brogan bunt

The second volume of Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life, published in 1961, is famous for positioning the field of everyday life as a vital social and political concern.¹ Turning away from the typical political-sociological focus on the sphere of production or the superstructural space of public culture and party politics, Lefebvre instead emphasises the importance of an almost imperceptible middle layer – the sphere of consumption, of ordinary habits, of everyday experience. The everyday represents an ambiguous field. On the one hand it appears as a site of alienation (shaped by the specter of commodity capitalism) and on the other hand as a site of utopic potential (a realm of interference, in which the abstract logic of capitalist relations come unstuck as they are played out, as they are lived). In this sense the everyday is associated with both acquiescence and resistance. Indeed the two possibilities are closely allied. Any potential for resistance is linked precisely to a dimension of acquiescence – to the silence, invisibility and amorphousness of the everyday.

This paradox is subject to a range of interpretations. In his 1961 article , “Perspective for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life”, Guy Debord emphasises the need for strategic intervention in the everyday.² He begins my acknowledging its central importance:

Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the (non)fulfillment of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; and of revolutionary politics.³

Debord moves on, however, to argue that, as a sphere of “separation and spectacle”, everyday life lacks adequate means on its own to serve as a genuine site of resistance. There is a need for conscious, radical, critical agents to intervene within the everyday and transform it. The urgent task is to “replace the present ghetto with a constantly moving frontier; to work ceaselessly toward the organization of new chances.”⁴

Writing two decades later, Michel de Certeau interprets things differently. He describes an integral dimension of resistance within the everyday, arguing particularly that the apparently meekly compliant space of consumption (of spectacular participation) is not simply passive – that it takes shape as a form of hidden production:

To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous, and spectacular production corresponds another production, called “consumption.” The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through products, but rather through its way of using products imposed by a dominant economic order.⁵

Certeau distinguishes between dimensions of macro-level cultural strategy (linked to the capitalist system and state-bureaucratic apparatus) and ground-level tactics (the field of everyday actions and decision-making). The former attempts to mould the everyday to meet its interests, while the latter manages to elaborate diverse means of leading strategic instructions astray – diverting them towards other less clearly delineated, less clearly constrained, interests. The specific example Certeau employs is that of walking through the city – the wayward, protean and unpredictable rhetorics of spatial interaction that emerge within the framework of even the most regimented city grid.⁶

So we have two divergent conceptions. Debord argues that active cultural agency is required in order to rouse everyday life from its slumber, in order to manifest its genuine revolutionary potential, while Certeau argues that everyday life reveals its own capacity for productive interference. How we navigate these different conceptions has obvious implications for how we conceive the role of the artist as social practitioner. Do the interventions of artists appear as a necessary strategic means of mobilising the social sphere – in its passivity, in its craven, glacial unconsciousness – or are they in some sense superfluous, even patronising? Do they devalue the social sphere – its integral, transformative potential – in the very motion of embracing it? Furthermore, what does it mean to interfere with the social? What does it mean to assume the role of strategic provocateur or of holy fool? What does it mean to intervene and move comfortably in a space that is not one’s own, in which one’s activities adopt the form of other activities, in which subversion and friendly exchange can easily become indistinguishable?

As a means of gaining some perspective on these questions, it is worth mentioning yet another interpretation of the everyday. In his 1962 article, “Everyday Speech”, Blanchot focuses chiefly on the undecidable aspect of the everyday, its elusiveness as a category and as field of existence.⁷ The everyday, at every level, escapes; it is defined by a motion of escape. Blanchot argues that Lefebvre’s critique is relevant not only in terms of positing a new dimension of political being (whether passive or resistive), but in terms of drawing attention to a paradoxical, intimate and yet alien, ever-present and yet invisible, social domain:

[T]he critique (in the sense that Henri Lefebvre, by establishing ‘the critique of everyday life’, has used this principle of reflection) is no longer content with wanting to change day-to-day life by opening it onto history and political life: it would prepare a radical transformation of Ataglichkeit [commonplaceness]. A remarkable change in view.⁸

No longer appearing as the dull, statistical average, Blanchot argues that the everyday discovers a new identity as “a category, a utopia and an Idea, without which one would not know how to get at either the hidden present, or the discoverable future of manifest beings.” ⁹ In this sense, the everyday appears as something that is neither simply strategically interfered with nor blithely entered. It obtains an awkward, unobtainable aspect. It becomes something demanding a different mode of attention – perhaps an attentive inattentiveness. However, this does not simply open up the necessity for a (traditional avant-garde artistic) work of estranging the everyday, because the everyday is already, by definition, estranged. Instead it prompts a sense of caution. There is a need for a less complacent attitude to the field of everyday life, a greater acknowledgement of its opaqueness and integrity – a less easy sense of the possibility of either artistic interference in its flow or of an immersive, aesthetically constituted, engagement in its currents.

My concern is not to represent walking as art, but rather to gaze sidelong at an activity that is irreducible to art – that exceeds art. The point is not to merge art and walking, but rather to find means that they can be interleaved. This is not to oppose art and walking – to treat them as antagonistic fields. No doubt the two share many affinities and points of overlap. It is just to acknowledge the elusiveness of both and their capacity to each mean something on their own. The blurring of the difference between walking and art seems less interesting than their multiplexing.

In what sense do the Jodi SOD game modifications interfere with the Wolfenstein 3D engine? They interfere with the engine not in order to fundamentally disrupt or disable it, but in order to fork it elsewhere. Strictly speaking, the engine is less interfered with than multiplied.

Just finished teaching a subject (with Lucas Ihlein) called Social Intersections. The aim was to review traditions of socially engaged art practice, from Dada and Surrealist efforts to recast lived experience to contemporary experiments in ‘social practice’ linking art to dimensions of ethnography, political activism and social work. Unitary urbanism, psychogeography, the writings of Georges Perec, 1960s happenings, 1990s relational art – all got a look in. The relation between art and everyday life was a specific focus of concern and many of our projects involved walking.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of subject prompts the inevitable question, ‘but is it art?’ However daft and unanswerable, however binary, the standard pedagogical pattern is for students to frame their engagement with the subject in terms of this question, typically gradually acknowledging that more and more things can be art – that, of course, not only gallery objects are art but also all manner of interventions in real social space, whether it be ‘toothbrushing’ (Alan Kaprow), pushing a piece of ice along a street (Francis Alys) or running an abortion clinic on a ship (Rebecca Gomperts – Women on Waves).

Now all of this appears mete and right. After all, who needs some wretched, irrelevant space of autonomous art? Let’s once again discover means for merging art with everyday life. Yet this well-meaning orientation towards the social field can also have a sinister aspect, particularly in terms of its amorphous, blobby motion of aesthetic expansion. All the time latching on to new dimensions of social interaction, socially engaged art practice can appear as a soft and mushy form of aesthetic appropriation. All kinds of contexts and activities that ordinarily have very little to do with art suddenly find themselves positioned as art. It is as though art adopts the model of some utterly fanciful form of historical colonialism; people in Western ships travel to exotic isles, leap on to the beach, hug the natives, proclaim that cultural difference is irrelevant and, precisely on this basis, convince the islanders that their colonisation is essential. It is the Hegelian aufehbung without any sense of violence or destructive appetite. I know that this is a bit unfair, that you could equally argue that art is passing beyond its ordinary limits and risking other modes of discourse, other idioms of interaction, but there is still a vital need for art to be sensitive to the political implications of its expansion into other contexts. It is not that I am opposed to socially engaged art practice. Nor do I wish to argue for some narrow, conventional conception of genuine art. It is just that artists can’t simply commandeer fields of social action that already have a sense of direction and integrity – that are already constituted well enough without art. Of course they can be taken up by art, they can be re-framed within the context of art, but there is still a need to acknowledge their distinct identity. There is a particular need to question the assumption that art is some kind of innocent honest broker, with an unerring capacity to cut to the chase, catalyse action and revitalise dimensions of social process. This places too great an emphasis on art to solve complex, cultural problems, as well as limiting art’s capacity to respond obliquely, irresponsibly and at a sometimes necessary remove.

Alongside the various conceptual terms (image, signal, interference, multiplexing, etc.), and the various more or less subjective activities (walking, running, climbing, etc.) there are also the set of specific sites (backyard, local park, escarpment, etc.). The escarpment – the escarpment itself, my relation to the escarpment, the conceptual implications of the escarpment – demand some effort at clarification.

I have only to walk up a short rough track to be in the escarpment. The escarpment begins at the limits of the suburbs and rises up through paddocks and sclerophyll forest to pockets of lush temperate rainforest and sections of vertical sandstone cliff. It is, however, as much an imaginary space as a real space – a thin curtain of green obscuring a more generally dry interior. It is like a huge wave in a fictional sea – a wave without any supporting momentum, hanging thinly between dull plains, suburbs and the actual sea.

The escarpment was extensively logged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Photos from the 1920s in the local butcher shop show the whole of Mt Keira without a single tree on it. The trees have since grown back, but the escarpment can scarcely be mistaken for a pristine wilderness. It is infested with all manner of weeds – lantana, scotch thistle, tobacco bush, coral trees, etc. As well, it is full of imported animal pests – deer, foxes, etc. Then there is the evidence of human interaction – dumped cars, trash of all kinds, bits and pieces of heavy equipment, old stone walls, abandoned coal mines, roads, trailbike noise, mountainbike tracks, etc. In short the place is thoroughly compromised, yet it retains this strange resilience linked to its darkness, dampness, coldness and heat; to its slippages, its loose earth, its refusal to stay still. Endlessly fucked up, endlessly interfered with, the escarpment has its own modes of interference. As a medium, as a backdrop, as a thin field of transition, it manages to survive careless treatment, to twist the most intimate wounds into emergent spaces – unexpected contours and scenes of strange, prolific growth.

[I have difficulty keeping up with the escarpment. It moves much faster than I do.]

Dropped D at train early this morning. Still dark when I got back, but clear signs of an unsettled day ahead. Reddish tinge on the dark clouds behind Mt Keira. May as well take a few photographs. May as well go for a run. Returning on the narrow track beside Byarong Creek, running close behind a row of houses, I recognised the best light and realised that I’d miss it in the eight minutes or so that it would take to get home. No matter. The images would mean nothing if I didn’t continue running – if I didn’t complete the run properly – although nothing of the run itself would appear in any case. It is just that the running lends the photography meaning, while at the same time relieving the photography of any heavy responsibility to be meaningful. The two activities provide alibis for one another. Like decent strangers sharing a railway carriage, without exchanging a word, scarcely knowing one another’s names, they watch each other’s back.

Of course, if I don’t choose interference as a strategy, it is partly because my aim is not to critique walking, running, etc. It is to reflect upon these activities – observing them, pursuing them, articulating them elsewhere. Here my work aligns with the tradition of critical and artistic engagement with aspects of everyday life – Lefebvre, Blanchot, Cereteau, Perec, etc. My aim is less to disrupt the everyday than to discover effective means to engage with its elusive potential. This is not a matter of transforming the everyday into art, but rather of linking art to the everyday – placing the two in a delicate, slightly uncertain relation.

The last couple of days have been dark and wet.

So interference can appear as a mode of resistance, a means of integrally disrupting and undermining some larger signal flow. This is, as I say, its heroic guise. But interference can also be regarded in less heroic terms – as, for instance, a parasitic attack.

Michel Serres, in his Parasite (1980) ¹ plays upon the multiple meanings of the word “parasite” within the French language, which refers not only to social and biological forms of parasitism, but also to the noise within a communication channel – the noise that in the form of interference affects the integrity of a signal. The etymology of the word can apparently be traced back to the ancient Greek parasitos, which means one who eats at another’s table. The prepositional prefix “para” means variously “besides”, “near”, “from”, “against” and “contrary to” (capturing, for our purposes, the whole sense of ambiguous relation between host and parasite), while the suffix “sitos” means literally grain, serving as a metonym for the bounty that the host provides. The term originally designated those who assisted in preparations for sacred festivals in exchange for free grain. It then obtained wider meaning within Greek comedy, referring to characters who ingratiated their way to the tables of the rich, “earning” [their] “dinner through stories told, flattery and the willingness to perform all sorts of services for” [their] “patron.”² Within this semantic context, the notion of interference gains new implications. Instead of indicating valiant resistance, it suggests wiley opportunism and inveigling. Interference capitalises on a signal, finding means of drawing sustenance and advantage from it. If this should harm the signal then so be it – although obviously it is many ways preferable if the signal survives, however weakened; in this manner continuing to provide free meals, continuing to provide scope for interference.

How can I relate Michel Serres’ conception of the parasite to my conception of multiplexing? The awkwardness, the uncertainty for me relates to the issue of interference. At one level, I am happy with the sense that interference affects all signals. In this sense, there is no need for art as some kind of privileged critical, autonomous agent to interfere with a signal that would otherwise remain monolithically pristine. Interference is integral and inescapable. It appears both as a necessary supplement to any signal flow, but also, more profoundly, as its ground and basis. Claude Shannon spoke tellingly of the signal to noise ratio, suggesting that the signal takes root in the noise. It is not only the noise that parasites the signal. It is also the signal that parasites the noise. All of this serves to complicate any conception of simple opposition between an unaffected signal flow and the agency of artistic interference.

Yet a vital problem remains. Parasitical interference involves literally disrupting some other thing, it involves finding one’s way within it, burrowing inside, attaching oneself intimately to its person – tapping into it, feeding upon it, weakening it and ultimately threatening its life. In contrast, however, I regard multiplexing as a form of commensalism, in which art discovers benefit and a ground for reflection in some aspect of ordinary life – walking, running, etc. – but without intimately disrupting that other space of action. Art both attaches itself and maintains a scrupulous distance. I am not even clear that the energy in this relation flows solely in one direction – that only art benefits from the encounter. I have described, for instance, how the conjunction of the art system and the running system can have creative, non-destructive implications for both. The two systems support one another, prompt one another, frame and lend meaning to one another. This sense of a mutual flow, which has its basis in an ethics of commensalism, is antithetical to Serres’ notion of parasitism, which via its sense of noisy interference links to Shannon’s conception of information entropy, which itself refers back to the second law of thermodynamics; the latter, of course, fundamentally concerned with the unilateral direction of energy flow – from hot to cold, from order to disorder. So how is it possible to conceive a reversible flow? How is it possible to conceive a mode of interaction in which neither pole loses energy, in which thermal excitation affects both?

Perhaps there is a way out of this impasse. In his most pithy definition of the parasite, Serres explains that “[t]he parasite is a thermal exciter.”³ This would seem to suggest a slightly different energetic relation, in which the parasite appears less as a destructive energy sink than as something that excites the host system, forcing it to adaptively respond:

The parasite intervenes, enters the system as an element of fluctuation. It excites or incites it; it puts it into motion, or it paralyzes it. It changes its state, changes its energetic state, its displacements and condensations.⁴

In this sense, despite its characteristic negative aspect, despite the second law of thermodynamics, the parasite does provide something in return, does find a means of energising the host. It is just that this exchange is structured in terms of a leeching, a bleeding, a disruption of homeostasis. So the difference between parasitism and multiplexing lies perhaps less at the level of the overall flow of energy than in terms of whether or not there is a burrowing within and a bite. The notion of multiplexing envisages modes of association and close imbrication that do not breach the integrity of independent signals.

The notion of interference – art as a mode interference – is associated with the conventional avant-garde self-image of critical subversion. The latter envisages that there is something like an unreflective signal – cast in terms of notions of power, consumption, ideology, etc. – that art finds the means to unsettle and pull apart. Art intervenes (at an awkward remove) and disrupts (without, however, quite touching). Three iconic works in this vein: Guy Debord’s film, Critique of Separation (1961); Gordon Matta-Clark’s public, sculptural intervention, Splitting (1974); and Jodi’s game modification, Sod (2000).

Three quarters of the way through Critique of Separation, Debord’s essay-style documentary on the problems of cinema, which mixes intense reflective narration, scenes of Paris, news reel material, comic book imagery and footage of Situationist work and activities, there is short sequence that reprises a technique from Debord’s earlier film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959). The screen goes blank. The film imagery disappears. In the earlier film blankness is realised through a white screen, whereas here it is through a black screen. It is as though almost nothing of the cinematic image can be permitted to remain – not even projected light (with its sense, perhaps, of the imaginary conviviality of the film theatre). The black screen appears as a pointed gesture of negation. The voice-over, which normally has a wayward, detourned relation to the film imagery, suddenly speaks directly to the image.

It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To undermine the conventions of its communication. To demoralize its fans. What a task! As in a blurry drunken vision, the memory and language of the film fade out simultaneously. At the extreme, miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objectivity: a documentation of the conditions of noncommunication.

Critique of Separation, Guy Debord, 1961

This sequence provides an emblematic example of critical disruption – of destructive interference. The film image is subverted in order that the truth of the spectacular relation to the real that film entails should appear. Nonetheless, important to acknowledge that the film is not entirely ruined. There is still the black. I think of Chris Marker’s famous line from the beginning of his film, Sans Soleil (1983), in which short sequences of black leader are juxtaposed with images of military aircraft and children on a road in Iceland, “If they don’t see happiness, at least they’ll see the black”. This negative image – this image of the negation of images – raises the issue of the staging of interference, the representation of disruption in legible and coherent terms.

If Debord, at least in this early phase of Situationist practice, permits the critique of film to occur via means of film, if he does not altogether disrupt the underlying medium, Gordon Matta Clark literally destroys the house in order to manifest the sculptural work. He cuts the house in half. No doubt this gesture is ambiguous. At one level it can be regarded positively as a form of non-instrumental architecture – a means of opening up new spatial possibilities within the real. At another level it summons a more negative reading – serving as a critique of the closure of contemporary space (especially here domestic space). Matthew Fuller, in his Behind the Blip (2003), argues that Matta Clark’s various splitting works offer an inspiring model for contemporary software art practice. Drawing upon Matta-Clark, he argues that a major aim of software art should be less to produce functioning software than to interfere with the technical and cultural software system – to discover effective means of disrupting it.

Splitting, Gordon Matta-Clark, 1974

Jodi’s Wolfenstein 3D game modification, SOD, appears as a characteristic realisation of this subversive goal. Stripping away the experience of illusory 3D space, it exposes dimensions of underlying computational artifice. The 3D engine is corrupted so that something of its mechanisms and abstraction can be revealed. Of course SOD’s black and white, curiously flattened space of planes, shapes and data is itself an imaginary construct. The underlying game, as field of invisible code-based operation, does not and cannot appear. Worth noting as well that the work still relies upon aspects of the original engine. The engine provides the functional basis for the work of artistic critique.

SOD, Jodi, 2000

Overall, despite their strands of ambiguity, compromise and contradiction, these three works serve as examples of whatever it is that creative interference means. Risking oversimplification, we could summarise their various forms of interference in the following terms:

the image is fucked
the house is fucked
the world is fucked

At the same time, however, we would have to acknowledge that this interference is chiefly symbolic. It takes place within the sphere of art. Matta-Clark’s practice may have occasionally broken the law, but once framed within the context of art it clearly represents no integral criminal or political-revolutionary threat to the wider field of spatial relations or, more specifically, instrumental architecture. Certainly he intervenes within a particular space – cuts in half a particular home – but this dimension of interference can hardly be equated with the more general interference that would be needed to convincingly disrupt the broader field of socio-spatial relations. So, without any sense of criticism, without any suggestion of aesthetic failure, we can qualify our summary of the forms of interference in the following terms.

the image is fucked || films continue to be made and seen
the house is fucked || houses continue to be built and lived in
the world is fucked || virtual worlds continue to be made and inhabited

I am not trying to suggest that art has no social consequences, but simply instead that the concept of heroic, avant-garde interference needs qualification. The limits and dilemmas that affect the awkward autonomy/non-autonomy of art suggest that the metaphor of interference may not provide the best means of conceiving these works and activities. Perhaps it is less a matter of interference as such than of tapping into a signal and reconstituting it elsewhere. In these terms, art less undermines the overall flow than reshapes it within the context of alternative currents. Inevitably, this adds to the overall flow rather than subtracting from it – however much the mythology of critical art may wish otherwise.

At the end of his 1959 film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time, Guy Debord describes the limit that his film has reached, which takes shape as the limit of film as such:

To really describe this era it would no doubt be necessary to show many other things. But what would be the point? The point is to understand what has been done and all that remains to be done, not to add more ruins to the old world of spectacles and memories.

These words are accompanied by a blank, white screen.

This ending would seem to acknowledge that art is not some special case – some altogether other form of image-signal- that can miraculously undo the untruth of spectacle. Rather the art image itself is implicated within the regime of spectacle. It too misdirects and pollutes. It adds to the sum of falsehood – of alienated, disengaged existence. So struggling with this contradiction there is the need for the limit image – blank, self-annulling, under erasure. This is all that is possible – except, of course, for stopping filming altogether – refusing to produce images at all. This latter option makes considerable logical sense within the framework of a vision of resistance that posits a monolithic enemy and an absolute, categorical space of revolutionary difference.

Yet Debord is aware that images return. Actions that were conceived as stepping outside the framework of the spectacle can quickly gain a spectacular dimension. Direct, momentary and ephemeral interventions in the everyday can be recuperated – can develop thick, imagistic skins, can pass away from whatever lent them immediate, animated life. This is the uncertainty (and pathos) of the Situationist venture – the ever present risk that situation be recast as spectacle. For me, the unthought possibility here is that the image, in its distance and intimacy, was always already present within the apparently exterior form of the situation – that spectacle and situation are not so neatly opposed.

Multiplexing, the process of combining multiple component signals within a single overall signal, depends upon a more fundamental feature of electronic signal processing, modulation. Modulation involves varying one or more properties of a carrier signal via a modulating signal. Aspects of amplitude, phase and frequency are systematically varied to encode supplementary layers of information. This enables a base signal to carry additional signals. Once the overall signal reaches its destination the different signal layers can be decoded as distinct sets of information. Modulation is what enables, for instance, an analogue telephone signal to carry digital information via the intercession of a modem (modulator/demodulator).

The difference between multiplexing and modulation is that modulation affects a carrier signal so that it can support additional layers of information, while multiplexing involves combining one or more modulated signals into a larger signal flow. Modulation directly modifies a base signal whereas multiplexing provides a means of combining already complex (modulated) signals. There are two basic forms of multiplexing: time or phase based multiplexing, in which different signals are interleaved and transmitted within a single channel; and frequency based multiplexing, in which multiple signal sub-channels run in parallel along different frequency bands within the overall signal flow. While modulation serves as a fundamental means of encoding (and decoding) information – motivated by the need to articulate information within a particular signal medium – multiplexing focuses upon enabling the efficient transmission of multiple signals within a single transmission pipeline. So while they share a common concern to first integrate multiple signal strands into a single signal flow and then, at the point of reception, to disaggregate that flow into multiple discrete signals, they have different orientations. Overall, modulation has a semantic emphasis – it is directed towards adding additional meaning to a signal. This involves intervening within and altering a base signal. Multiplexing, on the other hand, has a pragmatic emphasis – it is directed towards bandwidth efficiency. The signals are not altered – rather their flow is cunningly choreographed, signals are ingeniously combined and interleaved.

This explains why I employ the metaphor of multiplexing to describe my current practice. It is not as though art appears as a form of modulation, subtly altering the nature of my ordinary activities (in the manner of a more ordered, semantically inclined form of interference). Rather art appears as an already complex signal that becomes attached to the equally complex character of walking, running, etc. They are linked. They discover an association. But not in a way that integrally disrupts either. Very importantly, the two are not juxtaposed. It is not a matter for me of establishing a montage of conflicting elements, but rather of enabling a field of sidelong glances and scrupulous indirection. For example, I go outside to take a few photographs just before I go for my run. This appears not as an imposition but as a wayward expansion of what would be otherwise a merely intermediary moment. The images have nothing to do with the run as such. They are just views of my backyard or the morning sky through the trees. Similarly, when I return from my run, I can stand around gasping for a while or I can take another few photographs. This work of combination, expansion and interleaving demands delicacy and tact. The running and the photography (and the writing of the blog entries) have to retain their distance, their discrete space and discreet manner within the overall texture of my actions.

Very short, modest run around the oval. Large flock of easily disturbed egrets.

Let’s try again.

At one level an image can be regarded as a type of signal. This is in terms of conceiving the signal in the general sense of something that behaves like a sign – that works to communicate something at a spatial and temporal remove, that serves as an intermediate carrier of some field of meaning. But we are also very aware of a more specific sense of the term. The signal represents the electronic form of a message – its encoding, storage and transmission. In this sense the image is not a subset of the signal, but rather something that passes into a signal in order to be communicated. Very importantly, the signal is not the image itself. It represents rather a passage away from visibility – a representation in other terms. Strictly speaking, to conceive the image as signal is to suspend the semantic character of the image. It is to focus on the image as information, as something that according to Shannon’s famous conception, can be statistically determined – that takes shape in terms of a measure of entropy, of message undecidability. The image-signal then is the image as quantitative description rather than as holistic apparition.

So here we are less concerned with imagery as such (in its capacity to appear) than with the flow of imagery. It is in this sense that the multiple flows of imagery converge to form a single current – the image as signal. Whereas Debord was fundamentally concerned with the social relation of commodity-consumption, disengagemet and passivity that the ‘society of the spectacle’ entailed, the concern with signal is a bit different. It is less about contrasting truth and illusion, authentic and inauthentic life, than about recognising a new energetics, a new physics of image-based cultural being. Flying in the face of the first law of thermodynamics, it is though the image-signal is a form of energy that endlessly proliferates and grows, that encounters no natural limits. Drawing upon the second law of thermodynamics, it as though expansion, proliferation and pollution are the natural entropic attractors of the image-signal.

What is the relation between image and signal? Are the image and signal evident at once, or does the recognition of one entail a shift in attention away from the other? Traditionally, the mimetic image is associated with a space of illusion. The image takes coherent shape once the subterfuge that supports it – the material grounds or conditions for the image – are forgotten (or momentarily elude notice). The medium and the signal withdraw so that the image may appear. Clement Greenberg famously resists this conception, associating it with earlier forms of art and arguing that modern art is characterised by an attentiveness to medial conditions. The aesthetic essence of the painted image becomes linked to its material supports (the flatness of the canvas). This is exemplified in the transition to modernist abstraction, which works precisely to suspend the traditional mimetic conception of the image. It is by attentiveness to the specific conditions of the image signal that a new, non-illusory image emerges, with its formal parameters tied inextricably to its failure to constitute anything strictly supervening.

But then what kind of image is this new image? Is this actually an image at all? It links form – the apparent abstraction of form – to a space of material immediacy. In this manner, the image becomes less an apparition than an ensemble of immediately apperceptible elements and relations. It is less an image than a thing, not that an image is not a thing, but an image is characteristically a kind of thing that undermines the simplicity of here and now being – always pointing to and projecting an elsewhere. In any case, Greenberg’s modernist image has a contradictory aspect. It both welcomes and turns its back on the signal. The modernist image can only be seen on the condition that the signal be constrained and strictly reduced. Above all, the signal cannot be a cacophony (echoing the cacophony of the modern world). It must find means to become quiet. It can only appear by stripping itself back, by eliminating everything that is apparently superfluous. Hence the conception of the modernist medium, as the sphere of the aesthetic signal-image, depends upon an effort of ascetic purification. The signal must be cast in terms that are unproblematically material – in a way that the material can be simply seen and observed, that it can attain static formal shape. Art’s role is to discover points of utopic stillness, in which medium and signal cease to represent fields of elusive transition and multiplicity, in which instead an image – an image as non-image – can appear.

I distinguish walking from art, but not as things that are simply opposed. In all kinds of ways the two activities – the two discursive fields – intersect. They both offer the promise of freedom. They both enable a space of reflection (and non-reflection). They both entail systems of self-enforced rules. These dimensions of affinity are probably what leads me to link them together. Yet, as I say, the two also retain a sense of distinct identity. My walking can make do without any thought of art and my art can make do without any thought of walking. Worth noting, however, that in this instance art makes the initial approach. It appears as the slightly more interested party, the occasionally awkward addition and the relatively inoffensive parasite. Here the aim is not to lay aesthetic claim to walking, but rather to find a place alongside it – partly within it, but never absolutely. The tension, the game, lies precisely in discovering a close but non-abrasive relation. None of this, strangely, demands a simple and clear demarcation of the proper space and inviolable limits of either art or walking, but it does depend upon a demonstration of mutual care and respect. Above all there can be no subsumptive maneouvres on either side. They two practices are multiplexed, not merged.

Guy Debord, in a very Platonic fashion, contrasts the realm of images (within the context of consumer capitalism) to the terrain of authentic experience. Baudriallard imagines he has taken an additional step with his conception of the simulacrum – no reality at all only images. Yet now the space of imagery has become unclear – its autonomy far from certain. It is as though the image itself has broken down the cave walls or was never actually in a cave at all. It has descended down (or up) into reality. It is co-extensive with the real. It is just as material as it is abstract. And it doesn’t rely upon anybody to see it. There is no longer the necessity for spectators – no longer the need for chained slaves staring at walls. Whether people are still imprisoned or not is neither here nor there. Images circulate like blood. They are no longer, conveniently, extraneous. They cannot be simply swept away or set aside. They cannot be regarded as some alien figure of absolute loss. Our relation to images has become intimate.

Very careful. Something about flat ground does not suit me.

My mind is like the autumn moon
Shining clean and clear in the green pool.
No, that’s not a good comparison.
Tell me, how shall I explain?¹

Han-shan (or Hanshan) was an early Chinese Buddhist poet writing during the T’ang dynasty in 800 or 900AD. He was a wealthy and well-educated man who, having missed out on a senior government appointment, withdrew from the active public world to live a simple life in the mountains.

Despite the vast cultural distance, this poem by Han-shan seems relevant to my current work. At the most obvious level, and not at all metaphorically, I am concerned with the moon and our backyard pool. And if not with the moon and the pool, then with dusk on the escarpment, with clouds and dwindling light, and with minor activities such as walking and running. And in the same way as Han-shan, I am uncertain about these images and this space of experience, not, however, because they fail as metaphors of spiritual clarity, but because they signal an awkward romanticism and quietism. Or perhaps a recourse to a very conventional order of poetry, which nonetheless deeply holds me – although I do my best to approach it lightly, to tie it to the ordinary and prosaic, to non-descript leisure, suburban rooftops and weed-infested trails.

Full circuit again:

Water tower: six mins
Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins
Four ways gate: 18 mins
Waterboard gate: 23 mins
Rough trail start: 29 mins
Steep drop: 39 mins
Coal mine: 49 mins
Robertson lookout: 54 mins
Byarong park: 1 hour 16 mins (?)
Finish: 1 hour 28 mins

An obvious criticism: I am reducing the experience of running through the escarpment to an athletic event – a sad after-image of the conditions of mechanised labour. Lacking any capacity to imagine a genuine alternative, I render my space of freedom in terms of the very constraints that, at another level, lend the activity meaning. If I argue that here the conditions of time are my own, that I set them myself, then it becomes even more plainly evident how effectively I have interiorised the larger social system – how unfree and compromised my running actually is.

Without wishing to deny this criticism altogether, it naively imagines the possibility of a purely oppositional practice – one that does not in any way partake of given social forms. The subjection to clock time here lends the activity a specific formal coherence. It is a matter of pursuing and pushing back limits. Last week, when I’d finished some ten minutes slower, I doubted that I’d ever complete the run in under and hour and a half. I was very surprised when I managed to do it this week. The strange play between physical places and temporal targets. The sense of movement itself (with all its complexities of perceived effort, pace and recovery) and the sense of clock-time passing. And then the relation to the escarpment, which no amount of slowness of movement, no suspension of clock time, can ever adequately represent. It is a real space. It is a dream space. May as well pass through it quickly as slowly. There are correspondences to be discovered at any pace – in terms of any experiential conceit.

Saturday – late afternoon.

Tuesday – early morning, moon.

Art does not describe an order of phenomena, but rather an associated characteristic or quality of phenomena. It does not take its place in a concrete taxonomy. There is nothing that is substantively (and exclusively) art or not art. Art is always added to something. It is not an order of thing that can be distinguished from the order of non-art things. It is something that can be flexibly associated with any phenomena. Of course there is a need to say something about this super-added quality. What is it that distinguishes it from any other number of qualities? Once again, I doubt that any final determination can be made – the quality of art is multiple, historically variable and inchoate – but we can probably point to some key identifiers. Art relates to the promise of freedom – and to the rhetoric of freedom. It lends possibility – the exploration of possibility – a distinct, yet always contingent, shape. It is also linked to a motion of displacement – a work of reflection, entailing both engagement and distancing, the characteristic and the surprising.

Mt Nebo – MtKeira circuit:

Water tower: six mins
Mt Nebo top clearing: 14 mins
Four ways gate: 19 mins
Waterboard gate: 24 mins
Rough trail start: 30 mins
Steep drop: 40 mins
Coal mine: 52 mins
Robertson lookout: 58 mins
Byarong park: 1 hour 25 mins (?)
Finish: 1 hour 37 mins

(After Byarong Park, the path heads down Mt Keira road and then drops off down into the bush near the Bushfire Brigade building. Missed the trail and got a bit lost down there. The ground was loose and spongy, full of rocks and trash. A potential mud slide?)

Nothing of art here, except this.

In November last year I wrote of an unfinished walk. My aim was to head up Mt Nebo, around to Mt Keira and then back down. Unfortunately the track had become overgrown in the jungle section beneath the old coal mine, forcing me to turn back. Since then, however, mountain bikers have re-established the trail. Yesterday I completed the full loop, but in the opposite direction. I started a bit late in the afternoon so didn’t get back home until after dark. As I descended down the last steep slope from the water tank to Valley Drive I startled a small herd of deer. They rushed in all directions. I could hear one of the young deer plaintively calling for its mother as I hurried down the grassy trail.