niet nodig, ik wil juist het hoogfrequentie-geluid van de dia's laten horen. Maar goed, dat zijn allemaal dingen om het nog net iets toffer te maken.

AA: Je zou natuurlijk ook een programmaatje kunnen schrijven die op het moment dat de camera de te vernietigen dia filmt, deze captured en archiveert. Ik weet zeker dat je zoiets in je is opgekomen, en dat je meteen dacht: "dat is helemaal fout".

SJ: Ja, dat mag natuurlijk absoluut niet. De basis van de installatie is dat een dia negatief en origineel tegelijk is. Een foto verscheuren is heel theatraal, maar het is een cliche dat op mij niet zo'n impact heeft -- het negatief is er immers nog. Als je een dia vernietigt ben je het beeld echt kwijt, onmiddellijk. Maar nee, ik ga ze niet digitaliseren. Ik wil er ook vanaf.

AA: Ik ben benieuwd wat je precies doet met de software die er tussenin zit. Dat gaat dan om timing-mechanismes?

SJ: Inderdaad. Je schuift de dia door, de vorige dia valt door een lichtsluisje, die triggert de blowers die de dia's door buis omhoog jagen. Er gaat een spot aan, het geluid moet op dat moment uitversterkt worden, en eventueel kan ik op dat moment in het beeld een bericht laten oppoppen. Dan is er ook nog de shredder die aangaat. Het mooiste is als dat het een vloeiende lijn wordt. Dat is timing, en die kun je makkelijker controleren met een computer, dan kun je ook alles vanaf een plek instellen. Bij de vorige versie had ik een hele plank met elektronische timers en dan moest ik met een schroevendraaier al die potmetertjes bijstellen. Dat werkte ook wel goed, maar met software gaat dat beter. In de vorige installatie had ik overigens een vertraging ingebouwd waardoor je niet ongelimiteerd door kon gaan met het vernietigen van dia's. Die is er nu niet meer, je kunt gewoon de ene na de andere in de viewer schuiven. Het wordt een soort zappen. Ik heb nu zoveel dia's, dat durf ik wel aan. Maar eigenlijk doe ik weinig met software. Het is gewoon makkelijk.

AA: Jij maakt heel fysieke installaties, maar je kunt zien dat ze stuk kunnen, ze zijn duidelijk 'zelfgebouwd'. Is dat met opzet, of komt het voort uit je werkwijze? Je zou ze ook een heel slicke diavernietiger kunnen bouwen.

SJ: Meestal zijn mijn installaties net af voor de opening. Er is meestal geen tijd om het netter af te werken of slicker te maken. Ik heb van tevoren natuurlijk een voorstelling van hoe het er uit moet zien, en als ik eerlijk ben moet ik toegeven dat het soms toch iets rommeliger wordt dan voorzien. Maar ik vind dat niet erg. Wat ik bouw is nou eenmaal wel eens schots en scheef. Het komt ook voort uit het materiaal, dat zich leent om te prutsen. Ik probeer van alles uit terwijl ik bouw. Dat is mijn werkwijze. Ik kan er niet van wakker liggen als het daardoor net iets meer van stukjes aan elkaar hangt. Ik hoor ook vaak dat mensen dat juist waarderen. De leesbaarheid die in analoge media zit, zit ook in de manier waarop ik een installatie neerzet. Dat wil ik graag zo houden. Ik probeer het zo helder mogelijk te maken. Ik wil niet dat mensen 'niet snappen' wat er gebeurt omdat er technologie gebruikt wordt.

AA: Je kunt aan jouw installaties aflezen dat technologie iets is om zelf mee te knutselen. Bij oude elektronica is dat heel zichtbaar, in de digitale media zit dat vaak wat meer opgesloten in een kastje, of verborgen achter een interface.

SJ: Ja, een bal die naar beneden rolt, dat snapt iedereen, maar kennis over hoe software functioneert is minder wijd verbreid. Ik begin het prutsen met software echt te waarderen. Wat ik in MAX/MSP bouw is een zootje, maar het werkt wel. Je kan heel strakke patches maken met mooie knopjes in de interface, bij mij is het altijd een dicht spinnenweb waarvan ik blij ben dat het werkt. Software is om mee te rommelen.

AA: Eerder deze zomer heb je een installatie met elektronische orgels gebouwd, Borgeltron. Kun je daar nog wat over vertellen?

SJ: Dat is een installatie met elektronische orgels, die ook weer zijn verzameld door ze te ruilen tegen een appeltaart. Voor Borgeltron heb ik ook het ophaalproces gefilmd. Toen ik de dia's verzamelde besefte ik nog niet zo hoe belangrijk het sociale aspect van de uitwisseling was. Ik heb een documentaire van 40 minuten gemaakt waarin je ziet dat ik bij mensen thuiskom, en dat ik een elektronisch orgel krijg in ruil voor een appeltaart. Met de verzamelde negen orgels heb ik een installatie gemaakt, ik heb ze in een cirkel gezet. Ik wilde dat ze weer gingen spelen, op een soort generatieve manier, nadat ze vaak jaren ongebruikt in een hoek of op zolder hebben gestaan. Dat doen ze door een bal naar elkaar over te spelen. Voor elk orgel zit een sensor en een plank, die met een ruitenwissermotor aan het orgel vastzit. Als de bal voor het orgel terechtkomt, en de sensor triggert, geeft het orgel met die plank de bal een schop en begint meteen te spelen. De orgels spelen elkaar de bal over en blijven dus geluid maken. De sensor wordt ook uitgelezen door een MAX/MSP-patch, die een signaal naar het orgel stuurt om een bepaalde tijd te spelen. Soms viel de bal stil, op dat moment stuurde de computer een signaal naar de orgels om random te gaan spelen. Er is nog veel meer mogelijk met die opzet. Ik wil dat wel verder uit gaan breiden en dan moet ik verder in de software duiken. Het mooie van software is bijvoorbeeld dat je allerlei statistiekjes kunt gaan bijhouden, over het traject van de bal bijvoorbeeld. Je kunt dan composities genereren op basis van die statistiekjes. En dan kun je weer gaan analyseren voor welke volgorde, tonen of compositie de installatie een voorkeur heeft. Dat kun je weer publiceren op de Borgeltron-site. Ik breng het misschien wat jolig, maar zo kun je wel composities verfijnen. Daar ben ik bij Borgeltron nog niet echt aan toegekomen.

AA: Waarom eigenlijk een appeltaart als ruil, want het zijn altijd appeltaarten?

SJ: Never change a winning team. De eerste keer dat ik een familie aan de telefoon had over het ophalen van oude dia's, kwam mijn tegenprestatie ter sprake. Ik opperde dat ik wel iets zou kunnen bakken, want ja, geld, dat is ook zoiets ... Geld wilden ze er ook niet voor, maar een appeltaart, dat vonden ze wel lekker. Ik woonde toen op De Fruitberg, een oude camping met een boomgaard vol zure appels. De appels had ik dus al. Ik woon er nu niet meer, maar een zelfgebakken appeltaart vind ik nog steeds het beste. Een mooi zelfgebakken ding.

AA: Je bent begonnen met het verzamelen van 8mm-film, toen kwamen de dia's, en daarna realiseerde je je dat het ruilproces, de sociale uitwisseling een belangrijk aspect is. Nu zitten we bij de vernietiging van de dia's. Het lijkt wel alsof je een traject aflegt in je werk.

SJ: Als het een traject is, dan is de vernietiging eigenlijk een stapje terug in de tijd. Ik was oorspronkelijk van plan om in Rotterdam een documentaire te maken over de uitwisseling van dia's tegen appeltaart, maar de tijd wordt nu wel erg kort. Ik heb wel advertenties geplaatst, maar het loopt nog geen storm. De 40.000 dia's heb ik ook over langere tijd verzameld, zo nu en dan haal je dan via Marktplaats een dikke vis binnen. Ik heb al wel wat beeld voor zo'n documentaire, maar ik wil het niet ophangen aan twee personen, het moeten er wel meer dan vijf zijn. Bij de orgels was het trouwens echt noodzakelijk om de transactie te documenteren, alleen zo kon het ik persoonlijk maken. Dia's hebben al iets persoonlijks, het zijn meest gewoon vakantie- en familie-kiekjes, je ziet mensen vragend naar de camera kijken. Elektronische orgels hebben dat niet.

AA: Vind je eigenlijk dat we te veel bewaren?

SJ: Nee. Ik vind dat ik zelf te veel bewaar. De stap om iets weg te gooien is voor mij, net als voor veel anderen, heel groot. Je hebt wel mensen die in een zo goed als leeg, mooi ingericht huis wonen, maar ik denk dat de meeste mensen de neiging hebben meer te bewaren dan ze nodig hebben. Van dia's kan ik me goed voorstellen dat je ze wilt bewaren. Ik kan me ook voorstellen dat je ze weggooit. Het probleem is niet dat we te veel bewaren, we leggen te veel vast, zeker nu met de digitale camera's.

AA: Jouw installatie kun je heel goed opvatten als een commentaar op hoe wij met beeld omgaan. Vroeger maakten we dia's -- voor mij is dat een heel nostalgisch medium, op de zondagmiddag werden dia's vertoond, het huis werd donker gemaakt, dat was een 'evenement'. Nu maken we foto's en kijken we er soms nauwelijks naar. We bewaren ze omdat bewaren makkelijker is dan weggooien. Zoveel ruimte nemen ze niet in beslag, we vergeten dat ze ergens op een harde schijf of website staan. De individuele beelden gaan daardoor steeds minder betekenen voor ons, zo lijkt wel.

SJ: Misschien is het ook een leerproces. Ik bewaar alleen de digitale foto's die ik bij Flickr upload en dus publiceer. De rest gooi ik weg. De installatie vertelt ook iets over hoe we met beeld omgaan. Die dia's zijn namelijk gemaakt met de intentie om bewaard te worden -- net als dat met zorg samengestelde fotoboek van je grootouders. Ze zijn bedoeld om overgedragen te worden op de volgende generatie, en de volgende. Maar dat gebeurd dus gewoon helemaal niet. De eerste generatie amateurfotografen dacht misschien dat ze voor de eeuwigheid hun familie en omgeving vastlegden, en een echt archief aanlegden. Daarom catalogiseerden ze de dia's gecatalogiseerd en voorzagen ze van labels. Maar na een aantal jaar verzeilen ze ergens in een kast. Dia's zijn inmiddels een moeilijk medium geworden: de drempel om ze te bekijken is te groot geworden. En anderhalve generatie nadat de dia's gemaakt werden weten mensen soms al niet eens meer wat een dia is. Als je dan een dia laat zien staan ze versteld over de resolutie. Bij een dia kon je echt in een plaatje duiken -- daarom is het zo mooi. Ik kan er, net als de liefhebbers, in geuren en kleuren over vertellen.

Aan de andere kant, al die digitale foto's zijn misschien over twintig jaar nog te googlen, dan blijkt een verleden van jezelf publiek beschikbaar te zijn dat je zelf misschien bent vergeten.

De hoeveelheid herinneringen die je kunt meedragen is gewoon beperkt. Het overschot gaat hier in de shredder. Alleen nog een keer goed kijken.

LS: Here we have two lines of thought and realize they could become interrelated. Firstly, we should observe that our whole conception of form has been inverted. Physical form, biological form, the mathematics of form, how order emerges, how stability emerges, these have now all been structured in time, where form has become part of time. Fractal geometry, order on the edge of chaos, self-organization, catastrophe theory, finally concepts of geometry have emerged in which time itself has become essential, where the accident has become substantial, where form and order have become pattern, interference, iteration, rhythm, something created in time, and only to be understood in time. Secondly - as you mention Virilio's constant returning to the accident - media as the continuous accident of architecture. Of course, this dichotomy is omnipresent in theory, and I oppose it vigorously. I don't see media as the dark side of architecture at all. Why? Because I'd like to propose an architectural view of media, and vice versa. First of all, media comes in waves, in tides, and it deals with space as a medium, as a field, that is a soft substance through which events are transported by waves, and become interrelated as a result of interference, amplification and decay ... Media are a way to inhabit time as it were, a movement connected with our own movements, something far more sensitive and responsive than an architecture of frames, crystals and solids that is only capable of returning always the same answers to an experiential body. I think we should keep in mind that architecture was the first machine, the first medium to connect behavior and action to time, to place it under the revolving light of the sun, but now, on the other hand, we should not mix up the old history of architecture, its Euclidean mathematics with its new potentials. I just cannot see why architecture, because it is old, should stay old.

AR: The French word for real estate is "immobilier," which is the opposite of "mobilier" which means furniture. These two notions seem to indicate architecture's maximum radius of action: from absolute immobility (the building mass defining the invariable envelope) to total mobility (the furniture which could be placed anywhere inside). In other words, architecture actually has a whole set of varieties to choose from in order to "situate" itself in the variable relationship of form and movement. Nevertheless, throughout its (occidental) history architecture has displayed a clear tendency to opt for the immobile element as its definition. The challenging potential of furniture as the imminently destabilizing force of architecture is left aside, if not also embraced by the disciplining regime of order. In the plans of his single family houses, Mies van der Rohe used to place the furniture elements as precisely as the indeed unmovable elements like walls and columns. There is an anecdote about the Tugendhat House: a couple of months after the completion Mies came back to Brno unannounced to check if everything was in order. And Mrs. Tugendhat had indeed dared to arrange the chairs in a slightly different way. So Mies emphatically asked her to put them back in their proper position, pointing to the plan of the house he had discreetly brought along. What would an architecture be like which goes the opposite way, that is an architecture that would approach real estate with a furniture logic?

LS: We should resist Mies. We should resist this preservation of the old Aristotelian split of matter and time, substance and accident, tectonics and textile. Architecture as tectonics, media as textile. Architecture as a passive and neutral carrier, media as (inter)active image. That is: architecture as urbanism, as tectonics, as (infra)structure, as "bigness" - as Koolhaas has titled his agenda - and media as life, the changing, the ephemeral, whatever. Instead of moving architecture into bigness, I would suggest to move it into textile, into furniture, into media ... We should never mix up architecture and building. Just because our buildings can't move, it doesn't mean our architecture can't. As our buildings are hard and intransigent, our architecture could be active and liquid. This obviously does not mean the Miesian and Koolhaasian retreat into neutrality, into the hall, the empty envelope. It's an old misunderstanding in architecture that when you create the greatest common denominator of all possible movements, an architecture that gets out of the way, it will induce movement and vitality in the actual building. It is exactly the other way around, one just creates stillness, with that kind of generic neutrality one neutralizes action. That means they don't appreciate that architecture is media, that architecture is an event in itself, an event that, in their case, passes its tectonics onto the body. I opt for a geometry of the mobile, where the geometry has become part of the furniture, the moveable - nothing neutral, nor passive.

AR: Generally, Siegfried Giedion is seen as the theoretical advocate for a new space conception based on the notion of time. But if he indeed pointed to the new importance of the dynamic user moving freely through the building, he never got beyond the opposition of a static space and a mobile subject. He in fact kept the hierarchical distinction of space as substans and body as accidens, never realizing the transfer of movement from the subject onto the space. Curiously enough this transfer of movement was a major theme in the early experimental cinema and was also poignantly analyzed at the time by various scholars. In a seminal essay, German art historian Erwin Panofsky concluded that "as movable as the spectator is, as movable is, for the same reason, the space presented to him. Not only bodies move in space, but space itself does, approaching, receding, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing as it appears through the controlled locomotion and focusing of the camera and through the cutting and editing of the various shots."

LS: Can I start answering this with a classic study of Held and Hein, mentioned in Francisco Varela's book "The Embodied Mind"? They did this amazing experiment. They had a number of kittens with a carriage attached to each of them. Each carriage contained a basket with another kitten in it. So there were two groups of kittens sharing the same visual experience, but with one group active, the other stayed entirely passive. After a few weeks they were released and studied again as individual cats. The first group was okay and behaved normally, the second behaved as if they were blind, they bumped into everything. Obviously our whole idea of perception and action being unrelated bodily functions, the whole Cartesian distinction between eyes and feet is incarnated in architecture in the dichotomy of walls and floors, esthetics and program, elevation and plan. Simple as that. This also means the relation between space, movement and body has always been misunderstood, or at least, been related in the wrong order. There just is no movement apart from image, no image apart from movement. The way we construct images within our bodies is a million times more complicated than the cognitive concept of printing reality on light-sensitive gray matter. The sensory charges the motor, and the other way around, they are intertwined and connected. In this sense we should even resist thinking in terms of "space" - I never mention space actually - we have to conceptualize the body first, not the proportional Vitruvian body as the architectural center of the constructed world, no, the experiential body, the excited, vital body, where millions of processes go on at the same time. Therefore we should always remember the body is a clock, not the Huygens clock, but a manifold patterning trying to gain stability through action. Bodies try to transgress themselves in time by action, throwing themselves into time, that is: connect to other bodies, other rhythms, other actions. In this sense, you can really only talk about "space" as a result of an experiential body timing its actions. Space is never a given. There can be space in time, but not the other way round. Perspective was nothing else than leaving out the movement in experience and having the image as a residue - and it is: the image is what's left over when everything has dried out, like at the bottom of a cup of coffee. Pure recollection, and recollection only.

AR: But even if you refuse to use the word "space," you do seem to have a concept of it: one which is derived from radical constructivism. According to this theory, space does not exist per se, or in other words, where everything around us is only unstructured information which becomes only structured as soon as we interfere and interact with it.
This idea implies the dissolution of the inside/outside opposition; conceptually, body and architecture merge to one synthetic action space. But does not this opposition reappear in the real experience of a building?

LS: Well, no, because there is no "real" experience of the building. You're right to refer to radical constructivism, or even Varela's concept of enaction, which is even more radical. His idea of embodied action goes absolutely against cognitivist representation, where the so-called outer world is only recorded by the brain - and simultaneously absolutely against idealism where this outer world is only a subjective projection of an inner one. He, and Maturana, only refer to "structural coupling" in which body and world are interrelated and interactively transform each other. The "true" experience doesn't take place anywhere, neither in the body, nor in the world. Only in the coupling. This is the point where the distinction between inner knowledge and outer world ceases to exist. I'll try to give a better explanation of what a "real" experience is, especially vis à vis machines and technology. What we call reality, what we call our sense of reality, is nothing but an effect of synchronization, the synchronization of our own bodily rhythms with processes going on in the world around us. Our sense of reality is created by our sense of timing, trying to be "in phase" with the world, to live with the rhythm of the light. I don't mean this metaphorically; "in phase" is a direct and physical connection. That is why seeing-machines like film and television - and now computing - should be seen as a motorization of reality, as a speeding up of reality itself. They speed up our sense of timing. This also explains why we suffer from jet lag. Now, what has been disturbed by the speed of the plane can be undone by (sun)light - remember the sun is our first clock, we're created by it. Light is not only stored in the form of motor-images, but it is also the main indication for setting our own clock, the bio-rhythm. We are made of light. We long for a seamless stream of actions, carried by light, not the derealization and parkinsonian stuttering we experience during a jet lag. Actually, doctors nowadays prescribe melatonine, a neuro-hormone that influences the pigment in the skin, as a cure for jet lags ...

AR: All classical definitions of architecture contain the idea of fixing the movement which vibrates in the world outside architecture - in Vitruvius' famous definition it is called "firmitas." Any concern about dynamics and fluidity is avoided like a bad germ. It seems like architecture feels strangely endangered by movement, maybe simply for not knowing how to handle it. To a certain degree this might be caused by "timeless" condition of the drawing systems architecture has traditionally used: plan, section, elevation - all static modes of graphic inscription which can comprise three dimensions at the most, but certainly not time as the dimension of unfolding and change. Architecture has never developed a notation system for movement like choreography developed in dance.

LS: First we have to understand what an experiencing body is. How the body shifts between habit and action. Of course, in architecture, they've very often tried to combine them, but it proved difficult and they mostly came up with either/or concepts. The standard architectural program consists of habits, routines and work. This is viewed as the mechanistic repetition of certain acts - the program only takes into account actions that are considered repeatable. On the other hand, there is the desire for free action, play, experiment, as in Constant's "New Babylon." For me, it is not a question of either/or, it is not work-or-play, life is just the complication of these, the one is always hidden in the other. Sure, we habituate, we develop cycles of behavior. Why? Because it is hardly possible for humans to carry the whole act, to - as a Cartesian Machine - steer themselves continuously into intentions. We create our own rhythms, and make them stronger than ourselves, we create an internal music that gets us going. Our rhythms create us, we are an actual product of them. On the other hand we do not program ourselves, human software is much softer than computer software, we do not repeat the same actions over and over again, they change, they differ, they vary from each other, enabling us to change, to renew or to move smoothly into other acts.
That's why I would be in favor of separating work from dance, and after doing so, would try to merge them immediately. The whole set up of "firmitas," standing upright, habituation and routines, and opposing these with dance, play and experiment relating to the twisting of this posture fixed through gravity should be set aside for being too simple. We should not make the same mistakes as in the sixties. We would be marginalized. We should find a way in architecture to complicate habit, to multiply routines in action. It is the "winding up" of the soft clock of the body with motor geometry. Obviously, this geometry is not a geometry of section, elevation and plan, but one that tries to envisage these three - construction, perception and action - within one conceptual continuum.

AR: Doesn't space get lost somewhere?

LS: The way we act is similar to that of a skateboarder. We have a sense of direction, we have a sense of intentionality. We throw ourselves into time by movement. But then it is not a road or path we walk down. Our roads may be straight, but our tracks certainly are not. It is a vector with a point of action, and in that sense every act is an act of faith. Once underway we adapt, change our minds, engage other forces, but we do not just see these as resistance, no, they are like the curbs and obstacles for the skater. We use them as push offs, as points of inflection in the curve. That's it: a straight line goes from A to B, but while it leaves A it curves, trying to reach B. Architects have always misunderstood this position of B as something in space, instead of time. We humans complicate movement, we make movement from movement. Our moves are truly labyrinthine, like Nietzsches Dionysian dance, because we are our own alcohol, our own music - to quote Oliver Sacks. Every act has to be carried by this complication, this tilting of the horizon, where the act is carried by itself, and is orientated on its own need for gaining strength and stability. I must end here by quoting once more, now Baudelaire, who said: "Mentally and bodily I've always had this feeling of falling. The abyss not only of sleep, but also the abyss of acting, of dreaming, memories, desires, sorrow, the many, et cetera ... I'm in a permanent state of vertigo."

AR: Do you think that new notation systems provided by computer animation modeling techniques like the ones you use finally account for the body as an active part of architecture?

LS: Yes I do. On all kinds of levels. Both in conceptualization and building. As I've written in The Motorization of Reality - a Virilio piece without the Virilio hesitations - media should invade all aspects of architecture, both in diagramming and in programming. Let's not forget that all seeing-machines became drawing-machines (in architecture), and went from the static towards the kinetic. From perspective towards films and trains and television and cars (all with their own architectural styles), moving eyes constructing spaces. Now - with computing - this step is not metaphorical anymore, now we not only incorporate and embody the conceptuality of a machine in design, we can now actually step inside the screen and create reality from there. The design itself has become motorized, liquid, unstable, charged - the accelerating power of the computer is truly enormous, and is itself like a skateboard. But it is in the motor geometry, the geometry of the liquid that this machine becomes instrumental. What I try to oppose as much as I can is the dichotomy of floors and walls, action and perception, we have to create one from the other. So, I'm neither animating the floor and later on covering it in a tectonic envelope, nor am I animating the volume and later on stacking it with floors. It might be better though to animate the programmatic fluxes to animate the building. But after some time you would see that this hasn't lead you anywhere either, except for the smoothing of the already planned movement within the program. The aim is not just replacing program as military or Jesuit disciplining by free choreographies of movement, and then superimposing them, as if program is dance, which it is clearly not! It is not the fixation of the movement in the program, nor is it is the fixation of motion in the form. Either way, it's not only motion capture. You would end up with the so-called "stopping problem" - the question where to freeze the animation - while the real question is how to pass the movement on, from the machine to the architecture, from the architecture to the body, and from the body to the machine. First of all the movement should be going from floor to wall and vice versa. That is: in the architecture itself. The movement itself creates three-dimensionality, what Kiesler would have called the endless, which is always vectorial, as in Zeno's arrow. This would deframe architecture and here the looping of perception and action, the optic and the haptic would never stop. So, it's about creating tension and suspense in the program. This is very important. We deal - on the one hand - with the desire to cool down behavior, to structure and separate actions, in short with the instrumentality of the program - on the other hand, we vitalize action through animation, by replacing fixed points and fixed geometries by moving geometries, going from points to knots to springs, and we vitalize action through suspense, by shifting B from space to time, by multiplicationof action.

AR: In dance, space does not exist as a given entity (except the physical space of the stage, but that exists only as a precondition for the performance of the dance). Dance creates space out of movement. The shape of a form only exists in time, you can never grasp it in one moment but you have to commit its forms to memory. In all of these aspects, dance seems to be the art form that is furthest removed from architecture. Nevertheless I have the impression that it describes the most exactly what interests you in architecture?!

LS: Architecture and dance are generally but wrongfully separated by this notion of either-time-or-space, and rightfully connected by music. The great thing in architecture though, is that there's no audience and there's no sound. The beauty of dance is the thinking of movement as a movement within itself, a gesture, a closed thing. When one would consider the program in gestures and actions, you would have to organize them both in time and in space, not only sequentially as in dance but also simultaneously - in that way one gesture wouldn't be followed by the prescribed next gesture, but one could study them in different relationships and interactions.
Let us consider the notion of tension again. Tension can only be created by elasticity and springs, by lines that can be stretched or lines that are connected by "flexible points." In the concept of the spring the point is an inseparable part of the line, a twist in the line that can both expand and shrink. I used a non-abstract machine built out of lines and springs to animate the design for the V2_Lab. It's an office, a matrix of tasks and work. Quite rigid, most of the time. I would like to focus on a detail here. The programmatic set-up was quite clear - the position of the lab, next to the audio room, video room and storage, and in between a corridor, slightly raised from the existing floor. And located at the beginning of the corridor is the table for the manager of the Lab. I did not superimpose this scheme over another animated one. Everything would have stayed as it was. I animated a diagram of springs and snares through the organizational diagram. What happened? At one point, the snares moved up so high we couldn't interpret them as part of the raised corridor anymore but only as part of the table. Suddenly we had a corridor that morphed, that moved into a table ... So at one point I'm sure one should call this a corridor, at another spot, three, four meters further on, I'm sure to call it a table, but what is it in between? There is program, there is the rhythm of moving in the corridor, there is also a rhythm of working at the table, and there is the vector in between. This vector is always charging the others, that's the music, the silent music of the snares, so to say, that moves work into action. And back again, of course. Normally one would separate table and corridor by space, now they are connected by movement. And where does the movement go? The tension in the snares goes directly into the muscles and tendons of the body - the motor geometry relates to the "virtual motion," as Merleau-Ponty has called it, the background tension in the body, enabling an act to release itself from neurological anonymity and take shape. Now people sometimes lie down there as if on a beach, or just walk up the table ...

Coming up next:

• Kasia Molga with Oil Compass;
• Olav Huizer & Jelle Valk (WERC) with Moving Mapping;
• Anja Hertenberger, Meg Grant, Leonie Urff and Ricardo O'Nascimento (eTextile Workspace) with TK 730;
• Xiaowen Zhu with Wearable Urban Routine.

A scan of the article is here.

Anouk Wipprecht: The idea for Intimacy 2.0 came up in a brainstorming session after Vienna Fashion Week. Although the fashion world responded enthusiastically to the 1.0 version of the project (Intimacy Black and Intimacy White), there was also a lot of confusion. Maybe that’s a logical consequence of working at the cutting edge of art, technology and fashion. Either way, the fashion world didn’t always understand our approach. Was it fashion? Or was it art, or a prototype? Those were the kinds of questions I got. I don’t make designs that follow trends or can be developed into a collection. My designs are more of a look into the future, and so I deviate from the usual way of working. To move Intimacy more in the direction of fashion, I decided to make a version that was more wearable and to combine the e-foil with leather. There’s also more emphasis placed on the top part now. And we’ve hidden the sensor in a matching envelope bag carried by the model. But there’s still so much work in this design that’s been done by hand that large-scale production would be impossible. I’d rather concentrate on making custom versions.

And you hear the art world criticizing fashion for being vacuous.

AW: Yeah, you’re trapped between two worlds. Whether or not fashion has substance I can’t say. Should a design have substance or should it communicate a message? I see my work as a formal investigation of the human body. For example, shoulders are interesting; they have an architectural quality. The combination of that with the fragile e-foil, which is sometimes transparent and then not, has a poetic quality. I think Intimacy and works like DareDroid are about control, too. Who has the power – the wearer, the audience or the technology?

Media art is often produced by teams of specialists. Can you tell us about your role in that process as a fashion designer?

AW: We worked on Intimacy 2.0 for more than two months. Of course, I already knew the Studio Roosegaarde team (Peter & Christiaan) from Intimacy Black, so it went really smoothly. I developed the designs and ideas in my own studio, and I spent one or two days a week with the team. We tested various forms and materials in the studio. The models are also really important in projects like this one, which stand or fall on a good performance. For Intimacy, we worked with two regular models. Lara’s my main model, who I often use as a persona; we get each other. And Aleide also has exactly the right bearing and knows how to get the feeling we want Intimacy to project across to the audience. The same is true of Robert Lunak’s photography. It’s all about getting the right balance. 

Intimacy 2.0 is on view at the STRP festival in Eindhoven, November 2011.

http://www.anoukwipprecht.nl

http://www.studioroosegaarde.net