7 Items on the Net
by
ziel@khm.uni-koeln. de
1.
Now and again unforeseen events burst into the telematic Net. In
a December issue (15.12.1994) of the magazine FINEART - ART &
TECHNOLOGY NETNEWS, Jeremy Grainger broke the AP news story via
Fringeware that Guy-Ernst Debord had committed suicide. The
report was terse: "He was 62 ... Little known outside France,
Debord denounced what he called >the show-biz society< and
declared that performing arts should be based on powerful
emotions, passions, and sexual desire. His ideas were
influential among theoreticians and essayists who achieved
prominence in the May 1968 student-led cultural revolt that
shook French society." That was it. That the co-founder of the
Situationist International - who in "Society of the Spectacle"
had diagnosed more than twenty years ago that all direct
experience had given way to representation, who in the same book
had attested that telecommunication "reunites the separate but
reunites it as separate" - had died by his own hand did not
affect the tidily arranged symbols on the Net one pixel nor
their author. In 1952, at the age of 23, Guy Debord made a film
with a dialogue seemingly organised on random principles. The
title was "Howlings in Favour of Sade". At one point the second
voice says, "The perfection of suicide is in ambiguity." In the
script this is followed by a stage direction: "5 minutes'
silence during which the screen remains dark."
2.
The way language is used on the Net is most affirmative of life.
As a principle, the language is positive, animated, apologetic,
smart. It bristles with energy. It is an electronic fountain of
youth. The computers, their technical designers, and the
connections set up enable and facilitate and support (for
example, nature). Programs lead and organize and select.
Landscapes are created as are populations or generations, that
even develop dynamically and are at liberty to unfold in (self)
organization. The interfaces must be interactive and empathic
(in the Aristotelian sense) or even biocybernetically
interactive, that is, they have to organize something alive
within the closed circuit. Their secret agents don't have
trenchcoats with turned-up collars to hide their faces, they're
not up to anything, as yet you will search in vain for them in
the underground; they are tourist guides standing in the
spotlights, inviting us to go surfing, leisurely. Many decades
after their discovery by theoretical physics between the wars,
the waves of possibilities in which quantum truths are now
formulated exclude the violence of contexts/connections, they
are not waves of pain nor of ecstasy. "The linking of sensor
data with parameters of user interaction permits meaningful
correlations over and above various output modalities." In Chris
Marker's "Sans Soleil", inspired by the music of Mussorgsky, we
encounter a Japanese man who is always making lists of things,
for example, of things that make the heart beat faster. I
started to make a list of phenomena, phantoms, and modi that I
miss on the net, and in the columns of speech on the subject
that are getting longer by the minute. Here are some of the
favourite substantives:
ambiguity
anger
attack
collapse
crime
cruelty
danger
dark anguish of spaces
daze
death
deviance
discomfort
discongruence
doubt
drive
ecstasy
eczema
evil
excess
hysteria
incest
interruption
irritant
lust
macrogenetosomia praecox
monster
neurosis
obsession
passion
pathology
risk
scream
seduction
uneasiness
yearning
3.
Although many differences existed between, for example, Artaud,
Bataille, Duchamp, or Leiris, for all that the dissidents of the
Surrealist movement had a common focal point from which they
developed their relationship to the (intellectual and art)
world: they disrupted their own marginal tributary as well as
the larger main-stream because of their rejection of any kind of
functionalized ethics, their resistance to one-dimensional
rationality, their celebration of unrepressed pleasure, and
their aesthetic development of desire as an existential mode. To
them, it was of imperative significance that their thinking be
far removed from any hierarchical structures and that their
aesthetic practices be immanently and wildly heterogenous
juxtapositionings (philosophy and cultural critique took over
these paradigms at a much later date, notably with the work of
the duo Deleuze/Guattari). Particularly for characters of a
passionate and tortured/suffering disposition, like Antonin
Artaud, the focal point of artistic praxis was the
nondispersable duality of experience and sensation (with a
radicalness only comparable to Bataille's work in literature),
which he confronted with the pure praxis of the concept; indeed,
this also essentially shaped the work of Duchamp, for all his
extravagances and craziness. On what does the hyperrealistic
avant-garde orientate itself? What orientation is it capable of
elaborating and capturing for itself? The unconscious appears to
have been consciously written to death after Freud and Lacan
(who neglected to adhere to his own dictum that "there are
problems one must decide to abandon without having found a
solution"), and, above all, after their innumerable adepts and
interpreters. In the 1950s and 60s, Activists, Situationists,
and Performance Artists threw their own bodies into the fray, to
the point of (self) mutilation and (self) immolation, against
the discourse and the dispositives of power. So, will there now
be a re-orientation towards concepts, towards the natural and
life sciences, towards the illusion of a continuity, a flow, a
beautiful order in chaos? Or will there be the creation of new,
artificial bodies in the form of bodies of knowledge and their
mise-en-scane as aesthetically experienceable volumes in the
tele-age, moving and ephemeral artefacts in antiquated space?
4.
The experimental work of the group >Knowbotic Research< suggests
one possible avenue: their creations and workshop processes are
factional, that is, they are extracted both from empirical data
and from the realm of fiction, to which they always seem to want
to return. In Circe's Net they strive to direct its
visualization (knowledge and its organisation) while at the same
time hinting at a seduction, without which art as a
sensibilizing terrain for the experience of the enigma is
no/thing at all. In order to develop this character of the
double-agent, the "Knowbots" have been assigned a second mode of
existence that can assume form outside of the Net: in the event,
in the one-off mise-en-scane of publicly accessible space, they
become once again empirical bodies, sensations.
5.
The most complex mysticism praxis with the most complex
language that I know of is the theoretical Cabala: "a technique
for exercizing reason or, instructions for use of the human
intellect ... it is said, that angels gave the Cabala to Adam
after being expelled from the Garden of Eden as a means whereby
to return there" (Wolff). The 10 Sephiroth with their 22
connecting pathways constitute a sheer inexhaustible,
network-like reservoir of associations, connections,
punctuations; its construction principle is binary and it is
built of the basic tensions of theoretical reason (CHOCKMAH) and
the power to concretize, to form (BINAH). The only meaningful
mode in which the Cabala can be read and re-revealed over and
over again is that of interpretation. In this, the Cabala and
art are akin.
Edmond Jabas Texts are philosophical poems. In a discussion with
Marcel Cohen about the unreadable, he was asked what he meant by
the "subversion" of a text, to which he replied by referring to
the beginning of each and every subversion:
disruption/interference. The paradox, that he himself operates
with grammatically correct sentences and words that retain their
connotative meanings, he resolves cabalistically:
"I have not attempted to ruin the meaning of the sentence nor of
the metaphor: on the contrary, I have tried to make them
stronger. It is only in the continuity of the sentence that they
destroy themselves, the image, the sentence, and its meaning
when they are confronted with an image, a sentence, a meaning,
that I consider to be just as strong. To attack the meaning by
rebelling against the sentence does not mean that it is
destroyed. On the contrary: it is preserved because a path to
another meaning has been opened up . All this appears to me as
though I were confronted by two opposing discourses that are
equally persuasive. This results in the impossibility of
privileging one over the other which, in turn, constantly defers
the control of the meaning over the sentence. Perhaps the
unthinkable is just simply the mutual suspension of two opposite
and ultimate thoughts."
There be a key here to how aesthetic action within orders and
structures might unfold; between Pentagon, academe, and the
market which afford only slim possibilities for temporary
interference, the filigree weaving of labilities.
6.
On the Net, there is no art of this kind (yet): it has had no
time to develop a notion of the Other, the vanishing point of
which would be Death. The model for Net Culture is life and
because there it has relinquished its unique existence, it
easily and usually becomes a model. The algorithms used by the
engineers and artists who are working more or less secretly on
the orders of the Circe Telecom, have been copied from the
bio-logical, life form(ula)s translated into mathematics.
Genetic algorithms are useful and fascinating because of their
proximity to this life. They are bursting with strength and
confidence. For art, it would be worthwhile to attempt to invent
algorithms of (self) squandering, of faltering, of ecstasy, and
of (self) destruction as an experiment. In full recognition and
acceptance of the risk that perhaps there would not be much to
see or hear, these would be transformed into sounds and images.
In the universal shadow, in the dark halo, where the strong
light bodies of knowledge of Knowbotic Research move but that
also prevents them from dispersing, there is a presentiment of
this secret.
7.
"When art becomes independent, represents its world in dazzling
colours, a moment of life has grown old, and it cannot be
rejuvenated with dazzling colours. It can only be evoked in
remembrance. The greatness of art only begins to appear at the
dusk of life."(Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Rebel
Press, London 1992, p. 71)