brogan bunt

Some rapidly sketched distinctions between computer programming code and the coded systems of conceptualism. None of this will make much sense without reading some of the earlier posts below.

Expressive rigidity/flexibility: I guess one could object that any use of language involves an adherence to a set of rules. It is not possible to communicate and at the same time totally undermine all linguistic rules. So where does the difference lie? There is clearly no absolute line. It is a matter of emphasis. Natural languages would appear less rigid, more open to novel utterances – they are less based on the capacity to precisely anticipate the nature of anything that is said.

Technical level of assessment (interpreting/compiling) – incomplete programs are possible in natural language (ones that could never be run). “Draw a straight line and follow it” (La Monte Young) would constitute something like an infinite loop in code; possible to write, even to compile, but the running causes a collapse.

Neat distinction between program and running, conceptual system and performative instance. Evident, for instance, in the wall drawing of Sol Lewitt. Nonetheless, what is perhaps most interesting about coding is the relation it opens up to the non-conceptual dimension of any aesthetic process. Even though it would appear that the emphasis is on the dimension of conceptual abstraction, this only gains any traction in its relation to the mysterious, invisible field of operation, of running. What coding accomplishes is to put this dimension at a distance and in doing so enable it to be comprehended differently. Dimensions of process can’t simply be absorbed into some nostalgic sense of creative intimacy. Process becomes evident, instead, in its alien character – as that which is both determined and indeterminable, as that which functions out of view. The paradox then is that in pushing the conceptualist division between concept and process, in rendering it in extremis, coding processes actually enable a new appreciation of the non-conceptual, machinic aspects of process. These turn out to be aesthetically vital.

Closed and open systems: particularly the closure of the desktop interface or even of the computational paradigm generally. All these efforts to render computing physical and locative actually do the opposite. What they fail to do in every instance is to countenance the collapse of systems – the very risk that conceptualism embraces.

The event – which is not simply an instanciation of any given determinable system, but rather conveys the incompleteness of systemic determination; a play of forces that are excessive and irreducible. Any conceptual system just provides a summoning of the event (or situation) – a point of access rather than an abstract origin. Hence these systems tend less to grow in complexity, in some effort to extend and resolve a universe, than to be subject to endless subtraction and adaptation. There is no need for their fully realised elaboration because the rules have limited sway. They describe not a universe but an opening. They are provisional and uncertain. They can neither guarantee an opening nor come even close to dominating and exhausting an event.

Contemplating giving up code, formal computer programming; the work of elaborating systems that quickly become debilitating complex.

Most of the work is in the elaboration of potential – potential that often passes unrealised in terms of any genuine need. Perhaps only a few instances are ever produced. Very often, what seems an obvious field of generic functionality seems less obvious in use or fails to produce compelling results. And people remain relentlessly focused on images, on things that are literally accessible. Systems – certainly software systems – are just expected. If anything, it is preferred that they disappear altogether. They are at their best when they attain the easy weight of tools. Only when they are rough and inefficient do they attract notice. It would seem that computer code must instantly be transposed into other forms for it to attract any kind of aesthetic interest. Not that you want it noticed as such – exhibiting code itself is simply a mystification – but in order that the constructed system should somehow become aesthetically visible. But in that case why not express it in other terms – in terms more conducive to immediate apperception? It is in a lived, transposed state that code takes specfically aesthetic shape – in terms, for instance, of the paradoxical instructions and rule-based systems of conceptualism.

In the early 1970s, Jack Burnham famously positioned software as metaphor for art. Which still naturally gives rise to the assumption that to literally engage in software writing is to pursue the same issues of system, etc. that are relevant to conceptual art, but is this necessarily the case? Are literal programming code and the rule-based systems of conceptual art and Fluxus genuinely related, or only superficially so? This is a question that I’ve never quite posed to myself adequately – directly; always somehow assuming the integrity of the analogy. But in a sense what we encounter here are two different cultural trajectories: art drawing upon a wider space of productive modeling; and then a specific form of modeling drawing upon a particular conception of art. There is every chance that these tendencies can miss one one another despite all their best intentions, despite the certainty that they are literally addressing one another, that they are conceptually and aesthetically co-extensive.

Within this context, and very provisionally, it is worth indicating that computer programming is a form of mastery, that software construction and elaboration provides many small satisfactions, that the programmer adopts the role of architect and god. Yet at the same time, the systems that are conceived are always bound by the logic of a highly ordered and restricted context of exchange. Code must function. It is bound by the necessity to be interpreted or compiled. As mastery develops, much more is possible, but always on the basis of acceding to the fundamental space of limited expression – the positive lexical universe and the impossibility, for instance, of writing just gibberish, or even speaking in a foreign language, adopting British spelling or having the slightest comma out of place. Mastery then is also a form of adherence, an acknowledgement of the absolute authority of the interpreter or compiler, of the underlying system that provides the basis for the invention of any specific system per se. And this possibly represents an important difference to the work of coding in conceptual art. Within the context of the latter there is no underlying framework of running, except the art system itself. The invented rules and systems are not assessed for their adequacy – for their obedience – before they even appear, before they even take social-aesthetic shape. Nor do the rules function within a clearly constrained space. They are instead immediately susceptible to all kinds of unpredictable environmental forces. The rules are at the very outset couched in terms of a break from ordinary syntax, an alien replaying and articulation of rules within an overall context of rule-breaking. Here there is no possibility of craft-based pleasure, of complacent mastery. Each and every rule and instruction is also an undermining of the same.

Despite his antagonism to the notion of unitary being, there is one thing that links Badiou to Parmenides: a suspicion of common opinion, of truth in the guise of the already known – the status-quo. The only fidelity that matters is oriented towards a disruptive, execrable truth. Anything else is just mute obedience or the promulgation of false unity. In this manner, just going through the motions of being provides no basis for authentic subjective experience and action. It is only when the hidden multiplicity of a situation is made evident – only when new radical possibilities emerge and are recognised – that anything significant happens. What this ignores is the texture of existent being as such – the constitutive field of repetition and tacit operation that enables anything whatsoever to take shape. Too hard a line is drawn between identity and novelty, ignoring that novelty is as inflected by repetition as identity is by change. Not everything is determined in the apparently revolutionary moment, there is also the rub of the water against the rocks – the light pressure (and epiphany) of minor, imperceptible experience.

In suggesting a definition of militant art, Alain Badiou proposes: “[a] militant vision of artistic creation is when an art – a work of art – is a part of something which is not reducible to an artistic determination.”¹ Badiou’s point is that militant art involves an alignment with other forces, other processes, that cannot be safely contained within the sphere of art. Militant art must necessarily find its way within a more complex political field. It demands an alignment – a commitment – to specific political projects. It would seem to me that this notion of an art that eludes entirely autonomous aesthetic determination can be applied more generally. All manner of forms of contemporary art open up relations to other discursive fields, other modes of action – evident, for instance, in engagement with the everyday or forms of social activism. This suggests, for me, that art obtains a major part of its contemporary relevance in this risking of boundaries, this summoning of awkward, other relationships, this grafting into the flesh of non-aesthetic experience.

Just finished Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012)¹ Great book, very clearly written and based upon a huge amount of research. Provides a very useful survey of participatory art practices across various regions (chiefly Europe and Latin America) in relation to key historical periods (the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the 1968 student revolts and the 1989 dissolution of the Soviet Union and related rise of neo-liberal socio-economic regimes). Bishop demonstrates convincingly, through a close examination of many specific projects, that participatory practices have had very different implications in different historical contexts. They are not necessarily tied to fond, feel-good notions of collective, citizen-based democracy (which she tends to associate with US participatory art). They can also, for instance, unsettle conceptions of immediate engagement (many Latin American works) and even provide mechanisms for supporting illicit forms of artistic individuality (many Eastern European examples).

Bishop’s main argument is that participatory art should not be reduced to questions of ethical-political efficacy. The aesthetic dimension, which is never simply closed and autonomous, which is always transversal in orientation, demands that something like an image take shape – that any participatory event engage with issues of aesthetic form. This is not some abstract demand for formal beauty, but rather the suggestion that any event is instantly doubled when it is aesthetically cast or inflected. It is is once a singular event and the theatricalisation of that event. In this context it is worth noting that Bishop charts a close relation between traditions of participatory art and traditions of theatre and performance art. The quality of any piece of participatory art is not, in her view, aesthetically determinable at the level of its immediacy, ethical integrity and political efficacy, but in terms of the necessary dimension of distancing that aesthetic form entails. She suggests then a complex intertwining of multiple interests in contemporary participatory art that resists the glib rhetoric of an essential unification and blurring of the political and the aesthetic.

At the very outset of the book, Bishop explains her preference for the term “participatory art” rather than “socially-engaged art” or “social-practice” by explaining that “participation” is more precise (signalling work that involves multiple people). In contrast, the term “social” is imprecise. She argues that all art ultimately responds to its social environment, “even via negativa“.² I take her point, but in consequence the potent space of the via negativa is excluded. While it may not belong within a discussion of neatly defined participatory art, it is certainly central to any consideration of art’s relation to the social. Neglecting it ignores how ostensible turns away from the social, positing an indirect, mediated relation to the social, may in fact be emblematic of key dilemmas of sociality, communication and interaction in contemporary society. The tendency of non-participatory art to manifest the awkwardness, the unlikelihood and even the impossibility of group sociality is pertinent to any consideration of notions of participatory art.

Fairly evidently, I say this with a sense of self-interest. I am interested in the mediated relation to sociality that computational art represents – its interplay of solipsistic and engaged tendencies. I am also concerned with practices that are couched in individual terms – that tend towards isolated experience (solo walking and the like) – but that are plainly also socially inscribed, manifesting a negatively determined utopianism. While these are certainly not, strictly speaking, participatory practices, they are oriented via negativa towards the same underlying social problematic.

I have not written anything for a month. Is this bad? Should I always be writing? Perhaps. To write regularly maintains some semblance of robust, creative productivity. But this is not how I work. Not when it is precisely the question of work that is at question. I work hard enough in my ordinary academic job. If I reduce this blog to the same dismal necessity of daily output, if I don’t allow it the liberty of long stretches of silence and occasional bursts of writing, then it becomes just another pattern of methodical, necessary activity. It neurotically stakes its claim to existence, but existence – the risking of existence and non-existence; the risking of the contours of this relation, its tensions and rhythms – is precisely neglected. There is a need to at times say nothing. This takes shape for me less as a deliberate strategy than as a confusing lapse, a fall away from the possibility of any kind of lucid expression. And then within this lapse – only within this lapse – lucidity, the temptation and uncertainty of lucidity, re-emerges.

I am tempted to write, repetition is the greatest luxury.

To imagine pure repetition, the prospect, for instance, that a “for loop” offers in computer programming, is to render time in the image of space; as though time could be stopped not through stopping as such, but through the very mechanics of its unfolding – as an endless flow of the same. The iterative loop is both structured by time and structures time. It enables time and holds it at bay. And it is this combined forestalling of time and basking within it that is luxurious.

The same thing occurs in walking. The repetition involved in each step (never absolute) wards off the spirits of the last step, while also inevitably bringing that last step closer. Halfway through a walk is a paradise. It is impossible to imagine that it can end. Then, of course, it does. The experience of luxury always contains a dimension of illusion – more specifically, in this case, the paradoxical confluence of an experience of temporal immersion and temporal suspension.

[Worth indicating that my interest is in regimes of self-imposed repetition. There is no luxury in compulsory repetition (forced labour). The luxury, for instance, of repetitive craft activities relies precisely upon a sense of holistic satisfaction – a lack of external constraint. Sweatshop labour is another thing altogether.]

For many years I was deeply committed to programming-based projects. I could perhaps term them experimental, artistic projects, but I was never quite sure. They were certainly always equally engineering projects. The instrumental side of things was part of the aesthetic – an aesthetic perhaps of self-denial, of deliberate resistance to all the usual signs of the aesthetic. If software art was meant to be about ingenious strategies of software critique or demonstrably non-instrumental speculations, my interests lay awkwardly elsewhere – wrapped up in the thinking of tools. Ironic, but hardly surprising, that it was only when I produced explicitly visual work that the projects gained any kind of traction.

Now I find myself turning away from programming, partly with the sense that I have exhausted a particular trajectory of work and partly in an effort of self-preservation (unwilling to commit myself to further long, monastic bouts in front of the screen). My interest has turned towards dimensions of everyday life, particularly the complex positioning of the aesthetic within everyday life, regarded the aesthetic not as a colonizing force, nor even as a coherent reflective lens, but as a thin and permeable layer within the everyday.

So I am in the position then of returning from the digital to the analogue. No doubt this is too simple – the everyday is inextricably tied up with aspects of digital, virtual interaction and the digital is no longer some exclusively abstract, programmatic, screen and keyboard based realm – but the distinction has some heuristic value. It points to some key areas of difference, relating specifically to the affective, experiential frameworks which characterise these modes of practice. Worth trying to list a few of them:

Positioned within: while it is easy to to get lost in a code-based system (to build something that exceeds one’s capacity to fully, or even adequately, comprehend its operations), there is always also the sense of the potential finitude of the system and of one’s own authorial role as builder, maintenance worker and janitor. The programmer serves as uncertain god to many small and unruly worlds. In this sense, however lost they may get in this world, however unmanageable its various complexities become, still the programmer retains a capacity to stand back from the world and regard it as their own. The field of the everyday is larger and less determined. I move within it without ever being able to circumscribe it, to precisely define its substance or its edges. There is also no capacity to withdraw from it – it is the world that I inhabit.

Performance: the agency of the programmer is in writing, in designing a system. Performance is left to the machine. However intimately considered, even felt, performance exceeds the programmer. I write an iterative loop, but it is the machine that performs it. My everyday life experiments (walking and the like), however, draw design and performance together. I could pay somebody else to do the walking, but I prefer to do it myself. This is actually one of the best aspects of shifting away from programmatic interaction. Algorithmic processes develop an intimate link between the conceptual and the performative.

Ephemeral output: computational processes need not produce any kind of recognisable output. They can just happen, but typically there are words, images, manifest operations or whatever. It occurs to me that it may be worth writing software that does all kinds of marvelous hidden things without producing any kind of humanly accessible output, just as a kind of experiment in computational ephemerality – in permitting the computer rich dimensions of experience that leave no trace. Of course this already happens with all kinds of looping self-monitoring functions that are entirely invisible to the end user. But to do any of this would be deliberately perverse. Programs are designed to process input and produce output. Everyday life preserves much more apparent currents of silence and ephemeral process. The aesthetic challenge is not to compromise these.

Impurity: computational systems are restricted and focused. Aesthetic interaction with the everyday is complex and multi-layered. It is irreducible to the aesthetic system – it relates to all manner of other motivations, interests and practical/conceptual spheres.

Open-ended constraint: programming involves a work of precise definition. The natural tendency is for projects to grow and become increasingly complex and brittle. The constraints harden until they become unproductive and then the programmer moves on to the next project. The problem is always of maintaining the project at that delicate point in which it is both useful (it functions) and yet is also amenable to change, so that it can respond to new creative opportunities. For a million reasons the field of everyday life demands that constraints be constantly adaptable. As much as one may wish to pursue the same iterative scheme interminably, it is never possible. Things are always led astray.

A very strange sequence of events. Three days, three injured animals.

Two days ago I’m entering the shower early in the morning and I see a composite shape stumbling through the small park beside our house – a small brown deer struggling to escape from large kelpie. The deer appears to have a badly injured hind leg and the dog is biting at its leg and neck. I jump out of the shower and nudge Deborah. While I struggle to get dressed, she rushes outside, grabs a shove and chases the dog off.

She cautiously approaches the prostrate deer – a young doe, which leaps up, bellows, rushes a few metres into the lightly running creek and then, after a small pause, creeps up on the steep muddy bank on the opposite side with its legs buckled beneath it.

I come out to keep watch over the deer while Deborah goes back inside to call the widldlife rescue service (WIRES). They tell her that nothing can be done. They have no remit to treat vermin. Meanwhile the deer is looking about uncertainly, its ears soft and upright. It has a large, bloody wound on its neck.

Deborah tries the local Council. They suggest the police and the RSPCA. She tries the latter, only to encounter a recorded message service. They don’t open until 9am.

By now the deer has mustered the energy to make its way up the creek slope to a sunny patch of lantana.

We decide that I’ll call the RSPCA at 9am. Best that the deer remain where it is for now. I’ll keep an eye on it and make sure the dog doesn’t return. I go outside every so often and check that the deer is ok. It is lying in the lantana, but with its head up attentively looking about.

Anyway, I call the RSPCA and they finally arrive at 11:30am. The officer is dressed in a very neat uniform and is wearing dark sunglasses. We head down to the creek to look for the deer, but all of sudden it is no longer there. The officer assures me that deer often survive with only three functioning legs. It is very standard for them to lay low in bushes after a traumatic experience, recollect themselves and then make their way back up towards the escarpment. If the deer was going to die, she tells me, then it would just lie down in the open, impassive to its surroundings. She would have had to shoot it anyway. Deer, as we know, are vermin.

Vermin. The strangeness of this status. To be alive but to have no right to existence, no right to protection, scarcely even any right to have suffering addressed. I understand the damage deer do to the local environment, but they are still living creatures who demand, in these moments of awkward, inevitable contact, some level of care.

That should have been enough, but, no, the very next day, yesterday, I back my motorbike into the garage to discover a young diamond python poised to strike my right leg. It is coiled up in the geared complexity of my mountain bike. Not really liking snakes much, I jump off my bike and hurry out of the garage as quickly as possible. Go away snake, I think; I shall not disturb you, but please go away. A bit later I show Axel. The snake is still there. Then I show Deborah, who more attentively notices that a portion of the snakes tail seems to be caught up in the rear gearing. She rings WIRES. This time they can do something. Diamond pythons are native animals.

Three people arrive early evening with snake catching gear. The snake now appears very subdued. The rescuers have great trouble disentangling the tail from the gears. There are maggots in the wound. The snake seems to have partly disembowelled itself. They suggest that it may be preferable to put the snake down. I’m sent for an axe. Deborah is very distressed.

When I get back with a shovel (not an axe) I discover that they have managed to free the snake. It is weak but still manages to rise up and bite one of the rescuers on the hand. Eventually it is caught and placed in a bag. They assure us that they will take the snake to a vet. It may have to be euthenased, but just possibly it may be saved.

Before the three amateur snake handlers leave, the bitten rescuer goes into our house to wash his wound.

That’s two animals. Superstition leads me to expect three. Perhaps an injured Yeti softly moaning in our front yard.

But instead it is a cat. The next morning (today), Deborah is driving us all to school and work when a cat rushes across our path. We hear something like a bump, pull over quickly and jump out of the car to see what we have done. A kid on his way to school tells us the cat is ok. Apparently, it ran off through a fence.

Deborah knocks at the relevant door and warns them that we may have hit their cat. They thank her for stopping. She leaves her number. Later she gets a call. The cat is ok, only a few bruises.

That has to count as three.

The start of a well-used path in a gully off Gipps Road. It heads up through steep bush to the old coal mine. The path used to be narrow and follow a single, devious line, but has recently broadened and multiplied as hordes of weekend mountain bikers pursue every potential trajectory of descent. The undergrowth, which had been a tangle of lantana, has receded to be replaced by muddy banked curves, packing crate jumps, chain wheel scratched boulders and more or less dense sections of trees.

Another dusk image – once again legible in terms of traditions of Romanticism…and, no doubt, photographic cliche.

But no wish to assert the originality of this image. On the contrary, what interests me is that it is so easy to obtain. I can stroll out any late afternoon, walk up the steep hill towards Mt Keira, then across to Gipps Road and encounter any number of views similar to this; soft strands of orange cloud fading to blue light and the blue of the ocean. The technical term for this moment, I discover, is “the gloaming” – the short period after the intensity of sunset and before actual nightfall. The gloaming is the memory of light, the passage of light, the waning of light.

The issue for me is how this moment remains accessible to me, to all of us? What enables it to still appear? The gloaming is associated with a pause, the performance and repetition of a pause. The gloaming appears as an index of the passage of time, but also represents the suspension of time – a curious passage beyond ordinary temporal constraints and experience. It summons the past – a sense of kindred relation to the past – while also manifesting, within the past, a sense of possibility.

Why pursue these dusk images of clouds? Especially after the brightest hues have faded, after red passes into pink, purple and blue; after darkness itself becomes tangible? Why portray them above the silhouette of parks, trees, hills and suburban roofs?

The clouds appear and yet scarcely seem possible. They appear in disappearing. They suggest another time – another mode of being within time. They are a manifestation of a gentle and alien, distant and intimate, resonant, yet only half-remembered cosmological field. They establish a link between the mundane and the ethereal, while also separating these two entirely.

Some weeks ago, in the reserve beside our house, this mattress appeared as a makeshift bridge across Byarong Creek. At various times I have considered dragging it out of the creek, but, with no clear strategy for disposing of it, have ended up leaving it there, hoping, with a sense of guilty complicity, that the next big rain will carry it off towards the sea. I suspect that some local kids are responsible. Crossing the creek normally involves jumping from stone to stone. I can imagine the kids thinking, why not employ something larger, softer and more evidently bridge-like?

Of course I can’t really see things in their terms. Any sense of ingenuity is dwarfed by a sense of the object’s incongruity. Surely better to hop across slippery green stones, to risk getting feet wet, than to pollute the creek with an ugly piece of household junk? Yet now that the perverse bridge has been in place for a few weeks (we’ve had little rain), it has gradually, strangely, adapted to its surroundings. While remaining an obvious eyesore, it has started to sink into the creek and become part of it. It has found its own place amongst the rocks. The creek flows around it. Leaves collect in eddies around its base. The mattress is now pink, green, muddy and resolutely soggy. It has the moist and abject appearance of a corpse. Partly for this reason and partly to avoid acknowledging its usefulness as a means of crossing the creek, I avoid stepping on the thing. As I say, I am just waiting for it to disappear.

I realise, however, that his waiting reeks of bad faith, not only because I fail to practically intervene but also because of a larger dilemma. While the mattress certainly does not belong where it is, moving it elsewhere – out of sight – scarcely solves the problem. What proper place can be found for this thing? Where can it be shifted to so that it can no longer offend or affect? Is there some some place with no significant impact on soil, water, air, wildlife, etc? The tip is clearly better than the creek, but does this address the problem? Does drawing all manner of abandoned things together in the one spot, pushing them beneath the ground with bulldozers, suddenly make their material legacy and implications disappear? Or does it serve as just another means of removing things from sight; preserving the illusory scene of an intact creek, waiting disingenuously for an elusive cleansing rain?

Just watched Pare Lorenz The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). Two pieces of compelling New Deal (Farm Security Administration) propaganda – beautifully photographed, with poetic expository narration and wonderful music scores (Virgil Thomson). I am particularly interested in the way in which the land is positioned as the central character in these films – the Great Plains with their winds and relentless sun and the Mississippi with its inexorable flow down the Gulf. The films acknowledge how human interaction has affected these natural agents, how it has accentuated their destructive potential and undone any sense of natural equilibrium. Both films appear as early public examples of work that acknowledges human complicity in environmental devastation. Alongside the tales of loss, however, the films – particularly The River – suggest that a new relationship to the land can be established, demanding not a withdrawal of the human altogether but instead enlightened intervention (efforts of custodial remediation). All of this has clear contemporary relevance – and certainly makes climate change skepticism (especially when administratively approved) seem even more absurd.

So at one level I reject the idea of a critical art – an art that stands outside life, engaging in interference, subversion, etc. Yet, at the same time, I also reject the idea of an art that blurs the boundaries between art and life – that negates their schism. So I argue that art can neither stand outside life nor be neatly positioned within it. How can I make sense of this contradiction?

My suspicion of critical art hinges less on the issue of its alienated position per se than upon the various assumptions of critical purity and clarity that are associated with this position. Alienation need not grant a lofty perspective or a privileged insight into the nature of the world. Alienation need not even demand the thought of an integrally exterior being. Alongside separation. alienation can also entail dimensions of common identity and complicity. Indeed it describes much more accurately a troubled state – a mingled sense of implication and withdrawal – than an absolutely configured exclusion. In this sense art can retain a sense of alienation without imagining any categorically grounded capacity for critique.

On the other hand, the suggestion that art can intervene directly in life – and become co-extensive with life – ignores two things: firstly, that the notion of intervention itself assumes separation precisely as it struggles to overcome it; and secondly, most importantly, that art draws its energy from its troubled, uncertain, intimately distanced relation to the real.

There is a need, somehow, to conceive of an art that is both inside and outside and that is neither purely inside nor purely outside.

Working with electronic media involves a contract with oblivion, nonetheless still weird to discover old stuff that survives. Was copying old VHS tapes to DVD when I came across a number of audio tracks that I recorded in the late 1980s while living in Moss Vale. They were some of the last tracks that I produced before I gave up ‘music’ recording altogether. I can’t remember much of the process of recording them except that they represented a fond return to my noisy, tape-looping roots – bits and pieces of typically disreputable media cut up and recomposed into a relentless onslaught of whatever. Most of the stuff that I’d produced was lost at about the same time when the emulsion on my Ampex tapes degraded into flaky nothingness, but somehow, for whatever reason, I must have copied these final, fairly slight tracks to Video 8 and then VHS. Somehow they became mixed up with other home video footage, so that is no longer possible to separate the two strands of sound, but for me all of this adds to the charm (which I really don’t expect anybody else to share).

Anyway, very surprised to hear this stuff again and couldn’t resist using Transcode to strip the audio from the DVD and recompose things in Audacity. So here we have Moss Vale VHS, an avant la lettre glitch EP, redolent with the sense of both memory and oblivion.

mossvale_00 mossvale_01 mossvale_02 mossvale_03 mossvale_04 mossvale_05 mossvale_06

Kant speaks of the unknowable thing in itself. This describes the thing’s alienation from the apriori – from the interiority of the categories of rational thought. Knowledge can recognise similarities and differences between rational categorical modes and the stuff of the world, but can never entirely encompass or appropriate the latter. But how can knowledge take determinable shape on its own, without this relation to a field of unknowable exteriority? What is the sphere of the known in itself? I’m aware that addressing this question would require a close discussion of Kant’s notion of the apriori – something, that I’m scarcely in a position to attempt here. My concern here is simply to suggest that perhaps a relation to the unknowable character of the real provides the basis for all our machinations of knowledge. To speak of the unknowable thing in itself need not be to envisage our absolute separation from the real, but rather to insist that knowledge – the sense of knowing something – is a derived phenomenon. The world asserts itself first (and last) as unknowable force, as a field in which we are interpolated and summoned. Eluding the forms of knowledge, eluding even the subject/object dichotomy, we are enmeshed within the sphere of the unknowable. It is not only an awkward ground, it is not only something that can be gradually overcome, it shapes even the conditions of knowledge. Knowledge itself reveals a dimension of the unknowable – as it becomes an object, as it becomes a thing. Our relation to the real – in its unknowable character – is what makes reality pressing, is what makes it inescapable.

Consistency is the death of thought.

[jottings at Melb airport]

Don’t really get the notion of objects without subjects. How can you think object and subject separately? They form a logical pair. Just saying that there are only objects without subjects does not solve anything. You end up describing how one object takes shape for another object, which is instantly to reintroduce the subject/object relation. An object is inevitably only constituted for a subject, whether conceived in anthropomorphic terms or not. In fact object oriented philosophy (oop) seems to produce a massive escalation of subjects alongside all it’s apparent objects. A dangerous slippage is apparent. In an effort to acknowledge the independent nature of real things, things are posited as objects – as things that are constituted without any need for any relation whatsoever. But this is precisely to force some notion of subjectively constituted coherence on to the alterity of the real, which is never a set of objects as such, which exceeds the category of ‘object’.

To recognize the limits of the human is to give up the notion of objects – rather than denying the alterity of the real, it is to acknowledge that reality exceeds whatever schema we invent to make sense of it. Despite protestations to the contrary (Harman), oop fails to do this. The notion of ‘object’ assumes that we can speak of what we cannot speak, whereas, in contrast, the concept of alterity posits very clearly the problematic character of this external field (a field that is also never simply exterior, that affects inferiority as well – the positing of interiority itself as a coherent field). What oop seems to miss is the relationship to the alienation of the object within thought itself. Thought is never simply thought. As the work of Derrida suggests, it is always an opening on to an elsewhere that exceeds the human and in which the human (and the subject/object pair) is constituted. The subject is never simply a subject as such. If there is any means of thinking around the subject/object relation it is in terms of this work of deconstruction, not in terms of a crude attempt to dump the subject and keep the object.

How are we to make sense of the relation between images and interference? On the one hand, it would seem, we are faced by the spectre of a vast and endlessly proliferating machinic economy of the image, in which precisely visibility is at stake, in which images circulate but no longer appear, in which the flow of the image-signal displaces any possibility of contemplative, critical reception. On the other hand, in response to this dilemma, we have a suggested artistic strategy of interference, which struggles to avoid the language of images, but hopes, nonetheless, to somehow manifest things clearly – if nothing else, to make apparent the absence, any longer, of images. Strangely then the strategy of interference is positioned as a means of obtaining clarity and perspective, whereas the flow of ordinary images appears as a form of interference.

The notion of interference suggests meddling, obstructing, even sexual molestation, but it is most closely associated here with the more technical sense of noise affecting a communication channel. Claude Shannon famously conceives noise as an intrinsic feature of any form of telecommunication. Information, the signal proper, is embedded in noise. Information entropy provides a statistical measure of the level of undecidability of a message linked to the complexity of the message, available bandwidth and the ratio between signal and noise. In this sense it is difficult to see how interference can simply be harnessed by art, how it can be regarded as some kind of neatly exterior corrective to an otherwise pure-flowing signal.

I need to speak more clearly about the relationship between art and aesthetics. I am tending to either blur the distinction or insist upon it very strongly. My general view is that art represents an institutionally-configured sub-set of the aesthetic. The aesthetic for me is less grounded in the senses as such than in an alternation between dimensions of experience and representation. It represents a pause or break in the experiential flow as well as a motion elsewhere; it opens up another space of action and reflection. However, this light play of division, of multiplication of surfaces and resonances, is nothing alien. It is actually, paradoxically integral to experience, which is never simply a seamless and uninterrupted flow, which is always intrinsically a play of self-division. The aesthetic then is perhaps this motion, this field, this imperative to mediation. Yet strangely it is a form of mediation that has difficulty speaking, of finding means of being communicated beyond the complexity of experience itself. Art provides one context for making the aesthetic evident, but at the same, in laying claim to the aesthetic, also ends up failing to recognise and/or devaluing its broader relevance to all manner of dimensions of experience. The paradox of art is that it serves both to manifest the aesthetic and to deny its broader currency and implications.

I have a simple example of aesthetics beyond art. In March 2012, after two years of effort and multiple trips from his home in Japan to Cresciano Switzerland, Japanese rock-climber, Dai Koyamada, climbs one of the hardest boulder routes in the world, Dave Graham’s “The Story of Two Worlds” (in the process adding a new, lower start). The boulder itself appears nothing remarkable. It is not very high (scarcely more than a couple of metres), but the climbing is at the very limits of human difficulty and the ascent attracts worldwide attention within the international climbing community. Now, of course, all manner of aspects of climbing have an aesthetic dimension. If we were to trace its history back to the European Grand Tour and to the sublime response to the alpine landscapes – to the determination to move within those landscapes rather simple regard them from afar, to drop the alibi of science (barometric measurements) and to focus on line and difficulty – then we could recognise already a play of image and intimate experience that is recognisably aesthetic, but I want to draw attention to just a single moment in the video of Koyamada’s final successful ascent. Just as he places both hands on the large, finishing holds, just as he realises that he is certain to complete the climb, he stops. Still dangling upside down and just on the verge of pulling over the lip of the roof, he pauses and closes his eyes. That pause, that splitting of the present, that attempt to hold the present and make it cohere and to find in it a space of reflection is the very stuff of the aesthetic. Its poignancy lies precisely in its impossible but necessary relation to the elusiveness of lived experience, of its inevitable passage away – of its intimate contract with an ultimate, intractable dimension of invisibility.

Dai Koyamada climbing "The Story of Two Worlds", Cresciano Switzerland

Alan Kaprow describes his ‘activities’ as having a paradoxical relation to art.¹ They involve him performing everyday activities, such as brushing his teeth, but without any thought of the art institution – indeed without any particular thought of art at all (“I could, of course, have said to myself, ‘Now I’m making art!!’ But in actual practice, I didn’t think much about it”²). What is it then that links the notion of the activity to art? Kaprow acknowledges its logical position in the tradition of historical avant-garde resistance to the field of autonomous art (“developments within modernism itself let to art’s dissolution into its life sources”³. In this fashion, his non-art activities have a kind of inevitable relevance to art – they bear the imprint of art’s own motion of self-critique. Yet there seems to be more to it than just this. The very act of re-performing the everyday has very evident aesthetic implications. It involves a work of making strange, of fostering heightened perceptual awareness. It follows a legibly conventional avant-garde critical model: life, the experience of life, has become empty and routinised; there is a vital need to renew it from within, to discover means to lead it to fully engaged reflective apperception. In short, the aim is to re-animate life, but this can only occur through a strategic withdrawal – if not via the traditional means of drawing, painting and sculpture then through the insertion of the slightest layer of difference within the texture of ordinary activities; the sense of re-performance rather than the blindness of action as such. Despite Kaprow’s resistance to the field of art-objects, to the autonomy of images, he describes this layer of difference precisely in terms of the language of images:

This was an eye-opener to my privacy and to my humanity. An unremarkable picture of myself was beginning to surface, and [sic] image I’d created but never examined. It colored the images I made of the world and influenced how I dealt with my images of others. I saw this little by little.⁴

The metaphors are all of images. They all relate to a coming to visibility, as well as a shift away from the specific to the general. Kaprow recognises this. He catches himself slipping into the terrain of the aesthetic, so insists on bringing things back to the specific aesthetically alienated field of the activity itself:

But if this wider domain of resonance, spreading from the mere process of brushing my teeth, seems too far from its starting point, I should say immediately that it never left the bathroom.⁵

Kaprow struggles to position his activities beyond the frame of art, or just across its exterior threshold, but it could be argued that this alternation, this shift back and forth between interior and exterior, image and the non-image, experience and reflective apperception, specificity and generality is the very motion of the aesthetic itself. Of course, this is not the same thing as saying that it is the very motion of art itself. The aesthetic represents a space of opening and possibility, art, all too often, a space of closure and constraint.

Although Kaprow’s notion of the activity is distant from Guy Debord’s notion of the situation – Kaprow drawing on a Buddhist concern with awareness and being, Debord focusing on forms of revolutionary social experience that subvert the ‘society of the spectacle’ – they share a common dissatisfaction with ordinary experience. Experience either dissolves into inattentive routine or represents the disengaged social existence of the consumer. However uncertainly positioned in relation to the institution of contemporary art, aesthetic action serves to intervene in the everyday and to restore its meaning, its sense of genuine possibility. In 1957, at the birth of the Situationist International, Debord writes:

Our central idea is the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality.⁶

Similarly, in a 1961 article he argues:

To study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable to even grasp anything of its object, if the study was not expressly for the purpose of transforming everyday life.⁷

Kaprow’s relation to ordinary action is more gentle and less intrusive – it avoids Debord’s superior tone, his tendency to grab everyday experience by the scruff of the neck and give it a vigorous, politically-charged shake – but he is still concerned with changing things, if not the patterns of experience then its perceptual implications. Both conceptions tend to ignore the complexity and ambiguity of ordinary experience – its capacity not only to drift and disengage but also to reflect, discover moments of focus and veer from expectations. Ordinary life reveals its own plays of blindness, intimacy and distance without any need, as such, for any super-added artistic interference or mending. To be fair, Kaprow comes closer to acknowledging this. It accounts for his disregard for art, his tendency not to think of it, his wish to return to the specific experiential character of any activity, yet there is still a sense of underlying dissatisfaction, a sense that the potential of the everyday can only be released via some form of healing aesthetic intervention.

My argument, no doubt equally problematic, is that there is no need for intervention, that ordinary life contains its own powers, that art does better to acknowledge its distance (and the possibilities associated with this distance) from ordinary action. The two fields – equally ambiguous, equally contradictory, equally mobile – have scope to engage in more devious, delicate and discreet ways; without any sense of one becoming master to the other, without any work of dialectical sublation, without any disingenuous effort of reconciliation or merging under the sign of subordination.

The French philosopher, Jacques Ranciere, describes politics as “the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together'”.¹ In this manner, he conceives politics in strongly aesthetic terms; it involves the redistribution of socially-configured sensible experience. Ranciere argues that possibilities for social change appear through moments of “dissensus” – conflicts “between two regimes of sense, two sensory worlds”.² Dissensual aesthetic experience “is a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible”.³

Yet, however fundamentally political in its implication, dissensus, as an aesthetic phenomenon, cannot be reduced to a straightforward political means. Aesthetics, in Ranciere’s view, necessarily withdraws from direct political efficacy: “‘Aesthetic efficacy’ means a paradoxical kind of efficacy that is produced by the very rupturing of any determinate link between cause and effect”.⁴ In a similar way that German cultural critic, Theodor Adorno, criticises instrumentally geared political art, insisting that art highlights social contradictions rather than realising straightforward political goals⁵, Ranciere argues for a disjunction between art and programs of explicit social change. Art has the capacity to manifest dissensus, which is the primary medium of political change, but, once again, “this political effect occurs under the condition of an original disjunction, an original effect, which is the suspension of any direct relationship between cause and effect”.⁶

In order to clarify Ranciere’s paradoxical conception of the relation between politics and aesthetics, it is worth considering his critique of the Critical art tradition.⁷ Critical art, he argues, tends to both over and under value the political potential of art. On the one hand, it regards art as a means of enlightenment and emancipation – with the capacity to estrange ordinary perception and experience, so that underlying truths and scope for genuine freedom can be revealed. On the other hand, in failing to directly produce the desired emancipated community, it comes to lament its feeble socially transformative powers; leading significant strands of critical art, for instance, to turn their back altogether on the mediating image (traditional art forms) in an effort to manifest community directly via forms of ‘un-mediated’ social practice. The first mistake of over-valuing the political potential of art not only patronises the audience for art (reinforcing existing power relations) but also fails to recognise that the aesthetic represents a layer of mediation suspending dimensions of direct instrumental consequence. The second mistake (undervaluation) ignores how the dissensus of art can shape novel social possibilities within the context of an awkward, differentiated, never coherently realised space. As British art theorist, Claire Bishop, suggests, “art and the social are not to be reconciled or collapsed, but sustained in continual tension.”⁸

[My interest, however, is particularly in the notion of dissensus and its relation to the notion of disruption, making strange and interference. Dissensus suggests a similar motion of clashing forces – of juxtapostion – yet it also has positive implication, shaping new ‘distributions of the sensible’. Is a less adversarial position possible? Can we imagine devious bases of tension? More needed!]

There is no need to add art to walking. Walking already contains its own dimension of poetry. Practices such as the Situationst derive and psychogeography, for all their continuing charm, tend to suggest that just plain walking is not enough – that walking, in its ordinary, prosaic incarnation, lacks the capacity to offer anything but the empty after-image of a relentlessly alienated existence. But this is not true. Walking, as I say, already contains an aspect of art; it is just that it contains nothing of the art institution. It has no need whatsoever of galleries, biennales, curatorial essays, etc. Its dimension of art is very much linked to its elusiveness, to its refusal to attain proper shape, to appear as anything more than a break in the day, a diversion, a chance to get outside for a while. So my aim is not to drag walking within the accepted field of art, but rather to find oblique means to acknowledge a space of difference and affinity. My aim is to place art beside walking – not within it, but beside it. In this manner, if only through gestures of ellipsis, something of the poetry and alterity of walking may get picked up within art.

Receive/Transmit
Process (eg. amplification), transform, edit, reconstitute
Modulate (parasite it, make it a carrier for some other signal)
Interfere (disrupt, destroy)
Repeat, split, divert
Multiplex