(Source: focal-plane)
![Against the monument. The monument is essentially repressive. It is the seat of an institution (the church, the state, the university). Any space that is organized around the monument is colonized and oppressed. The great monuments have been raised to glorify the dead or the beauty of death in palaces and tombs. The misfortune of architecture is that it wanted to construct monuments, but the idea of habiting them was either conceived in terms of those monuments or neglected entirely. The extension of monumental space to habiting is always catastrophic, and for the most part hidden from those who are subject to it. Monumental splendor is formal. And although the monument is always laden with symbols, it presents them to social awareness and contemplation (passive) just when those symbols, already outdated, are beginning to lose their meaning, such as the symbols of the revolution on the Napoleonic Arc de Triomphe. [lefebvre]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3xvyymdtl1qzbuvjo1_1280.png)
Artists are hardly unaware of their positioning by urban elites, from the municipal and real estate interests to the high-end collectors and museum trustees. Ironically, perhaps, this is also the moment in which social engagement on the part of artists is an increasingly viable modality within the art world, and young curators specialize in social practice projects. Many artists have gone to school in the hopes of gaining marketability and often thereby incurring a heavy debt burden. Schools have gradually become the managers and shapers of artistic development; on the one hand, they prepare artists to enter the art market, and on the other, through departments of “public practice” and “social practice,” they mold the disciplinary restrictions of an art that might be regarded as a minor government apparatus. These programs are secular seminaries of “new forms of activism, community-based practice, alternative organization, and participatory leadership in the arts” that explore “the myriad links between art and society to examine the ways in which artists … engage with civic issues, articulate their voice in the public realm.”
To look again at the United States—but not only there—arts and architecture institutions are quite pleased to be swept along by the creative-class urban-planning tide. The distinctly old-economy, luxury-vehicle maker BMW has joined with the Guggenheim Museum to create “a mobile laboratory traveling around the world to inspire innovative ideas for urban life,” with the names of some high-profile artist and architect attached. The “Lab” firmly ties the corporation, the museum, architecture, art, and entertainment to the embourgeoisement of cities.. Urban citizenship has replaced other forms of halo-polishing for so-called corporate citizens. By the way, they all like bikes. As does Urban Omnibus—which also likes “Art as urban activator.”
……
If the creative-class thesis can be seen as something of a hymn to the perceived harmony between the “creatives” and the financiers, together with city leaders and real-estate interests, guiding the city into the post-industrial condition, perhaps the current grass-roots occupations can be seen as the eruption of a new set of issues related to a new set of social relations of production. The mode of production, we remember, includes the forces of production but also their relations, and when these two come into conflict, a crisis is born. If the creative-class thesis can been seen as something of a hymn to the harmony between the creative forces of production and the urban social relations that would use them to the benefit of cities bereft of industrial capital, perhaps the current grassroots occupations can be seen as the inevitable arrival of the conflict between the creatives and the city that uses them. It is interesting, in this respect, that the battle cry has been “Occupy” (which echoes Richard Florida’s similar injunction to gentrify), that is, to occupy space, to occupy the social and political imagination, in a way analogous to the way previous movements radicalized freedom into emancipation, republic into democracy, and equality into justice. Florida says gentrify, we say Occupy.
That leads us to the next step, now under way. What the occupations have done is to make members of disparate groups—neighborhood advocacy groups, immigrants’-rights groups, and working-class labor groups, both organized and not, visible to each other— and in Occupy’s first phase put them into temporary alliances. It is these alliances that form the nuclei of the occupation of the present and future.
alloplastic
“In a sense Aegis explores potential shifts in cultural as much as technical pattern, looking for new potentials offered by an electronic creative environment, and for me it begins to venture into psychological territory – into the ‘psychologies of (electronic) perception’. The characteristic cultural strategy of the twentieth century has widely been characterized as that of shock - a dis/re-orienting wrench of cultural expectation. Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, for instance, characterizes the effective art-work as a shock, which assaults the viewer, similar to Heidegger’s term, ‘Stoss’, literally a blow. It was Nietzche who suggested that modern man “is a reactive, no longer active creature”, and it is perhaps such cultural reactivity which now begins to dissipate as we enter a profligate and spontaneous space of digital creativity.
Stoss – shock – is a reactive strategy, still reliant on a legitimizing cultural origin and the very structures of representation that it calls into question: it is a reactivity-against. My sense is of a dissipation of the shock-effect and the development of irreferent creative processes - metonymic and freely associative rather than metaphoric and representative. Not so much a dis/re-orientation as an endless suspension of the possibility of orientation. This has been characterized, quite legitimately, I think, as no longer a cultural mode of shock but a mode of trauma, trauma occuring almost as a suspension of shock, a stimulated absence…
Classically trauma occurs as the struggle of the mind to capture an event which has escaped registration, occurs on the site of a conceptual gap, the mind searching restlessly for a missing referent. This motivated suspension, or precise indeterminacy - no longer reactive but interactive - seems to mark an emergent form of cultural capacity markedly at odds with accounts of extant cultural patterns. If one looks to Gombrich, for instance, in his ‘Sense of Order’ (circa 1960? and subtitled, interestingly enough, ‘the psychologies of perception’), he continually asserts that the mind cannot tolerate sustained dis-orientation and will quickly ground it in reference. But with computational power, as here, to calculate real-time 10,000 points physically moving in space, where transformation replaces the notion of origin as operative principle, dis-orientation and trauma emerge into a fully interactive cultural milieu. And trauma, as shock, is not simply debilitating - it stimulates wildly, often triggering neglected modes of cognition as a highly activated ‘sampling’ of experience, seemingly calling the bodily senses into play cognitively and creating a highly charged proprioreceptive state.
The terms autoplastic and alloplastic to which I referred are psychological terms, introduced by Ferenczi in his studies of trauma, in which (effectively) he extended Freud’s notion of trauma as resulting from dramatic situations of stress, to a much more generalized social theory. In Ferenczi’s terms an autoplastic environment is one where the subject is challenged by a highly determining context and is forced to auto-adapt in the face of such resistance which can lead to neuroses of trauma. He contrasts this with an alloplastic environment in which there is the possibility of a reciprocal transformation in which both subject and environment negotiate interactively.
The terms I implicate here to make the suggestion that as we seemingly pass to a cultural mode of trauma, we might think this transition in terms of a shift from autoplastic to alloplastic mode. Both in terms of cultural production - the fluid processural negotiations with a software environment - and cultural reception - the transformative effects of an electronic environment becoming actual.”
[mark goulthorpe]
(Source: generativeart.com)
Soundcube by Bernhard Leitner
(via planetaryfolklore)
