Networks (Whitechapel - Documents of Contemporary Art) 9780854882212, 9780262525756, 2013036288

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�..............., The rise of electronic media has initiated. a cultural shift from the modernist grid's determination of projection and representation to the fluid structures and circuits of the network, presenting art with new challenges and possibilities. Artists have used the 'space of flows' to set up countercultural or utopian scenarios, reveal hidden forms of subjugation or Initiate new types of reciprocity, in works that address changed conditions of co-dependence and new sites of social negotiation. Networks is one of a series documenting major themes and ideas in contemporary art

Theodor W. Adorno//Pamela Allara//Lawrence Alloway//Roy Ascottj /John Baldessari//Jane Bennett;/ Hakim Bey//Lourdes Blanco//Luc Boltanski//Jack Burnham//Manuel Castells//Eve Chiapello//Colectivo Situaciones//Critical Art Ensemble//Jodi Dean// Guy Debord//�illes Deleuze//Umberto Eco//Okwui Enwezor//Peter Fend//Alexander Galloway//Natasha Ginwala//Felix Guattarij/Michael Hardt;/Yuko Hasegawa//Robert Hobbs//Calvin Johnson// Koncern ° //Joasia Krysa//Bruno Latour//Pia Lindman// Ann Lislegaard//Geert Lovink//Marshall McLuhan// Noortje Manes//Marcel Mauss//Barry Miles//Vaclovas Mikailionis//Marta Minujin//Aleksandra Mir//Robert Musil//Reza Negarestani//Antonio Negri//Sadie Plant;/Lea Porsager//Lane Relyea//Ned Rossiter// Craig Saper//Saskia Sassen//Pit Schultz//Steven Shaviro//Hito Steyerl//Tiziana Terranova//Caroline Tisdall//Suzanne Treister//Paolo Virno//Stephen Willats//Vivian Ziherl

Networks

Whitechapel Gallery

London

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

Edited by Lars Ban g

Larsen

Documents of Contemporary Art

Co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and The MIT Press First published 2014 © 2014 Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited All texts © the authors or the estates of the authors, unless otherwise stated Whitechapel Gallery is the imprint of Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher ISBN 978-0-85488-221-2 (Whitechapel Gallery) ISBN 978-0-262-52575-6 (The MIT Press) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Networks / edited by Lars Bang Larsen. pages cm - (Whitechapel: documents of contemporary art) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-52575-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Internet-Social aspects. 2. System analysis­ Philosophy. 3. Social networks-Philosophy. 4. Mass media and social integration. 5. Art criticism. I. Larsen, Lars Bang, 1972- editor of compilation. HM851.N477 2014 302.3-dc23 2013036288

Series Editor: Iwona Blazwick Commissioning Editor: Ian Farr Project Editor: Sarah Auld Design by SMITH Justine Schuster, Allon Kaye Printed and bound in China Cover, Gego, Reticularea, 1975 (detail). Stainless steel wire, 82 x 102 x 7 in. Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Courtesy of Fundaci6n Gego. Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited 77-82 Whitechapel High Street London E1 7QX whitechapelgallery.org To order (UK and Europe) call +44 (0)207 522 7888 or email [email protected] Distributed to the book trade (UK and Europe only) by Central Books www.centralbooks.com The MIT Press Cambridge, MA 02142 MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@ mitpress.mit.edu

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Whitechapel Gallery

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Documents of Contemporary Art

In recent �ecades artists have progressively expanded the boundaries of art as they have sought to engage with an increasingly pluralistic environment. Teaching, curating and understanding of art and visual culture are likewise no longer grounded in traditional aesthetics but centred on significant ideas, topics and themes ranging from the everyday to the uncanny, the psychoanalytical to the political. The Documents of Contemporary Art series emerges from this context. Each volume focuses on a specific subject or body of writing that has been of key influence in contemporary art internationally. Edited and introduced by a scholar, artist, critic or curator, each of these source books provides access to a plurality of voices and perspectives defining a significant theme or tendency. For over a century the Whitechapel Gallery has offered a public platform for art and ideas. In the same spirit, each guest editor represents a distinct yet diverse approach - rather than one institutional position or school of thought - and has conceived each volume to address not only a professional audience but all interested readers.

Series Editor: Iwona Blazwick; Commissioning Editor: Ian Farr; Project Editor: Sarah Auld; Editorial Advisory Board: Roger Conover, Neil Cummings, Mark Francis, David Jenkins, Kirsty Ogg, Magnus af Petersens, Gilane Tawadros

INTRODUCTION// 12 CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET//022 THE NETWORK AS A MODE OF BEING//074 EXCHANGE IS THE OXYGEN OF CAPITAL// 138 CORRUPTION, INTRIGUE AND COVERT SOLIDARITY//188 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES//226 BIBLIOGRAPHY/228 INDEX//231 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS//237

CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET Sadie Plant Shuttle Systems, 1997//024 Umberto Eco The Encyclopaedia as Labyrinth, 1984//030 Robert Musil The Man without Qualities, 1930-43//032 Craig Saper Networked Art, 2001//032 Marta Minujin Simultaneity in Simultaneity (1966), 2004//035 Marshall McLuhan The Medium is the Massage, 1967//039 Lourdes Blanco Gego: Reticularea, 1969//040 Jack Burnham Systems Aesthetics, 1968//042 Lawrence Alloway Network: The Art World Described as a System, 1972//046 Caroline Tisdall Joseph Beuys: Honey Pump, 1977 //052 Peter Fend Brief History and Founding Documents of Ocean Earth, 1980-85//053 Felix Guattari The Three Ecologies, 1989//057 Vaclovas Mikailionis Power of the Earth, 2007//058 Pia Lindman Learning from Mould, 2013//060 Koncern ° FAX ONLY: Send more information, 1991//064 Bruno Latour Network: A Concept, Not a Thing Out There, 2005//068 THE NETWORK AS A MODE OF BEING Roy Ascott Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace? 1990//076 Jane Bennett What is an Assemblage?, 2010//084 Ann Lislegaard Time Machine, 2011//085 Aleksandra Mir HELLO: In Conversation with Lars Bang Larsen, 2013//086 Tiziana Terranova Network Dynamics, 2004//088 Ned Rossiter Organized Networks: Transdisciplinarity and New Institutional Forms, 2006//095

Noortje Marres There is Drama in Networks, 2007//100 Geert Lovink Orgnets in Practice//107 Hito Steyerl Digital Debris: Spam and Scam, 2011//110 Joasia Krysa Kurator: A Proposal for an Experimental, Permutational Software Application Capable of Curating Exhibitions, 2013//118 Okwui Enwezor Travel Notes: Living, Working and Travelling in a Restless World, 1997// 122 Saskia Sassen Locating Cities on Global Circuits, 2002//125 Pamela Allara Geobodies: Feminist Activists Crossing Borders, 2008// 126 Yuko Hasegawa Tarek Atoui: Within, 2013//134 Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl Sensing Grounds: Mangroves, Unauthentic Belonging, Extra-Territoriality, 2013//135 EXCHANGE IS THE OXYGEN OF CAPITAL

Marcel Mauss The Gift, 1925//140 Theodor W. Adorno Fish in Water, 1951//141 John Baldessari The Best Way to do Art, 1971//143 Guy Debord Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1971//143 Gilles Deleuze Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1990//146 Pit Schultz The Origins of the Nettime Mailing List: In Conversation with Pauline van Mourik Broekman, 1997//151 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello The New Spirit of Capitalism, 1999//155 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Network Production, 2000//158 Alexander Galloway Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, 2004//161

Lane Relyea Your Art World, or The Limits of Connectivity, 2006// 167 Manuel Castells Communication Power, 2009// 180 Jodi Dean Collective Desire and the Pathology of the Individual, 2013// 184 CORRUPTION, INTRIGUE AND COVERT SOLIDARITY Lea Porsager Odd, Indexical Ideas on the MultiBreasted Monstrosity, 2012// 190 Barry Miles Notes from Underground, 2006// 192 Stephen Willats Inside the Night, 1982// 195 Robert Hobbs Mark Lombardi: Global Networks,

2003//198 Hakim Bey The Temporary Autonomous Zone, 1991//202 Critical Art Ensemble Utopia, 2012//208 Steven Shaviro Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society, 2003//209 Paolo Virno A Grammar of the Multitude, 2003//212 Calvin Johnson Profile for MakeOutClub.com, 2001//214 Reza Negarestani Hyperstitional Entities of Oil, 2008//215 Colectivo Situaciones Promiscuity, 2009//219 Suzanne Treister Networks in Reverse: From the Interplanetary Internet via the ARPANET to the Last Pre-Internet Moment, 2013//221

BACTERIA

communicate with our cells, telling them about a world 'out there', a chatter of which we are very little aware, not to mention the resonances of a11 matter in the world, constantly humming to every part of our bodies, the boundaries of which thus dissolve, because we are also resonance, a cloud of microbes, ENERGY, SMELL AND LIGHT

Pia Lindman, 'Learning from Mould', 2013

Lars Bang Larsen Introduction//The Unimaginable Globality of Networks

It is fair to assume that the reader of this text belongs to the percentage of the world's population with Internet access, as does their writer. Yet if being a member of the 'online community' is a privilege, it is not one that we enjoy only when we feel like it: to be a citizen, consumer and worker is to be hooked up. Connectivity is a compulsion that subtends social participation and cultural imagination. Maybe this is why networked life is often perceived in terms of givens and general conditions: the economy is 'global'; friends and colleagues are all collapsed into one's 'network'; connectivity gives rise to 'complexity'. Our digital contemporaneity seems to beg such totalizations, which create opacity and silence by tending to put experience out of reach. In other words, as a theme, the network revolves inescapably around the Internet, today's network of networks, yet importantly it also stirs other fields, practices and materialities. For this reason, and wishing to counteract exclusive interpretations regarding media and periodization, this is not a book only about new media or the Internet era: instead, it takes its historical beginning before the Net and attempts to point beyond its domination in the present. In art, networks and webs cease to be instruments and infrastructure and can be acknowledged as phenomena that range across the infra, the macro and the in­ between. Thus the texts and works sampled in this book deal with topics as varied as cyborg traditions Uoasia Krysa); feminist activism (Pamela Allara); UK punk culture (Stephen Willats); communicative networks in fungal mould (Pia Lindman); and reflections on how historical trade routes inform the contemporary art biennial (Okwui Enwezor). Networks offer a unique perspective on structures and fault lines where the fact-based and the speculative, the historical and the non-human encroach on one another. Cosmologies are embedded in networks. Because networks tend to place themselves at the beginning and end of space, time and body, art is called for to go to the boundaries of experience. One can apply Sci-Fi writer William Gibson's paranoiac notion of cyberspace as a 'consensual hallucination' to ways in which networks usurp reality; the artist Mark Lombardi's drawings - 'narrative structures' that map out webs of corruption between politics, big business and old boys' networks in the years around the turn of the millennium - is an example of work that targets such insidious consensus with a symptomatic kind of hyper-attention that quite literally connects the dots between seemingly unrelated entities. A perhaps more exotic example from this reader is the media event FAX ONLY - Send more

12//INTRODUCTION

information (1991), created by the Copenhagen collaborative Koncern° as a meditation on how an exponential growth in the exchange of information will eventually lead to communicative entropy. Before it became dominated by digital connotations, the network was a social concept. In the eighteenth century Adam Smith defined a supply chain as a network; Jurgen Habermas describes the public sphere as a network; and the media theorist Friedrich Kittler defined his concept of discourse network (Aufschreibesysteme) as 'The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data'.1 In this way, as the first section, Connectivity before and beyond the Net, suggests, network theories and practices existed before we went online; Sadie Plant, for instance, links the age­ old, transcultural and gendered craft of weaving to writing and programming. Cited by management theory, the term network took on its cybernetic connotations in the late 1950s.2 Concurrently, artists developed other approaches to technology's societal tendency.Joseph Beuys' notion of soziales Plastik - social sculpture - took the form of a reticular structure in his installation Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honeypump in the Workplace, 1976), where honey flows in long transparent tubes that meander through the art institution. A kind of alchemical signifier for the integration of aesthetics and politics, individual and community, it is an artwork that materializes circulating social energies as well as spiritual processes. Where Beuys found a biological metaphor for the social sphere in the life of bees, Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) dealt - in a less holistic and symbolic manner - with the network as 'a structure underlying all vital elements in our universe'. 3 Made with segments and small rods of metal wire, her environments are based on the graphic problem of the line. Thus the Reticulareas (1969-77) are multidimensional, more or less irregular and willowy nets or webs, marking and reorganizing space and webbing-in their spectators. No two installations of her works are exactly the same, as their loose-jointed metal bits will arrange themselves anew. Both visceral and abstract, the Reticulareas disregard the distinction between human and non-human reality and make differences fall away between inside and outside, new and old, built and grown, outlining new, fragile junctions and meetings. A premonition of physicist Fritjof Capra's later, holistic idea that 'the network is the pattern common to all life', Gego's work embodies the insight that systems as well as organisms are webs, are something already there, as pre-forms or proto-geometries.4 For all their modesty Gego's cosmologies do make universal claims. But instead of a modernist techno­ rationalist utopia, a structure that is fundamentally open to the possibility of new developments is proposed, on the basis of a non-human vitality. In her work Gego insisted on the multiplicity of connections, their Larsen//The Unimaginable Globality of Networks// 13

interrelations and interstices, against the art object as the One. It is as a corrective, for example, to Minimalism's industrial sublimity and masculine­ coded rigour. Other artists found ways to eschew the one-way communication of single-channel media. It was mail art of the late 1950s and early 1960s that most radically developed a model for distributed authorship based on informal exchanges that played out between many participants. These were artists and non-artists alike, but all of them authors doubling as senders and receivers, in a gift economy that established a present of strange, communicational events; 'of things arriving and departing at unforeseen times and places', as art historian Ina Blom puts it. Thus mail art could be seen to 'place itself squarely in the realm of social exchanges, that is the realm whose entire principle of circulation and reciprocity is kept in check by the system of gifts'. 5 These idiosyncratically circulating missives questioned the public nature of official communication systems, as well as the framework of the art institution. Mail art seemed to do perfectly well without the latter, its history and canons. 6 Crucially, networks are not just something out there. Marshall McLuhan's famous statement that 'electronic circuitry is an extension of the central nervous system' was provocative in the 1960s, but the human body's physical integration with multimedia terminals makes this a mere observation today. If there is something quaint or inaccurate about McLuhan's evocation of a conjunction of human nerve endings and optic fibres, it is only because he suggested that this meeting occur at a determinate point in time and space, and that it augments the human nervous system. However, the machinic and the organic can hardly be thought of as distinct; nor does human existence precede that of the machine. They are already touching and formatting one another in new assemblages and somatic-technological economies. A brain is an organ that via haptic gestures connects the nervous system to electronic circuitry through a touch screen .. . or is it the screens that touch us with the pseudopodes of capital? In this way social formations and systems of communication, discourses and technologies, neurological and biological modes of being, new economies and cognitive styles bleed into one another in the network, and it seems counterproductive to talk about one without mentioning the other. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concept of the rhizome, borrowed from botany, owes its influence to its capacity for lateral articulation of structures and events. One can thus take a rhizomatic view of history that contests etymology, genealogy and the influence of root narratives. Instead of primal scenes and immaculate origins, this view would accept cross-pollinations and irregular developments at all levels of life and culture. When binary recapture of truth and essence is prevented, non­ linear energies and influences are set free. A world without a historical centre is a realm that can be created anew, because meetings and events occur in many 14//INTRODUCTION

I discovered the charm of the line in and of e line th s a ell w s a e c a p s itself - the line in drawn on a surfaceJ and the nothing between ey cross th n e h w g lin k ar sp e the lines and th I discovered that sometimes in-between ne itself li e th s a t n a t or p m i s the lines is a Ill

Gego, Sabiduros and Other Texts,

2005

empowered places. With his idea of 'the eternal network', for instance, Robert Filliou countered the military avant-garde metaphor as a principle of straight historic progress. Instead, Filliou held, each individual artist is part of an eternal network in which his or her knowledge - necessarily particular and incomplete - may supplement art as an investigation. 7 Accepting these multifarious definitions and histories of the network, and the notion of it as a dynamic principle, was the starting point for this selection of texts. Such methodological promiscuity is comparable to how networks seem charged with the power to connect different realms of being. This doesn't imply that there is a universal paradigm of 'the network' that exists over and beyond the particulars of any given network; as Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker point out, this would suggest 'a metaphysics of networks'.8 Rather, this selection of texts seeks to exacerbate differences by dealing with a variety of social, natural and technological phenomena and artistic practices, as much as with the methods available for analysing them. According to the sociologist Bruno Latour's definition, for instance, the event is a network - an assemblage of contributing factors and unruly effects - not a thing unto itself. Thus the event-as-network appears in the language that describes it Whether within or outside discourse, networks are integral to what it means to be a historical subject The second section, The Network as a Mode of Being, explores embodied modalities that concern active processes of political subjectivation, as well as subaltern existence, or subjection to the movements of capital in which networks serve exploitative purposes. This is also about living in the city: drawing on cross-cultural sources and influences of music, Tarek Atoui's project Within (2013) plays compositions and 'pulses' into the soundscape of the city of Sharjah, thus making various sonic movements feed off and feed back into each other. On the more speculative and Sci-Fi side of things, the text from Ann Lislegaard's digital animation Time Machine (2011) is performed by a stuttering fox-like animal that recites a passage from H.G. Wells' novel The Time Machine ( 1895) in which the protagonist travels 'unfathomable distances' and realizes in a way that is comparable to the way time is subordinated to space in a networked society - that time is a dimension of space; in this case, a space where strange beings meander along the curvature of time. To the educator Fernand Deligny, writing in the early 1980s about his work with autistic children, the network was an existential formation, part of a singular series of utterances and encounters that connect the individual with his or her social and political contexts; a properly human mode of being because it grows from the ground up as a particular kind of togetherness on the margins of institutional power. Today such a view would have to be supplemented with a perspective on the bio-political adjustment and fine-tuning that, indirectly and 16//INTRODUCTION

profoundly, affects human life. When power no longer has a place because it is transposed to networks, it goes viral. A stage for struggles for freedom and control, the Net variously accommodates, on the one hand, individual trajectories and anti-authoritarian forces, and on the other, the potential for the centralization of information and surveillance on a hitherto unseen scale. The Net is a threat to political institutions as we know them, and a mass ornament of control. In Manuel Castells' terse definition, the network is a structure that processes flows. One can add that structure and flow typically aren't neatly separated, and that there is also a feedback loop between the two in which the process affects the structure. Information highways, for instance, aren't inflexible like road systems but are prone to sprouting new connections, their bandwidth pulsating according to user demand. To sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, the network is simultaneously a 'crystallized form' and a 'chaotic non-form'; a paradox which implies that the digitally connected subject lives in a condition between doing and undoing, between being an actively communicating subject and a passive vehicle for information inside larger techno-linguistic sequences.9 Whether you are a mover or just a relay for flow processing in a feedback loop is never quite clear. It seems that when it comes to networks of any kind, ignorance and knowledge rub against each other in intimate ambiguity. A network is a dynamic order that you can't fathom or gauge, because of its double-bound nature and the fact that it might be coextensive with all that possibly exists. As Umberto Eco put it brilliantly, the rhizome is an 'unimaginable globality'.1 0 You can't negate it, depict it or stare it straight in the eye. In terms of a traditional aesthetic category to which the rhizomatic lends itself, every node that comprises it is a potential sublime because it is a site of multiple, perhaps infinite, connections and becomings. And so it must be speculated upon, conjured up, acted out. These factors contribute to the ineffable sovereignty of the Net as a highly adaptable, half-intelligent infrastructure for processes of economic abstraction particular to our time, as discussed in the third section, Exchange is the Oxygen of Capital. John Baldessari's work The Best Way to do Art ( 1971 ) - a text laconically accompanied by a photo of a jumbo jet in which one imagines the artist finding himself, or wishing to be - suggests, in this context, that networks carry mobility, and that mobility itself has become a producer of symbolic value; this type of mediation is what Toni Negri and Michael Hardt term 'network production'. Particularly germane to this discussion is how globalization's pervasive exchangeability produces de-differentiation. This can be described as an inflation in determinate qualities that nibbles away at characteristic differences; the difference between ideologies, between public and private space, citizen and consumer, government and economy, work and social life, human and non­ human, being connected and being alone, individualism and dissipated being, Larsen//The Unimaginable Globality of Networks// 17

and so on. Subjectivity is no longer perceived in terms of autonomy, as the result of a clear dialectic between self and world. We don't become somebody by choosing, as in existentialism, or through direct action, as in Marxism, or by balancing the ego and the unconscious, as in psychoanalysis; but - for better or worse, and in a sense more vulnerably - by being exposed to something outside of ourselves, by feeling out attractions and tensions, ceaselessly connecting and reconnecting, navigating flows and synching in with rhythms and intensities. It can be argued that the rise of the Net has been accompanied by - or provoked? - a paradigm shift from a dialectical understanding of history as struggles between incompatible forces, to a cybernetic understanding in which history plays out inside networks according to infra-systemic parameters. Such de-differentiation isn't totalitarian in the twentieth-century sense that phenomena are mechanically reduced through top-down domination by a political or symbolic power that forces its organization on all expression. To a disenchanted view, however, society has become no less total. Gilles Deleuze famously wrote in his essay 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', about the mutational capacity of apparatuses of control, that ' . . . controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.' 11 That is, a kind of mercurial homogenization where differences are liquidated through their mobilization in forms of circular control. For Marx, to be alienated from one's labour is to be cut off from its value and products, and ultimately one's very essence as a human being. In a networked world, however, one could argue that we are ambiguously estranged through a connectivity that separates us even further from society, nature, production and our humanity in their known forms. The means of production are at our fingertips and yet no direct action is possible, because agency is anticipated and mediated: our networked being is, as it were, ahead of our humanity. Following a Marxist line of thought, then, connectivity disconnects. This is a new figure of estrangement that works through separation and extreme proximity. How can you act, let alone hide, if your being is dissipated? It is probably the Lacanian concept of extimacy ( extimite) that comes closest to articulating this predicament of being turned inside-out in networks. The extimate is an estrangement that exists in extreme proximity with yourself. It is that which is intimate to your Self, yet external to who you believe you are : illness, feelings of shame, powerlessness or impotence. Or, in the case of the network, that which surrounds and envelops us but whose alien circuitry is also deeply within our Selves.12 In networked economies you may meet yourself as your own limit: you are the weakest link because it is up to you to hold things together - not only in relation to the outside world, but also in your relation to 18//INTRODUCTION

your own capacity for exposing, performing and valorizing your Self. The idea of dissipated being not only concerns states of technological distraction in relation to one's environment, but also ways in which it is purposeful for one's professional and social life to entertain a splintered self-perception. Many discussions about networked life today revolve around discussions of the common good. To Negri and Hardt, the globalized Empire is networked by definition, yet the Internet opens up the possibility of a 'spontaneous communism', called into being by an increased commonality in the digitized multitude. Less lyrically, Boltanski and Chiapello state that in a networked world there is no reason to pose the question of justice : ' . . . there is not even that co-presence in the same space which makes it possible, through simple comparison, to enquire into the relationship between the misery of some and the happiness of others'.13 In a crowd of scattered beings, it is not known between whom a scale of justice can be established. As Hannah Arendt had earlier pointed out, a common world can only survive to the extent that it appears in public, and the reality that the Internet re-wires is shot through with murky connections and dislocations. As a unique mediator through which everyone and everything relates to everything else, it is the One into which the many can be subsumed.14 According to Arendt, 'the end of the common world has come when it is seen only under one aspect and is permitted to present itself in only one perspective.' 1 5 From underground resistance to corporate oligarchy, the organization of life in networks produces a space for the shady social formations that headline section four, Corruption, Intrigue and Covert Solidarity. This last section deals with the occult potential of connectivity. An occult connection is external, not intrinsic or 'necessary' - this is why it is exchangeable and transmissible, open to empiricism and chance. Consider the grid: the grid epitomized modernism, as the interior space of reason, planning and representation. The network, on the other hand, is grid-like but also a flexible and plastic space of conjecture and proliferating connections. In other words, historical examples of networked forms of organization typically escaped modernist schemata of representation. This recondite potential has prompted artists to look outside modernity's mainstream - to hermetic traditions (Lea Porsager, Arturas Raila) and anti­ authoritarian experiments (Colectivo Situaciones, Hakim Bey, Critical Art Ensemble ) - for forms which can critically mirror, or dramatize and re-employ, the shadowy sovereignty of networks and how history can be rewritten through them. In Suzanne Treister's semi-fictional text 'Networks in Reverse', time implodes as the history of the Internet is rewound; the fact that Google deletes the entire known Web from its database has not a little to do with this. In one of his fragments, Theodor Adorno wrote with prophetic pessimism about 'all these nervous people' who instrumentalize their personal life until Larsen//The Unimaginable Globality of Networks// 19

'there is no relationship that is not seen as a "connection"', and who censor their impulses according to what is acceptable in their networks. Astonishingly, Adorno wrote these lines in 1951. For good reasons he wasn't referring to social media - even though his remark that 'the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature' makes you think he had a premonition - but to the mimeograph, as 'the only fitting, the unobtrusive means of dissemination.' 16 For those who don't remember, a mimeograph is a hand-operated stencil duplicator that was used to make copies before photocopiers were introduced. No doubt Adorno's icy analysis overlooks the network's potential for counter-power. On the other hand his brilliant disillusion can serve as an antidote against the nai"vete that tinges theories of the non-hierarchical nature of rhizomatic structures. Even if the reality described by networks is as global as ever, the Net is arguably a product of twentieth-century post-industrialism. Mechanistic and electrical, it sounds like something that humans have planned, built and turned on. No doubt our liquid modernity will soon begin to appeal to other notions of digital connectivity; concepts of fluidity that will more aptly accommodate the seamlessness of wireless communication, the plasmatic vitality of touchscreen technologies and a world shaped by the ebb and flow of semi-autonomous modulations. As it turns into an ocean or a cloud, into magma, The Net will become as obsolete as the mimeograph is today. Jurgen Habermas quoted in Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 1 2; Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1 900 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1990) 369. I am grateful to Jaime Stapleton for pointing out Adam Smith's concept of the supply chain as a network. For a brief history of the study of networks, see Newman, Barabasi and Watts, The Structure and Dynamics of Networks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 1 -8. 2

Craig Saper, Networked Art ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 ) 22.

3

Lourdes Blanco, 'Reticularea', in Gego: Reticularea (Caracas: Ediciones de la Galeria Conkright, 1969); reprinted in Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel, eds, Gego 1957- 1 988: Thinking the Line (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1988) 216.

4

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life ( 1997). From various quarters in pre-Internet modernity, communication networks have been subject to lyrical, holistic interpretations: the priest and palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, whose cosmic speculations were widely read by the counter-culture in the 1960s, foresaw a new evolutionary stage of 'collectivization' or 'socialization', through powerful systems of communication. He called this the Noosphere: 'the terrestrial sphere of thinking substance', a brain of brains enveloping all collective life. Marshall McLuhan described the global village as 'the Christian concept of the mystical body - all men as members of the body of Christ - this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions' (Both examples quoted from Linda Sargent Wood, A More Perfect Union: Holistic World Views and

20//INTRODUCTION

the Transformation ofAmerican Culture after World War II ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) 111 -37. 5

http: / /www.rayjohnson.org/Ray-Johnson-The-Present-of-Mail-Art/ray-johnson-the-present-of­

6

Exhibitions such as 'Before the Internet: Networks and Art', at Western Front, Vancouver, in 2007,

mail-art (last accessed July 31 2013 ). have explored artistic network projects prior to the development of the Internet by focusing on 'manifestos, correspondence art, Slowscan images, fax transmissions, music exchanges, collaborative publications, and documentation of community TV, video and radio projects'. http: //front.bc.ca/events/before-the-internet-networks-and-art/ (last accessed July 31 2013 ). 7

Robert Fi/liou defines the Eternal Network http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9BgOfsG7JOQ ( last accessed July 31 2013).

8

Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 1 18.

9

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism ( 1999) ( London and New York: Verso 2007) 146.

10 Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 80-82. 11 Gilles Deleuze, 'Postscript on the Societies of Control', October, no. 59 (Winter 1992) 3-7. 12 For the elaboration of a similar argument, see Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society ( Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003 ). 13 Boltanski and Chiapello, op. cit., 106. 14 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) 55. 1 5 Ibid., 58. 16 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London and New York: Verso, 2005) 1 56, 51.

Larsen//The Unimaginable Globality of Networks//21

S I XTY P E O P L E, O CC U PY I N G E V E RY OTH E R S EAT EAC H

W I T H A TV I N F R O N T O F T H E M A N D A RA D I O I N O N E O F

TH E I R H A N DS, W E R E F I L M E D E N T E R I N G A N D F I N D I N G

TH E I R S E ATS F R O M I N F R O N T A N D I N P R O F I L E,

STAN D I N G A N D EX I T I N G . S O M E W H O KN EW EAC H OTH E R

M OV E D A R O U N D I N T I G H T G RO U PS, OTH E R S A BS O R B E D

I N T H E T V W E R E H O P I N G S O M ETH I N G WO U LD H A P P E N .

T H E R E W E R E M E ET I N G S, PSYCH I AT R I C CO N S U LTAT I O N S

A N D T H E D E S I R E T O L EAV E

Marta Minujin, Simultaneity in Simultaneity, 1 966

CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

Sadie Plant Shuttle Systems// 1997

[ ... ] There is always a point at which, as Sigmund Freud admits, 'our material for some incomprehensible reason - becomes far more obscure and full of gaps'.1 And, as it happens, Freud's weaving women2 had made rather more than a small and debatable contribution to his great narrative of inventions and discoveries. Far more than a big and certain one as well. It is their micro-processes which underlie it all: the spindle and the wheel used in spinning yarn are the basis of all later axles, wheels and rotations; the interlaced threads of the loom compose the most abstract processes of fabrication. Textiles themselves are very literally the softwares linings of all technology. String, which has been dated to 20,000 BCE, is thought to be the earliest manufactured thread and crucial to 'taking the world to human will and ingenuity', not least because it is such multipurpose material. It can be used for carrying, holding, tying and trapping, and has even been described as 'the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth'. Textiles underlie the great canvases of Western art, and even the materials of writing. Paper now tends to be made from wood, but it too was woven in its early form, produced from the dense interlacing of natural fibres. The Chinese, with whom the production of paper is thought to have begun some 2,000 years ago, used bamboo, rags and old fishing nets as their basic materials; papyrus, from which the word paper is itself derived, was used in ancient Egypt, and later Arab cultures used the same flax from which linen is produced. Wood pulp gradually took over from the rags which Europe used until the nineteenth century, and most paper is now produced from fibres which are pulped and bleached, washed and dried, and then filtered onto a mesh and compressed into a fine felt. Evidence of sophisticated textile production dates to 6,000 BCE in the southeast regions of Europe, and in Hungary there is evidence that warp­ weighted looms were producing designs of extraordinary extravagance from at least 5,000 BCE. Archaeological investigations suggest that from at least the fourth millennium BCE Egyptian women were weaving linen on horizontal looms, sometimes with some two hundred threads per inch, and capable of producing cloths as wide as nine feet and seventy-five feet long. Circular warps, facilitating the production of seamless tubes for clothing, and tapestry looms, able to weave the dense complications of images visible in weft threads so closely woven to completely conceal the warps, were also in use in ancient Egypt where, long before individual artisans stamped their work with their own signatures,

24//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

trademarks and logos were woven in to indicate the workshop in which cloths had been produced. Cloths were used as early currency, and fine linens were as valuable as precious metals and stones. In China, where the spinning wheel is thought to have first turned, sophisticated drawlooms had woven designs which used thousands of different warps at least two and a half thousand years before such machines were developed in the West. It may be a bare necessity of life, but textiles work always goes far beyond the clothing and shelter of the family. In terms of quality, sophistication and sheer quantity, the production of textiles always seems to put some kind of surplus in play. The production of 'homespun' yarn and cloth was one of the first cottage industries, pin money was women's earliest source of independent cash, and women were selling surplus yarn and cloth and working as small-scale entrepreneurs long before the emergence of factories, organized patterns of trade, and any of the mechanisms which now define the textiles industry. Even when cloths and clothes can be bought off the rack, women continue to absorb themselves in fibrous fabrications. There is an obsessive, addictive quality to the spinning of yarn and the weaving of cloth ; a temptation to get fixated and locked in to processes which run away with themselves and those drawn into them. Even in cultures assumed to be subsistence economies, women who did only as much cooking, cleaning and childcare as was necessary tended to go into overdrive when it came to spinning and weaving cloth, producing far more than was required to clothe and furnish the family home. With time and raw materials on their hands, even 'Neolithic women were investing large amounts of extra time into their textile work, far beyond pure utility', suggesting that not everything was hand to mouth. These prehistoric weavers seem to have produced cloths of extraordinary complexity, woven with ornate designs far in excess of the brute demand for simple cloth. And wherever this tendency to elaboration emerged, it fed into a continual exploration of new techniques of dyeing, colour combination, combing, spinning, and all the complications of weaving itself. Even in Europe there had been several early and sophisticated innovations. Drawlooms had been developed in the Middle Ages, and while many of Leonardo da Vinci's 'machines for spinning, weaving, twisting hemp, trimming felt, and making needles' were never made, he certainly introduced the flyer and bobbin which brought tension control to the spinning wheel. Unlike 'the spinster using the older wheel', she now 'slackened her hold on the yarn to allow it to be wound onto the bobbin as it was being twisted'. It is often said that Leonardo's sixteenth-century work anticipated the industrial revolution 'in the sense that his "machines" (including tools, musical instruments and weapons) all aspired toward systemic automation'. But it was

Plant;/Shuttle Systems//25

his intuition that textiles machines were 'more useful, profitable, and perfect than the printing press' which really placed him ahead of his time. If printing had spread across the modern world, textiles led the frantic industrialization of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 'Like the most humble cultural assets, textiles incessantly moved about, took root in new regions . . .' The first manufactory was a silk mill on an island in the Derwent near Derby built early in a century which also saw the introduction of the spinning jenny, the water frame, the spinning mule, the flying shuttle, the witches' loom, and the power loom. A spiral of 'inventions in both spinning and weaving (interacting and mutually stimulating) had attracted capital, concentrated labour, increased output and swollen imports and exports'. This was cloth capitalism, a runaway process which quite literally changed the world. In the 1850s, it was said that if Providence had never planted the cotton shrub those majestic masses of men which stretch, like a living zone, through our central districts, would have felt no existence; and the magic pulse which has been felt ... in every department of national energy, our literature, our laws, our social condition, our political institutions, making us almost a new people, would never have been communicated'. Textiles had not merely changed the world: they seemed to have mutated its occupants well. 'Almost a new people ...' 'I was surprised at the place but more so at the people', wrote one commentator of Birmingham, the site of the first cotton-spinning mill. 'They were a species I had never seen.' While the industrial revolution is supposed to have made the break between handheld tools and supervised machines, the handmade and the mass-produced, the introduction of technology to more primitive textiles techniques is both a break with the old ways and a continuation of the lines on which the women were already at work. Even before its mechanization, the loom was described as the 'most complex human engine of them all', not least because of the extent to which it 'reduced everything to simple actions: the alternate movement of the feet worked the pedals, raising half the threads of the warp and then the other, while the hands threw the shuttle carrying the thread of the woof'. When John Heathcote, who patented a lacemaking machine just after Jacquard built his loom, first saw 'a woman working on a pillow, with so many bobbins that it seemed altogether a maze', his impression was that lace was a 'heap of chaotic material'. In an attempt to unravel the mystery, he 'drew a thread, which happened to draw for an inch or two longitudinally straight, then started off diagonally. The next drew out straight. Then others drew out in various directions. Out of four threads concurring to make a mesh, two passed one way, the third another and the fourth another still. But at length I found they were in fact used in an orderly manner . . .' It was then a matter of producing 'a fabric which was an exact imitation of the thread movements of handmade lace'. This

26//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

is both the ordering of chaos, and also how its networks replicate themselves. There were other spin-offs from textiles too. The weaving of complex designs demands far more than one pair of hands, and textiles production tends to be communal, sociable work allowing plenty of occasion for gossip and chat. Weaving was already multimedia: singing, chanting, telling stories, dancing and playing games as they work, spinsters, weavers and needle-workers were literally networkers as well. It seems that 'the women of prehistoric Europe gathered at one another's houses to spin, sew, weave and have fellowship'. Spinning yarns, fabricating fictions, fashioning fashions . . . the textures of woven cloth functioned as means of communication and information storage long before anything was written down. 'How do we know this? From the cloth itself' This is not only because, like writing and other visual arts, weaving is often 'used to mark or announce information' and 'a mnemonic device to record events and other data'. Textiles do communicate in terms of the images which appear on the right side of the cloth, but this is only the most superficial sense in which they process and store data. Because there is no difference between the process of weaving and the woven design, cloths persist as records of the processes which fed into their production: how many women worked on them, the techniques they used, the skills they employed. The visible pattern is integral to the process which produced it; the program and the pattern are continuous. Information can be stored in cloth by means of the meaningful messages and images which are later produced by the pen and the paintbrush, but data can also be woven in far more pragmatic and immediate ways. A piece of work so absorbing as cloth is saturated with the thoughts of the people who produced it, each of whom can flash straight back to whatever they were thinking as they worked. Like Proust's madeleine, it carries memories of an intensity which completely escapes the written word. Cloths were also woven 'to "invoke magic" - to protect, to secure fertility and riches, to divine the future, perhaps even to curse', and in this sense the weaving of spells is far more than a metaphorical device. 'The weaver chose warp threads of red wool for her work, 24 spun one direction, 24 spun the other way. She divided the bunch spun one way into 3 sets of 8 and the other bunch into 4 sets of 6, and alternated them. All this is perhaps perfectly innocent, but . . . ' If the weaving of such magical spells gives priority to the process over the completion of a task, this tendency is implicit in the production of all textiles. Stripes and checks are among the most basic of coloured and textured designs which can be woven in. Both are implicit in the grids of the woven cloth itself. Slightly more complex, but equally integral to the basic web, are the lozenges, or diamonds, still common in weaves across the world. These open diamonds are said to indicate fertility and tend to decorate the aprons, skirts and belts which are themselves supposed to be the earliest forms of clothing. 'These lozenges, Plant;/Shuttle Systems//27

usually with little curly hooks around the edge, rather graphically, if schematically, represent a woman's vulva.' These images are quite unlike those which are later painted on the canvas or written on the page. The lozenge is emergent from the cloth, diagonal lines implicit in the grids of the weave. And even the most ornate and complex of woven designs retains this connection to the warps and wefts. When images are later painted, or written in the form of words on a page, patterns are imposed on the passive backdrop provided by the canvas or the page. But textile images are never imposed on the surface of the cloth: their patterns are always emergent from an active matrix, implicit in a web which makes them immanent to the processes from which they emerge. As the frantic activities of generations of spinsters and weaving women makes abundantly clear, nothing stops when a particular piece of work has been finished off. Even when magical connections are not explicitly invoked, the finished cloth, unlike the finished painting or the text, is almost incidental in relation to the processes of its production. The only incentive to cast off seems to be the chance completion provides to start again, throw another shuttle, cast another spell. As writing and other visual arts became the privileged bearers of memory and messages, weaving withdrew into its own screens. Both canvases and paper reduce the complexities of weaving to raw materials on which images and signs are imposed: the cloths from which woven patterns once emerged now become backcloths, passive matrices on which images are imposed and interpreted as if from on high. Images are no longer carried in the weave, but imprinted on its surface by the pens and brushes with which shuttles become superficial carriers of threads. Guided by the hand-eye coordinations of what are now their male creators, patterns become as individuated and unique as their artists and authors. And whereas the weave was once both the process and the product, the woven stuff, images are now separated out from matrices to which they had been immanent. The artist sees only the surface of a web which is covered as he works; the paper on which authors now look down has no say in the writing it supports. The processes themselves become dematerialized as myths, legends and metaphors. Ariadne's thread, and the famous contest in which the divine Athena tore mortal Arachne's weaving to shreds, are among the many mythical associations between women and webs, spinsters and spiders, spinning yarns and storylines. For the Greeks, the Fates, the Moirai, were three spinsters - Klotho, Lachesis and Atropos - who produced, allotted and broke the delicate contingency of the thread of life. In the folktales of Europe, spindles become magic wands, Fates become fairies, and women are abandoned or rescued from impossible spinning and weaving tasks by supernatural entities, godmothers and crones who transform piles of flax into fine linen by means more magical than weaving itself, as in 'Rumpelstiltskin', 'The Three Spinsters', and 'The Sleeping Beauty'. 28//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

'European folktales are full of references to the making of magical garments, especially girdles, in which the magic seems to be inherent in the weaving, not merely in special decoration.' As for the fabrics which persist: evaluated in these visual terms, their checks and diagonals, diamonds and stripes become insignificant matters of repeating detail. This is why Freud had gazed at work which was so literally imperceptible to him. Struggling only to interpret the surface effects of [his daughter] Anna's work as though he was looking at a painting or a text, the process of weaving eluded him: out of sight, out of mind, out of his world. This was a process of disarmament which automation should have made complete. But if textiles appear to lose touch with their weaving spells and spans of time, they also continue to fabricate the very screens with which they are concealed. And because these are processes, they keep processing. 'Behind the screen of representation', weaving wends its way through even the media which supplant it. While paper has lost its associations with the woven fabrics with which it began, there are remnants of weaving in all writing: yarns continue to be spun, texts are still abbreviated textiles, and even grammar - glamour - and spelling retain an occult connectivity. Silkscreens, printing presses, stencils, photographic processes and typewriters : by the end of the nineteenth century images, texts and patterns of all kinds were being processed by machines which still used matrices as means to their ends, but also repeated the repeating patterns downgraded by the one-off work of art. And while all these modes of printing were taking technologies of representation to new heights, they were also moving on to the matrices of times in which these imprinting procedures would reconnect with the tactile depth of woven cloth. [ . . . ] ['The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex', 1924.] 2

[ In 'Femininity' ( 1 933), Freud discusses the techniques of 'plaiting and weaving' as a historical contribution to civilization.]

Sadie Plant, extract from Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture ( New York: Doubleday, 1 997) 60-69 [footnotes not included].

Plant;/Shuttle Systems//29

Umberto Eco The Encyclopaedia as Labyrinth//1984 [ . . . ] There are three types of labyrinth. The first, the classical one, was linear. Theseus entering the labyrinth of Crete had no choices to make: he could not but reach the centre, and from the centre the way out. That is the reason by which at the centre there was the Minotaur, to make the whole thing a little more exciting. Such a labyrinth is ruled by a blind necessity. Structurally speaking, it is simpler than a tree: it is a skein, and, as one unwinds a skein, one obtains a continuous line. In this kind of labyrinth the Ariadne thread is useless, since one cannot get lost: the labyrinth itself is an Ariadne thread. This kind of labyrinth has nothing to do with an encyclopaedia, irrespective of its important and venerable symbolic meanings. The second type is called in German Irrgarten or Irrweg; a good English term for it is maze. The maze is a Manneristic invention; iconologically speaking, it does not appear before the late Renaissance. A maze displays choices between alternative paths, and some of the paths are dead ends. In a maze one can make mistakes. If one unwinds a maze, one gets a particular kind of tree in which certain choices are privileged in respect to others. Some alternatives end at a point where one is obliged to return backwards, whereas others generate new branches, and only one among them leads to the way out. In this kind of labyrinth, one does need an Ariadne thread; otherwise, one might spend one's life in turning around by repeating the same moves. [ . . . ] A maze does not need a Minotaur: it is its own Minotaur: in other words, the Minotaur is the visitor's trial-and-error process. In a labyrinth of the third type is a net ( maybe the word meander characterizes it as different from a maze and from a plain labyrinth). The main feature of a net is that every point can be connected with every other point, and, where the connections are not yet designed, they are, however, conceivable and designable. A net is an unlimited territory. A net is not a tree. The territory of the United States does not oblige anybody to reach Dallas from New York by passing through St Louis, Missouri ; one can also pass through New Orleans. A net - as Pierre Rosenstiehl (Paris-Pekin par le transsiberien, 1980) suggests - is a tree plus corridors connecting its nodes so as to transform the tree into a polygon, or into a system of embedded polygons. But this comparison is still misleading: a polygon has some borderlines. On the contrary, the abstract model of a net has neither a centre nor an outside. The best image of a net is provided by the vegetable metaphor of the rhizome suggested by Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome, 1976). A rhizome is a tangle of bulbs and tubers appearing like 'rats squirming one on top of the other'. The 30//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

characteristics of a rhizomatic structure are the following: (a) Every point of the rhizome can and must be connected with every other point. (b) There are no points or positions in a rhizome; there are only lines (this feature is doubtful: intersecting lines make points). ( c) A rhizome can be broken off at any point and reconnected following one of its own lines. ( d) The rhizome is anti-genealogical (e) The rhizome has its own outside with which it makes another rhizome; therefore, a rhizomatic whole has neither outside nor inside. (f) A rhizome is not a calque but an open chart which can be connected with something else in all of its dimensions ; it is dismountable, reversible and susceptible to continual modifications. (g) A network of trees which open in every direction can create a rhizome (which seems to us equivalent to saying that a network of partial trees can be cut out artificially in every rhizome). (h) No one can provide a global description of the whole rhizome; not only because the rhizome is multidimensionally complicated, but also because its structure changes through time ; moreover, in a structure in which every node can be connected with every other node, there is also the possibility of contradictory inferences : if p, then any possible consequence of p is possible, including the one that, instead of leading to new consequences, leads again to p, so that it is true at the same time both that if p, then q and that if p, then non-q. (i ) A structure that cannot be described globally can only be described as a potential sum of local descriptions. (j ) In a structure without outside, the describers can look at it only by the inside; as Rosenstiehl suggests, a labyrinth of this kind is a myopic algorithm; at every node of it no one can have the global vision of all its possibilities but only the local vision of the closest ones: every local description of the net is a hypothesis, subject to falsification, about its further course; in a rhizome blindness is the only way of seeing (locally), and thinking means to grope one's way. This is the type of labyrinth we are interested in. This represents a model ( a Model Q) for an encyclopaedia as a regulative semiotic hypothesis. [ . . . ] Umberto Eco, extract from Semiotica e filosofia de/ linguaggio (Turin: Einaudi, 1 984); trans. Semiotics and the Philosophy ofLanguage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 984) 80-82.

Eco//The Encyclopaedia as Labyrinth//31

Robert Musil The Man without Qualities// 1930-43

[ . . . ] The fact is, living permanently in a well-ordered State has an out-and-out spectral aspect: one cannot step into the street or drink a glass of water or get into a tram without touching the perfectly balanced levers of a gigantic apparatus of laws and relations, setting them in motion or letting them maintain one in the peace and quiet of one's existence. One knows hardly any of these levers, which extend deep into the inner workings and on the other side are lost in a network the entire constitution of which has never been disentangled by any living being. Hence one denies their existence, just as the common man denies the existence of the air, insisting that it is mere emptiness; but it seems that precisely this is what lends life a certain spectral quality - the fact that everything that is denied reality, everything that is colourless, odourless, tasteless, imponderable and non­ moral, like water, air, space, money and the passing of time, is in reality what is most important. Man is at times seized with panic as in the helplessness of dream, by a gale of movement, wildly lashing out like an animal that has got into the incomprehensible mechanism of a net. [ . . . ] Robert Musil, extract from Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Berlin, 1930, 1933 ; Lausanne 1943); trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, The Man without Qualities (London: Secker & Warburg, 1961 ) 182-3.

Craig Saper Networked Art//2001

[ . . . ] The Oxford English Dictionary's definitions and usage history of the term network suggest two contexts : mass-media networks and management terminology. The citations to business all suggest that the term took on its cybernetic connotations around 1957. The copious usage history of the term does not include artists' networks, and neither mail art nor correspondence art appear anywhere. [ . . . ] Joseph Beuys used the term soziales Plastik [ social sculpture ] to describe the process of addressing social issues using art strategies. This social art paradoxically advocates both an extreme individualism and a collective 32//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

internationalism, employing both artisanal and mass-production techniques. This paradoxical motivation, production and distribution form the basis for an intimate bureaucracy: they create intimate aesthetic situations by using all the trappings of bureaucratic procedures. Often these situations produce networks of insiders who share idiosyncratic code systems. One usually thinks of intimacy as the opposite of objectification, procedural utility and bureaucratic manipulation. The poetic practices of assemblings inherently offer alternatives to the preconceived opposition between the artisanal village and the mechanized global society. [ . . . ] A well-known work that captures the intimacy of an event is Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance ( 1962/1995 ). This artist's book, originally in French, with revised versions later produced in English and German, presents photographs of the remains of a meal (which Spoerri glued to his table) accompanied by anecdotes about each object. The anecdotes appear in footnote form, and the book looks like an ethnographer's notebook on Spoerri's life. In the later English-language edition subtitled re-anecdoted version, Emmett Williams offers his own anecdotes for each of the photographs. He reads the images according to his reveries and intimate recollections while staying alone in Spoerri's apartment. Both books are linked to Spoerri's and Williams' networks, through their connections to Fluxus. Spoerri was also a member of the Nouveaux Realistes [ . . . ]. Beginning in the mid 1950s, these artists became interested in systems, especially postal systems. Yves Klein's Timbre bleu ( 1957-59), a fake blue postage stamp, created a scandal among post office bureaucrats after it was successfully mailed and postmarked. Arman started using early twentieth-century rubber stamps in his work, and it was with the work of the Nouveaux Realistes that artists began to play with the postal system and other forms of bureaucracy as parts of everyday life. They sought to project intimacy onto otherwise impersonal systems. They also used a graphic sculptural poetry rather than one closely connected to the voice, and by moving away from the voice they recast intimacy and opened the way for future artists to appropriate logos, corporate names, mailing lists and distribution systems. Intimate bureaucracies monitor the pulse of the society of the spectacle and the corporatized bureaucracies: economics, as in big business; culture, as in museums and art markets ; mass media, as in studio systems and telecommunication networks ; and politics, as in 'big government'. Rather than simply mounting a campaign against big conglomerations of business, government and culture, these artists' networks and their publications use the forms of corporate bureaucracies for intimate ends. Rather than reach the lowest common denominator, they seek to construct what those in the business world would call niche marketing to

Saper//Networked Art//33

specific demographics. Ironically, the model these artists developed has now become the new mantra of businesses interested in utilizing the World Wide Web and the Internet, as these technologies allow for very specific niche marketing. It is the very system of the new business model used in Internet marketing that these artists' networks explored, emulated and resisted. The apparent oxymoron intimate bureaucracies suggests not only a strategy of artists' networks and their published periodic compilations, but the very basis for the new productive mythology surrounding the Internet. Electronic networks combine a bureaucracy, with its codes, passwords, links and so on, with niche marketing, intimate personal contacts and the like, creating a hybrid situation, or performance. This is not merely business performance masquerading as performance art, not only performance art mocking business, but the emergence of an alternative politics. [ ... ) Intimate bureaucracies, whose works are better understood in terms of processes, procedures, systems and situations, stage a possibility - actualized rather than utopian - of combining two apparently opposite tendencies in Western culture. These artists' networks, and their conglomerated periodicals, stress the collective production process, playing with (rather than rejecting) the trappings and procedures of large institutional bureaucracies, corporate aliases and the centralized efficiency and money-saving process of collecting the pieces of the assemblage and then sending it out. It is the Federal Express process in miniature: all the packages are shipped to one central location and then are sent out to their various destinations. The 'finished' product of the periodical as an artwork is not merely a documentation of a closed collective art experiment; it is a provocation for further experimentation. The democratic spirit exists in the infinite potential of distributing these periodicals to future audiences. For example, in the premiere issue of Running Dog One and Done ( 1976), a letter from the editor, Michael Crane, explains, 'The attempt of this publication is to present the documents of the experiments and explorations artists are undertaking today on an international level.' Crane goes on to justify the publication's unbound pages by explaining that 'the readers can recycle the pages within their own information systems'. The title of this assembling also contains an ironic allusion to Mao's condemnation of capitalist entrepreneurs as 'running dogs'. The premiere issue is packaged in a portfolio with a silhouette reproduction of Eadweard Muybridge's Greyhound Running (1879) on the cover. The introduction and cover art point to a desire among participants to encourage and facilitate sharing by creating a venue in which artists can experiment rather than showcase finished work. These publications have an 'in-process' feel, and when art is understood as an experiment rather than the making of a masterpiece, the gallery system loses its competitive edge over faster distribution systems. The

34//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

works on the artists' networks seek to challenge both the gallery system and the corporatized world in which art is now marketed and distributed. [ . . . ] Craig Saper, extract from Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 ) 22-6.

Marta Minujin Simultaneity in Simultaneity (1966)//2004 In April 1966, Marta Minujin of Argentina, Wolf Vostell of Germany and Allan Kaprow of the United States came up with the idea of creating three different events simultaneously in their three respective countries. Part of Vostell, Kaprow and Minujin's Happenings would take place at the same time, on the same day; in other words, in addition to creating his or her own Happening, each one would perform part of the activities of the Happenings of the other artists. Specifically, it was set for Monday 24 October at midnight, the signal of a change in the environment here in Buenos Aires. Part of the Happenings of Kaprow and Vostell plus the instantaneous invasion by Marta Minujin would be aired jointly on [Argentina's] Channel 13. Radio Municipal and Radio Libertad would broadcast ten minutes during which you could hear the voices of Ka prow and Vostell listing the alternatives of the simultaneous Happening, plus the text read by Marta Minujin, to some degree linked to the mute images of what could be seen on television. The Happening created by Marta Minujin, with the collaboration of Leopoldo Maler, which took place at the Instituto Oi Tella was called Simultaneity in Simultaneity.

Two Happenings were created, simultaneously, of course: 1) Instantaneous Invasion (radio, TV, telephone, telegram) consisting of a ten­ km-minute broadcast on 'University on the Air' (Channel 13 TV), and another ten minutes on Radio Libertad, simultaneously with Radio Excelsior. This Happening, to be performed on Monday 24 October, would take place at the same time in Berlin and New York. Wolf Vostell in Berlin and Allan Kaprow in New York would receive instructions from Marta Minujin by radiophone at the same time that both would give instructions to Marta Minujin over the same medium for her to perform her Happening. Previously, one thousand people who live alone had been identified, and they Minujin//Simultaneity in Simultaneity//35

would be in their respective houses at the time of the broadcast; they would be 'the invaded'. In addition, all of them had been photographed, filmed, and had their voices recorded to be included in the broadcast. Let us now see what would happen on day D at time T: 'He' knows that something is going to happen, turns on the TV, and settles down to see the Happening; immediately Marta Minujin appears, talking to him and telling him that the radio must be tuned in for him to find the text related to each image. Each image has a number, and he has to change stations in accordance with the number (for example image 1 is Radio Libertad and image 2 Radio Excelsior). Meanwhile someone calls him on the phone and at the same time he receives a telegram, so that for ten minutes he is a prisoner of the media, with his radio in his hand and the TV turned on, answering the phone and receiving telegrams. And the Happening is over. 2) Surrounded by Simultaneity (TVs and radios for each of the people participating in the Happening at the Instituto Torcuato Oi Tella, slides, movies, photographs, recorders). a) Preliminary phase on Thursday 13 October beginning at 7:00 pm: sixty invited participants enter the audiovisual room at the Institute, where there are sixty TVs and sixty portable radios ready for each one. While they are finding their places, their voices and sounds - as they give their impressions - are recorded, and they are filmed and photographed in various positions. Then they are instructed to leave, and once again they are filmed and photographed. b) Performance phase on Monday 24 October at midnight: the same people who attended the preliminary phase enter the Institute, wearing the same clothes they had on before. On the screen in front, they see themselves, finding their places as they did the time before, while slides are projected on the walls that show them from front and side views. On the stage screen they can see themselves entering and sitting down. Each participant is seated in front of a television and is given a radio. On the television, they can watch the instantaneous invasion. Meanwhile, they can tune in on their portable radios to the stations whose initials appear on the television screens. In this way, a double situation is created in which the participants will see themselves reflected in the hall and on the television receivers. The end of the Happening coincides with the conclusion of the special programme on the TV and on the radios. When they get up from their armchairs to leave, the action is repeated, projected on the stage screen. The End. [ . .. ] Twenty-four hours before the night of Thursday 13 October 1966, telephone calls were made to the sixty people who participated in Surrounded by Simultaneity, the first part of the Happening created by Marta Minujin. The sixty people chosen among journalists, reporters and press staff were in 36//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

this case the ones to be photographed and reported on; every one of their steps, gestures and movements was detected by seventeen photographers located around the hall, and their voices were captured by several tape recorders. The remaining people came from television, radio, the movies, universities, workers and executives. These sixty people, occupying every other seat each, with a television in front of them and a radio in one of their hands, were filmed entering and finding their seats from in front and in profile, standing and exiting. To do this, they had to wait two and a half hours, which led to fatigue, dissatisfaction and boredom. Some of the participants who knew each other moved around in tight groups ; others absorbed in the television were hoping that something would happen; there were meetings, psychiatric consultations, and the desire to leave. At 10:00 pm, total impatience prevailed and they began to leave, for which reason it was necessary to cut the filming to half of what was planned and to pressure them to have photographs done one by one in profile, marking out six paces against the lateral walls of the hall. By 10:30, no one remained in the hall ; the material obtained was very limited, the recorded sounds confused, and both slides and filming showed the rushed situation. Therefore, Surrounded by Simultaneity was transformed into something else, and sixty more people were allowed to enter the hall. [The work was accompanied by the following text ( 1966), first published as 'Simultaneidad in Simultaneidad', in Oscar Masotta, et al., Happenings ( Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Alvarez, 1967); trans. Eileen Brockbank. ] On October 24, 1966, from midnight to 1 2 : 10 am, these activities will be executed simultaneously in New York, Buenos Aires and Berlin. The activities may be acted out by anyone who wants to, at the same time in each city. Time

City

Actors

Authors

Activities

1 2 : 00-12 : 04 am

Berlin

Vostell

Vostell

Take a bottle of wine and write fallex on it, put the bottles on the adjacent corners. Fill out a telegram that says milk and the name of the streets and send the

Minujin//Simultaneity in Simultaneity//37

telegram to the White House in Washington the same day. 1 2 : 00-1 2 : 04 am 1 2 : 00-1 2 : 04 am After 1 2 :00 1 2 : 04-12 :07 am 12 : 04- 12 :07 am 12 : 04- 1 2 : 07 am

New York Buenos Aires Anyplace else Berlin New York Buenos Aires

12 : 04-12 :07 am 1 2 : 07- 12 : 10 am

Anyplace else Berlin

1 2 : 07- 1 2 : 10 am 1 2 : 07- 1 2 : 1 0 am 12 :07- 1 2 : 1 0 am 1 2 : 1 0- 1 2 : 1 1 am

New York Buenos Aires Anyplace else Berlin

1 2 : 1 0- 1 2 : 1 1 am 1 2 : 10- 1 2 : 1 1 am 1 2 : 1 0- 1 2 : 1 1 am

New York Buenos Aires Anyplace else

Kaprow Minujin Anyone who wants to Vostell Kaprow Spread marmalade on your car and lick it. Then Ka prow open the car doors and Minujin allow people who are covered with metallic paper to fall. Anyone who wants to Minujin Simultaneity in Vostell Simultaneity Kaprow Minujin Anyone who wants to Vostell Polaroid Polaroid photographs must be made of each of the scenes and must be sent to the 3 cities by telephotography. They must be projected for 48 hours nonstop in Galerie Block, Frobenstr. 18, Berlin Kaprow Minujin Anyone who wants to

Marta Minujin, extract from 'Artists' Projects' section in Ana Langoni, 'Oscar Masotta and the Art of Media', in Ines Katzenstein, ed., Listen, Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant­ Garde (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004) 237-41.

38//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

Marshall McLuhan The Medium is the Massage// 1967

[ ... ] Ours is a brand-new world of all-at-onceness. 'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village ... a simultaneous happening. We are back in acoustic sp ace. We have begun again to structure the primordial feeling, the tribal emotions from which a few centuries of literacy divorced us. We have had to shift our stress of attention from action to reaction. We must now know in advance the consequences of any policy or action, since the results are experienced without delay. Because of electric speed, we can no longer wait and see. [ . . . ] At the high speeds of electric communication, purely visual means of apprehending the world are no longer possible; they are just too slow to be relevant or effective. Unhappily, we confront this new situation with an enormous backlog of outdated mental and psychological responses. We have been left d-a-n-g-1-i-n-g. Our most impressive words and thoughts betray us - they refer us only to the past, not to the present. Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically­ configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication ensures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay. [ ... ] Marshall McLuhan, extract from McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1 967 ); reprinted edition (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2001 ) 63.

McLuhan//The Medium is the Massage//39

Lourdes Blanco Gego: Reticularea// 1969 Despite its brilliant material accomplishments in many fields of human endeavour, technology has failed to bring harmony to humanity's collective consciousness. The result is a widespread sense of frustration - particularly painful precisely because today most human activity is geared to the technological. Technology has all but wiped out many of our traditional points of reference without adequately providing new ones. On one hand, numerous efforts are being made in the visual arts to bridge the gap between old forms and new possibilities offered by technology. Artists in the United States and Europe are studying the new media, believing that rapprochement and competent utilization of technology's advances can help to stem frustration while providing fresh, virtually unlimited resources for creation and discovery. The results, however, have been only partly successful and usually limited to groups with access to the media plus financial backing for experimental work. Paradoxically, while the influence of technology spreads, the participation it offers to underdeveloped communities diminishes. In general, art-technology suffers from a lack of genuine integration, either because works remain superficial or because they are merely art applied to technology or vice versa. On the other hand, frustration has set off a violent rejection of the entire technological apparatus, its inroads into society and its subservience to political ambition. Generally speaking, the creative activity encouraged by artists who resent the yoke of technology is characterized at present by an absence of order. There is a conscientious rejection of structure as an aesthetic component. Moreover, aesthetics itself is dismissed in favour of a creative process conducted within the social scene, with obvious political overtones. There is, I believe, a third alternative to the crisis. It is a creative vein pursued by those artists who are neither lured by technology and its gadgets nor prepared to bury it. They continue to believe that to accept an absence of structure - in art and in life - is to resign oneself to the view that destruction, after all, is an overwhelming force, and that therefore those who woo it negate life. Gego is such an artist. Her entire creative life has been dedicated to a search for essence, or to put it another way, for the structure underlying all vital elements in our universe. She remains faithful to familiar elements such as line and metal, assured that they are still valid in the discovery of untapped visual experiences. What's more, she relishes the simple pleasure of working with humble materials. Her insistence on line and its capacity to forge a clear language of fresh and unlimited dimensions is one of the most admirable commitments in current 40//CONNECTMTY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

Venezuelan art. Line is the common denominator of all her work - prints, drawings and sculpture. The line is her compass to space. Tenor, modulation, length and character are varied accordingly, freely, as if applied in swift brushstrokes (in her small works, such as the wire sculptures of 1965 and 1967), or in rigorous disposition which strengthens the pure, geometric character of her larger pieces, in which the demands of scale impose calculation and design ( as in the iron construction series of 1 960, 1961 and 1965). From the outset of her sculptural work some ten years ago, Gego has posed, alternately, several problems which she now brings to a successful synthesis in her environmental work Reticularea: concern for structure and virtual volume as rendered by line, without formal obeisance to functional supporting elements ; multiplicity of vision and weightlessness as provided by transparency; and the suggestion of subtle movement in space without resorting to moire effects. Walking into Reticularea as it was arranged in Caracas' Museo de Bellas Artes is like entering the domain of a friendly giant spider. A web-like wire structure extends over ceiling and walls, cascading down at some points into the space/ room or shrinking back into the corners. Primary units - something like the building blocks of organic reticula - play out a game of multiplication in space, as vital as cells in a living organism and as ephemeral as magic. Large in scale (limited only by the size of the room in which it is placed), Reticularea combines the grace of Gego's small works with the clarity and substance of her large pieces. Intimacy, nuance and expressive directness, so often dissipated when models are blown up to outdoor scale, remain. As an environmental work, moreover, it is equally successful, for it imparts to viewers the sensation that they are physically involved in what their eyes focus upon. Like most of her sculpture, Reticularea is an outgrowth of drawing, to which Gego returns after each foray in three dimensions. It is in the intimacy and directness of drawing that she replenishes ideas and finds new energy. And if Reticularea, more than her other sculpture, is closer to drawing, it is because the process of construction is similar to drawing, without the limitations of paper. Line in her drawings and sculpture had until now pursued parallel paths, either horizontal or vertical rhythms. Early this year, however, her line, on paper, took on an entirely different character: it became radial, it traced triangles, hexagons. The step into spaces was made with linear elements such as florist's and stainless steel wire - clipped to manageable lengths - with which she could draw freely in space, delineating volume without confining it. Reticularea's formal origins can be traced to Alexander Calder's early wire sculptures as well as to Buckminster Fuller's constructive design for the geodesic dome. Yet it is neither descriptive, though it evokes the real, nor systematic, though it adheres to a unifying underlying system. Despite its irregularity and its

Blanco//Gego: Reticularea//41

contrast of pure, spaced-out forms of single lines with the intricacy of overlapping clusters, the sensation of free order prevails. An indoor work with an outdoor scale, Reticularea evokes the living, whether by a cellular or molecular suggestion. It works on the viewer, eliciting his attention. Visually, it defines space as indefinite, flowing, unlimited. It is both friendly and forbidding, related alike to man-made structures and to structures of nature and the universe. And though frankly open and direct, easily decipherable in formal terms, it still baffles like the distant stars, glimmering and elusive. Lourdes Blanco, 'Reticularea', in Gego: Reticularea (Caracas: Ediciones de la Galeria Conkright, 1969); reprinted in Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel, eds, Gego 1 957- 1 988: Thinking the Line ( Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1988) 216-17.

Jack Burnham Systems Aesthetics// 1968

[ . . . ] We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done. The priorities of the present age revolve around the problems of organization. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, ongoing relationships between organic and non-organic systems, be these neighbourhoods, industrial complexes, farms, transportation systems, information centres, recreation centres, or any of the other matrices of human activity. All living situations must be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values. Intuitively many artists have already grasped these relatively recent distinctions, and if their 'environments' are on the unsophisticated side, this will change with time and experience. [ . . . ] Situated between aggressive electronic media and two hundred years of industrial vandalism, the long held idea that a tiny output of art objects could somehow 'beautify' or even significantly modify the environment was na·ive. A parallel illusion existed, in that artistic influence prevails by a psychic osmosis given off by such objects. Accordingly lip service to public beauty remains the province of well-guarded museums. Through the early stages of industrialism it remained possible for decorative media, including painting and sculpture, to embody the aesthetic impulse; but as technology progresses this impulse must identify itself with the means of research and production. Obviously nothing could be less true for the present situation. In a society thus estranged only the 42//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

didactic function of art continues to have meaning. The artist operates as a quasi-political provocateur, though in no concrete sense is he an ideologist or a moralist. L'art pour l'art and a century's resistance to the vulgarities of moral uplift have ensured that. The specific function of modern didactic art has been to show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment. This accounts for the radicality of Marcel Duchamp and his enduring influence. It throws light on Pablo Picasso's lesser position as a seminal force. As with all succeeding formalist art, Cubism followed the tradition of circumscribing art value wholly within finite objects. In an advanced technological culture the most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis-a-vis society. Artistic nihilism established itself through this condition. At the outset the artist refused to participate in idealism through craft. 'Craft-fetishism', as termed by the critic Christopher Caudwell, remains the basis of modern formalism. Instead the significant artist strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society. Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Robert Morris are similarly directed in this respect. Gradually this strategy transforms artistic and technological decision-making into a single activity - at least it presents that alternative in inescapable terms. Scientists and technicians are not converted into 'artists', rather the artist becomes a symptom of the schism between art and technics. Progressively the need to make ultrasensitive judgements as to the uses of technology and scientific information becomes 'art' in the most literal sense. As yet the implication that art contains survival value is nearly as suspect as attaching any moral significance to it. Though with the demise of literary content, the theory that art is a form of psychic preparedness has gained articulate supporters. Art, as an adaptive mechanism, is reinforcement of the ability to be aware of the disparity between behavioural pattern and the demands consequent upon the interaction with the environment. Art is rehearsal for those real situations in which it is vital for our survival to endure cognitive tension, to refuse the comforts of validation by affective congruence when such validation is inappropriate because too vital interests are at stake . . . The post-formalist sensibility naturally responds to stimuli both within and outside the proposed art format. To this extent some of it does begin to resemble 'theatre', as imputed by Michael Fried [in 'Art and Objecthood', 1967 ]. More likely though, the label of theatricality is a red herring disguising the real nature of the shift in priorities. In respect to Fried's argument, the theatre was never a purist medium, but a conglomerate of arts. In itself this never prevented the theatre from achieving 'high art'. For clearer reading, rather than maintaining Mr Fried's Burnham//Systems Aesthetics//43

adjectives, theatrical or literalist art, or the phrase used until now in this essay, post-formalist aesthetic, the term systems aesthetic seems to encompass the present situation more fully. The systems approach goes beyond a concern with staged environments and happenings; it deals in a revolutionary fashion with the larger problem of boundary concepts. In systems perspective there are no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame. Conceptual focus rather than material limits define the system. Thus any situation, either in or outside the context of art, may be designed and judged as a system. In as much as a system may contain people, ideas, messages, atmospheric conditions, power sources, and so on, a system is, to quote the systems biologist, Ludwig van Bertalanffy, a 'complex of components in interaction', comprised of material, energy and information in various degrees of organization. In evaluating systems the artist is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output and related activity inside and outside the system. Where the object almost always has a fixed shape and boundaries, the consistency of a system may be altered in time and space, its behaviour determined both by external conditions and its mechanisms of control. In his book The New Vision ( 1938), Moholy-Nagy described fabricating a set of enamel-on-metal paintings. These were executed by telephoning precise instructions to a manufacturer. An elaboration of this was projected recently by the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Jan van der Marek, in a tentative exhibition, 'Art by Telephone'. In this instance the recorded conversation between artist and manufacturer was to become part of the displayed work of art. For systems, information, in whatever form conveyed, becomes a viable aesthetic consideration. Fifteen years ago Victor Vasarely suggested mass art as a legitimate function of industrial society. For angry critics there existed the fear of undermining art's fetish aura, of shattering the mystique of craft and private creation. If some forays have been made into serially produced art, these remain on the periphery of the industrial system. Yet the entire phenomenon of reproducing an art object ad infinitum is absurd; rather than making quality available to a large number of people, it signals the end of concrete objects embodying visual metaphor. Such demythification is the Kantian Imperative applied aesthetically. On the other hand, a system aesthetic is literal, in that all phases of the life cycle of a system are relevant. There is no end product that is primarily visual, nor does such an aesthetic rely on a 'visual' syntax. It resists functioning as an applied aesthetic, but is revealed in the principles underlying the progressive reorganization of the natural environment. [ . . . ] Methodologically, Les Levine is possibly the most consistent exponent of a systems aesthetic. His environments of vacuum-formed, modular plastic units 44//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

are never static; by means of experiencing ambulation through them, they consistently alter their own degree of space-surface penetrability. Levine's Clean Machine ( 1968) has no ideal vantage points, no 'pieces' to recognize, as are implicit in formalist art. One is processed as in driving through the Holland Tunnel. Certainly this echoes Michael Fried's reference to Tony Smith's night time drive along the uncompleted New Jersey Turnpike. Yet if this is theatre, as Fried insists, it is not the stage concerned with focused-upon events. That has more to do with the boundary definitions that have traditionally circumscribed classical and post-classical art. In a recent environment by Levine rows of live electric wires emitted small shocks to passers-by. Here behaviour is controlled in an aesthetic situation with no primary reference to visual circumstances. As Levine insists, 'What I am after here is physical reaction, not visual concern.' [ . . . ] Formalist art embodies the idea of deterministic relations between a composition's visible elements. But since the early 1960s Hans Haacke has depended upon the invisible components of systems. In a systems context, invisibility, or invisible parts, share equal importance with things seen. Thus air, water, steam and ice have become major elements in his work. [ . . . ] Haacke's systems have a limited life as an art experience, though some are quite durable. He insists that the need for empathy does not make his work function as with older art. Systems exist as ongoing independent entities away from the viewer. In the systems hierarchy of control, interaction and autonomy become desirable values. In this respect Haacke's Photo-Electric Viewer Programmed Coordinate System ( 1968), is probably one of the most elegant, responsive environments made to date by an artist (certainly more sophisticated ones have been conceived for scientific and technical purposes). Boundary situations are central to his thinking. A 'sculpture' that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reach beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a 'system' of interdependent processes. These processes evolve without the viewer's empathy. He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real. Tangential to this systems approach is Allan Ka prow's unique concept of the Happening. In the past ten years Ka prow has moved the Happening from a rather self-conscious and stagy event to a strict and elegant procedure. The Happening now has a sense of internal logic which was lacking before. It seems to arise naturally from those same considerations that have crystallized the systems approach to environmental situations. As described by their chief inventor, the Happenings establish an indivisibility between themselves and everyday affairs; they consciously avoid materials and procedures identified with art; they allow

Burnham//Systems Aesthetics//45

for geographical expansiveness and mobility; they include experience and duration as part of their aesthetic format; and they emphasize practical activities as the most meaningful mode of procedure . . . As structured events the Happenings are usually reversible. Alterations in the environment may be 'erased' after the Happening, or as a part of the Happening's conclusion. While they may involve large areas of place, the format of the Happening is kept relatively simple, with the emphasis on establishing a participatory aesthetic. The emergence of a 'post-formalist aesthetic' may seem to some to embody a kind of absolute philosophy, something which, through the nature of concerns, cannot be transcended. Yet it is more likely that a 'systems aesthetic' will become the dominant approach to a maze of socio-technical conditions rooted only in the present. [ ... ] Jack Burnham, extracts from 'Systems Aesthetics', Artforum (September 1968) 30-35; reprinted in Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1973).

Lawrence Alloway Network: The Art World Described as a System// 1972

The first exhibition of a newly made work of art is in the studio. This first audience of the artist's friends views the art in the workplace in which it was created, in the artist's presence and associated with the rest of his life. The satisfactions of his contact are obvious, both to the privileged group and to the artist in touch with his peers. The second exhibition, as a rule, is in an art gallery where it is seen by a larger but still specialized section of the public. (The average attendance at an art gallery during a show is rarely more than a thousand people.) From the gallery the work may be purchased by a collector, travel to other galleries or museums, or be actually acquired by a museum. Each change of milieu will encourage different expectations and readings by a changing audience. A fourth context is literary, the catalogues and magazines in which the work of art is no longer substantially present as an object, but is the subject of information. By this point in a work of art's distribution a description in stages is no longer sufficient; it has acquired a record, not simply in terms of places shown and changing hands but of the aura of aesthetic interpretation as well. It belongs in the context of the art world, with its special opportunities for comparison and 46//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

meditation for analysis and pleasure. The density that a work accrues as it is circulated means that it acquires meanings not expected by the artist and quite unlike those of the work's initial showing in the studio. Although wide distribution is the modern equivalent for the classical frame, there is an inbuilt alienating factor. Wide distribution can separate the work from the man who produced it as the variables of other people's readings pile up and characterize the object. This alienation by distribution effect is not to be avoided except by withdrawal from the art world, for art is now part of a communications network of great efficiency. As its capacity has increased, a progressive role-blurring has taken place. Before World War II, for example, museums worked at a fixed distance from the art they exhibited, which was either of some age or could be regarded as the latest form of tradition of acknowledged historicity. Most American museums have abolished the time lag that previously regulated their policies and now present not only new work but new artists. Though on a different scale and with different motives, such activity connects intimately with private galleries, whose profits can be affected by museum shows of their artists. The Alan Solomon/Leo Castelli collaboration at the Jewish museum in the early 1960s, the Rauschenberg and Johns retrospectives, at the ages 38 and 34 respectively, is a remarkable example of the convergence of intellectual interest and high profits. Art historians prepare catalogues raisonne of living artists, so that organization of data is more or less level with their occurrence. Critics serve as guest curators and curators write art criticism. The retrospectives of de Kooning and Newman at the Museum of Modern Art were both arranged by the editor of ARTnews, Thomas B. Hess. (A crossover in the opposite direction was made by John Coplans, former curator of Pasadena Art Museum and now editor of the magazine.) William Rubin, a curator at the same museum, wrote a monograph on Frank Stella; he is also a collector and lent a Newman to the retrospective. In ten years I have been a curator, a teacher and an art critic, usually two at a time. The roles within the system, therefore, do not restrict mobility; the participants can move functionally within a cooperative system. Collectors back galleries and influence museums by acting as trustees or by making donations; or a collector may act as a shop window for a gallery by accepting a package collection from one dealer or one adviser. All of us are looped together in a new and unsettling connectivity.1 [ • • • ] Not only has the group of artists expanded in number but art is distributed to a larger audience in new ways, by improved marketing techniques and by mass media. What does the vague term 'art world' cover? It includes original works of art and reproductions ; critical, historical and informative writings ; galleries, museums and private collections. It is a sum of persons, objects, resources, messages and ideas. It includes monuments and parties, aesthetics and openings, Avalanche and Art in America. I want to describe it as a system and Alloway//Network: The Art World Described as a System//47

consider what effects it has on art and on our understanding of art. Let me state at once that the system does not mean merely 'establishment' ; as Tomas Maldonado has pointed out, system is often used as a synonym for regime, which vulgarizes an exceedingly useful term. 2 Recognition of recent art, the art of the sixties, induces a sense of product proliferation. An example from industry is the big airplane, the DC- 10, being followed by the short haul DC-9 in two different versions. Artists use their own work and each other's in this way, rapidly and systematically following up new ideas. In addition, the written criticism of the period has supplied visual art with instant commentary. There has been therefore a considerable increase in the number of short term orderly proj ections and their improvised interpretation. The effect is, to quote Henri Lefebvre, of an 'enormous amount of signifiers liberated or insufficiently attached to their corresponding signifieds'. 3 In reaction to this has been widespread discontent with the existing system of information-handling in the arts. The problem of art for the educated has taken on acute significance with the emergence of an alienated audience, for instance, the youth market and the black community. Reassessment by the artists and their role in society parallels their audience's doubt about art's centrality. The market or exchange value of art has been discussed since 1960, not as a source of prestige but as the taint of corruption. Art is a commodity in a part of the system but not in all of it, and at this point I am more interested in differentiation than reduction. The art world can be viewed as 'a shifting multiple goal coalition'.4 It is, to continue regarding it as an organization, 'a 'negotiated environment'. That is, long contracts with suppliers and customers, adherence to industry-wide pricing, conventions and support of stable 'good business practice'. 5 The contracts are usually less formal in art, and good business practice is pretty vague, but the parallel is there. Decisions in art galleries, museums, magazines and publishing houses are made close to the working base of each enterprise, as in decentralization. Thus we have a network, not a hierarchic structure. As H.J. Leavitt points out, apropos of the individual in a network: 'It is enough, in some cases, if they are each touched by some part of a network of communication which also touches each of the others at some point.' 6 Such a pattern of partial information fits the complex movement of messages and influences in the art world. Raymond D. Cottoll has referred to 'the principle of "simple structure", which assumes that in an experiment involving a broad and well sampled set of variables it is improbable that any single influence will effect all of them. In other words, it is more "simple" to expect that any one variable will be accounted for by less than the full complexity of all the factors added together'. 7 This should be borne in mind, for it is absolutely against my intention to reduce 48//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

the art world to any single influence by describing it as an organization. On the contrary, it is only in this way that its complexity can be kept clear. 'The organization as a system has an output, a product or an outcome, but this is not necessarily identical with the individual purposes of group members', observe D. Katz and R.L. Kahn. 8 What is the output of the art world viewed as a system? It is not art, because that exists prior to distribution and without the technology of information. The output is the distribution of art, both literal and in mediated form as text and reproduction. The individual reasons for distribution vary; with dealers it can be assumed to be the profit motive at one remove. Art galleries, museums, universities, publishers, are all part of the knowledge industry, producing signifiers whose signifieds are works of art, artists, styles, periods. F.E. Emery and E.L. Trist have discussed systems in relation to the various forms of environment that they occupy. The art world would seem to be more animated than a 'placid clustered environment' but less momentous than a 'turbulent field'. Between these two falls the 'disturbed-reactive environment'. This term refers to a situation in which there is more than one organization of the same kind; indeed, the existence of a number of similar organizations now becomes the dominant characteristic of the environmental field. Each organization does not simply have to take account of the others when they meet at random, but has also to consider that what it knows can also be known by others. The part of the environment to which it wishes to move itself in the long run is also the part to which the others seek to move.9 Certainly the art world meets Emery and Trist's requirement of 'the presence of similar others' in a disturbed reactive environment. The principle of conflict of interest is fully applicable to the situation in the art world. There is, for example, the competition among artists to do a certain kind of work that is potential in the level of knowledge that a group of them shares. It applies also to the relationships among critics: these are rarely antagonistic, but it is noticeable that critics have not as a rule, reviewed one another's books, though in the past few years Max Kozloff, Nicolas Calas, Lucy Lippard and Michael Kirby have all published collections of their essays. The conflict of interest among museums is marked because topicality favours certain shows at certain times and the institutions know it and know each other knows. Thus there is considerable competition for a limited number of desirable properties.10 [ • • • ] In connection with early Pop art the term 'fine art/pop art continuum' 11 was used to describe the interconnections of cultural levels, 'low' and 'high', unique or mass-produced, in non-homogeneous groups. It included the aesthetic appreciation of mass-produced goods, the appropriation of popular materials Alloway//Network: The Art World Described as a System//49

by artists (Pop art), and the mass media's interest in art. In the sixties, however, it became clear that the art world itself had become subject to a similar non­ hierarchic connectivity. The mass media covered prominent artists or museum shows; the occasions of high culture became the subject of publicity. Abstract paintings in the House and Garden features on collectors, or the Park Place Gallery photographed with fashion models amongst the sculpture, are two examples. Here the works of art become a part of the lively flow of signs and symbols that populate the environment. In the case of one movement, that of European-based Op art, it was welcomed in the general press earlier and more cordially than in the art magazines.12 Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg have both done covers for Time and Lichtenstein one for Newsweek as well. One of Robert Smithson's earliest texts appeared in Harper's Bazaar and the first article on earthworks, by Howard Junker, appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, years before Calvin Tomkins got to it in The New Yorker.1 3 The literature of art now runs copiously beyond the reviewing of exhibitions by critics, as art is assimilated to the sphere of consumption. Thus there exists a general field of communication within which art has a place, not the privileged place assigned to it by humanism as time-binding symbol or moral exemplar, but as part of a spectrum of objects and messages. According to Roland Barthes, 'what makes writing the opposite of speech is that the former always appears symbolical, introverted, ostensibly turned towards an occult side of language, whereas the second is nothing but a flow of empty signs, the movement of which alone is significant.' 14 Thus he maintains the traditional separation of closed high art and popular culture as an extension of Saussure's terms language and speech [ langue and parole] . The proponents of visual art as a closed form, a type of classified information, also suppose irreconcilable levels. To use a statement of Rothko's, one that has become a cliche: 'A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer. It dies by the same token. It is, therefore, a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.' 1 5 This view of art, highly aestheticizing but also snobbish, rests on the assumption that a painting processes a deep singular meaning and that correct reception consists of identifying it. The history of taste and the study of human communication do not suggest such perfect matching as plausible occurrence. Though art may be a private act in its origins, this is not what we can be expected to see as art becomes part of a system of public information. Art is a public system to which we, as spectators or consumers, have random access. [ . . . ] 1

This passage derives from the author's 'Art and the Communication Network', Canadian Art (June 1966) 35-7.

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2

[footnote 4 in source] Tomas Maldonado, Design, Nature and Revolution, trans. Susan Suleiman (New York, 1972) 51.

3

[ 5] Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York, 1971 ) 56.

4

(6] D.S. Pugh, D.J. Hickson, C.R. Hinings ( paraphrasing Richard M. Cyert and James G. March), Writers on Organizations (Harmondsworth, 1971 ) 81.

5

(7] Ibid., 83.

6

(8) H.J. Leavitt, 'Some Effects of Certain Communication Pattemson Group Performance', in Organization Theory, ed. D.S. Pugh ( Harmondsworth, 1972) 72.

7

[9] Raymond B. Cottoll,'The Nature and Measurement of Anxiety', Scientific American, vol. 208, no. 3 ( 1963 ) 96.

8

( 10] D. Katz, R.L. Kahn, 'Common Characteristics of Open Systems', in Systems Thinking, ed. F.E. Emery (Harmondsworth, 1969) 88.

9

[ 1 1 ] F.E. Emery, E.L. Tri st, 'The Casual Texture of Organizational Events', in Emery, Systems Thinking, op. cit., 247-8.

10 ( 1 2 ] For an account of one such competition, between the Museum of Modem Art and the Guggenheim Museum, see the author's 'Art', The Nation (30 December 1968) 733-4. 11

[ 17 ] The concept of the fine art/pop art continuum is given in the author's 'The Long Front of Culture', in Pop Art Redefined, ed. John Russell and Suzi Gablik ( New York, 1969); originally published in Cambridge Opinion, no. 17 ( 1959).

1 2 ( 18 ] See the author's 'Notes on Op Art', The New Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1966) 83-91. 13 [ 19 ] Robert Smithson, 'The Crystal Land', Harper's Bazaar (May 1966), Howard Junker, 'Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty', Saturday Evening Post (2 November 1968); Calvin Tomkins, 'Maybe a Quantum Leap', The New Yorker (5 February 1972) 42-67. 14 (20] Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero ( 1953) and Elements ofSemiology ( 1964), trans. Annette Lavers (Boston, 1970) 19. 15 (21 ] Mark Rothko, 'The Ides of Art', Tiger's Eye (December 1947) 44. Lawrence Alloway, extracts from 'Network: The Art World Described as a System', Artforum (September 1972) 28-33.

Alloway//Network: The Art World Described as a System//51

Caroline Tisdall Joseph Beuys: Honey Pump// 1977 Honey Pump was in action throughout the 100 days of Documenta 6 (Kassel, June-October 1977). The materials and engines were installed in the stairwell of the Museum Fridericianum and linked this to the curved space in which discussions, seminars, lectures, films and demonstrations for the Free International University took place throughout the 100 days. After this, since its function was a sculptural articulation of these living activities, it was dismantled and appears in the museum context in its static state. With Honey Pump I am expressing the principle of the Free International University working in the bloodstream of society. Flowing in and out of the heart organ - the steel honey container - are the main arteries through which the honey is pumped out of the engine room with a pulsing sound. The whole thing is only complete with people in the space round which the honey artery flows and where the bee's head is to be found in the coiled loops of tubing with its two iron feelers. Back in the engine room the three major principles of the Theory of Sculpture thinking, feeling and will - are brought together: Will power in the chaotic energy of the double engine churning out the heap of fat. Feeling in the heat and bloodstream of honey flowing throughout the whole. Thinking powers in the Eurasian staff, the head of which rises from the engine room right up to the skylight of the museum and then points down again. - Joseph Beuys, statement on Honey Pump ( 1977) The union and balance of these essential parts of human creative drive are articulated in the three tiny bronze pots set into a corner of the engine room. By happy chance, a spider wove a web in the shape of a perfect triangle above these pots and stayed there throughout the 100 days - the fat attracted plenty of flies. The association of warmth and energy with honey stretches back over the years to the Queen Bees of 1952. Although the principles were already there in embryo in the presentation of a range of analogies to human and natural form, to warmth processes and to psychological expression, the means were still hermetic, subject contained within object. Greater possibilities for associative layers of meaning came in the 1960s with the freedom of actions and objects related to them. The material honey was now directly used instead of referred to through the sculptural subject of bees. Hence the use of honey in the ritual anointment of 52//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare in 1965. The additional freedom offered by multiples and editions enabled Beuys, like many Fluxus artists, to send out cryptic messages. Two postcard editions, Give Me Honey ( 1973) and Honey is Flowing in All Directions ( 1974) would ring a bell to anyone who knew of the range of qualities attributed to the production of honey and its analogies to human organization by Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx and Rudolf Steiner, in their various ways. Those who did not know would be confronted with a mystery. Confrontation with 'images of liberation' was a hallmark or aspiration of the art of the 1960s, as Herbert Marcuse suggests. Beuys' Honey Pump marks a significant addition to this, in keeping with the pragmatic mood of the 1970s : the work 'is complete only with people'. It needed communication, coordination and cooperation to have any meaning when installed for the hundred days of the Free University. Here the silent intention of Hearth - permanent conference - really did take place. Placed in the context of Documenta 6, it suggested a criticism of the one-sided relationship between artist and public, and proposed an alternative to the painfully isolated and marginal position of culture in society. The principles of a Free University follow this and represent the third stage of Beuys' involvement with the organization of political alternatives, which, like his sculpture, has grown and developed, forerunners being the German Student Party, founded in 1967, and the Organization for Direct Democracy of 1970. [ . . . ] Caroline Tisdall, extract from Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum/London: Thames & Hudson, 1979) 254.

Peter Fend Brief History and Founding Documents of Ocean Earth//1980-85 Brief History of Ocean Earth Founded 1980 The Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation arose from efforts of artists to develop projects larger than possible for any one artist and of public rather than art-world service.1 The company arose from the ferment of the 1960s and 70s, during which artists moved into video and film as display media, and into earthworks and Fend//Brief History and Founding Documents of Ocean Earth//53

ecosystems as sculptural and architectural material. Numerous concepts emerged then: that television had become like the cathedrals of prior centuries, and that artists should produce television news as they had produced sculpture and friezes for the cathedrals before; that earth art implied an entirely new way of dealing with terrain and regional planning; that artists should function chiefly to investigate and report visually apprehensible facts of public import, and not to produce decorative objects for adornment; that mass media and not art galleries or museums are the primary field of action. The company was founded through the efforts of an attorney, Richard Cole. Much of the intellectual foundation for the company, and its dedication to large­ scale earth monitoring and engineering, comes from lectures by Vincent Scully, architecture historian at Yale. Scully argues that recent earth art and conceptual art contain the germs of a radically new approach to gardens (or land), fortresses (or military defence systems) and, extendibly, regional planning. Herefrom, the company proceeds into the public arena. ( 1985) Founding Documents

The company is registered in the State of New York to ( 1 ) provide 'media services' and (2) produce 'architectural components'. This gave a mandate, for example, to produce mise-en-scene or film documents of sites monitored or built into with our architectural components. These documents were filed with New York State as part of the registration process. [ . . . ] Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation2 Ocean Earth Planet monitoring and management for stable nutrient circulation, high numbers of wild animals and plants, continuous exchange of gases CH4 -CO2 -O2 , particularly within saltwater catchments, or ocean basins including lands supplying freshwaters, soil and possible pollutants.

Sea rigs. For production of seaweeds and fish at artificially-high rates. Rigs are hydrodynamically-stabilized, semi-submersible and rotating. They may have artificial upwellings, furnishing them not only bottom nutrients but also possible thermal-gradient energy. Harvesting of seaweeds from below allows weekly yields; a tenfold increase over present harvesting methods, which could meet all present hydrocarbon needs with a non-polluting, replenishable fuel. Effects: end to most air pollution; return of outwashed soil nutrients to economic circulation; increased ocean yields.

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Waste conversion. Via pyrolysis and bioprotein production, yielding predominantly a lower-animal feed suitable for wild feeding and spawning grounds - notably marshes. Yielding from the small ash/metal-fraction certain extractable minerals. Effects: end to most water pollution; fertilization of ecological systems through existing animal networks, therefore with complete micronutrient dispersal; easier access to recyclable ash minerals. Marsh construction. Whether in deserts, as wadis, or along rivers, for animal increase and flood control, or among estuaries: functioning earthworks that build up groundwater supplies and increase mix of fresh and salt waters for high bioproductivity. Set along migratory pathways of animals, chiefly airborne ones, so that upgrading and fertilization there leads quickly to replenishment of the surrounding ecosystem. Nearby, traps and lures for wild animal harvests are constructed. Effects: end to agricultural poisons or artificial fertilizers, which damage environment; end to monoculture; end to destruction of varied habitat; commercial or paramilitary harvesting of wild animals and plants in superior overall yields and of superior nutrient quality. Video monitoring. In the mode of Futurist photodynamism, mobilize the many possible spectral readings of an environment - usually from aircraft or satellites - into algebraically-formulated video colour streams. Consciousness may not recognize all the information, but the eye-brain complex - given a carefully balanced sofware program - will accurately respond anyway. Apply program not only to specific sites, like marshes, but also to entire hydrological systems. Effects: televisable image of entire ecological (hydrological) systems, for all to see; proper timing of harvest and fertilizations. City Bild Construction of human settlements with optimum exposure to sun, air and scenery, with an overall shelter from extreme winds, temperature or sunlight, and with minimum interference with the movements of wild animals. Locations tend to be scattered, often on sloping terrain, along conduits.

Skeletons. Sloped frameworks; counterbalanced and cantilevered bridges; bascule bridges; counterbalanced discs: all these usually in combination and usually set in linear patterns along hillsides or across valleys. Principles of bridge construction have become predominant in skyscrapers: now the skyscraper is set on its side, and the city becomes a series of linear, sloping structures. Skeletons rest on floating caisson foundations; they are ready to hold containers, pipelines, transport aqueducts, hydroponic farms - all upon the extending beams. Plug-in Fend//Brief History and Founding Documents of Ocean Earth//55

elements are structurally fitted to be ferried about by overhead gantry cranes, and to add to the overall structural strength as they are inserted. Effects: relative safety from earthquakes; easy access to infrastructure for repairs; security of infrastructure from water damage; extreme ease of renovation and reconstruction, with no need for new foundations; each time, skylines gain fresh configuration. Containers. Intermodal freight containers serving as standard architectural space, as a standard bay, which can be continued indefinitely along a skeletal framework of a megastructure city. Usually of the 10 x 8 x 20 foot size, sometimes half or a quarter of that for specific functions (such as bath). Basic unit has steel roof, floor and corner posts; each post has flanges and grooves to accommodate optional, variously cut-out wal l pieces. Interior spaces could be horizontal multiples of such containers. Ducts and services could be channelled through 2 foot gaps between slot levels on the skeleton. Effects: translocatable fixtures for new or different lofts; metabolically-specific spaces to accelerate certain body processes ( e.g. sleep). Windbreaks. Tensile canopies sustained by hot-air collectors (using chiefly exhaust heat of the city) and stabilized by airfoil assemblies that baffle and neutralize wind loads. Plants suspended amidst the rigging increase oxygen supply and diffuse sunlight. Running alongside or over city frameworks, these are sometimes strong enough to suspend walkways, giant signs, aerial retreats. Effects: reduce wind load, the main load and stress on buildings, allowing lighter weight and more temporary structures; less insulation for each building, and less air-conditioning; a moderate city climate. Aqueducts. Pumped arteries to support continuous freight and pedestrian pathways. The supported weights do not add to load on the structures bearing up the arteries, and noise is far less than that of highways or subways: lightweight, aerial tracery can result: all travellers can see their city. Effects: mass transit with no waiting; personal choice of speed. (1980) 1

The engagement began in Collaborative Proj ects, the artist-run venture serving as a non-profit model for the for-profit venture Ocean Earth.

2

In 1994, the firm was re-named Ocean Earth Development Corporation.

Peter Fend, 'Brief History of Ocean Earth, Founded 1980' ( 1985) and 'Founding Documents' ( 1980), in Peter Weibel, ed., OCEAN EARTH: FOR A WORLD WHICH WORKS (Stuttgart: Oktagon Verlag, 1994) 11, 13.

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Felix Guattari The Three Ecologies// 1989

There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds. - Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972 The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations. If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet's surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes oflife, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating. Kinship networks tend to be reduced to a bare minimum; domestic life is being poisoned by the gangrene of mass-media consumption; family and married life are frequently 'ossified' by a sort of standardization of behaviour, and neighbourhood relations are generally reduced to their meanest expression . . . It is the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority - be it social, animal, vegetable or cosmic - that is compromised in this way, in a sort of general movement of implosion and regressive infantilization. Otherness [l 'alterite] tends to lose all its asperity. Tourism, for example, usually amounts to no more than a journey on the spot, with the same redundancies of images and behaviour. Political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues. Despite having recently initiated a partial realization of the most obvious dangers that threaten the natural environment of our societies, they are generally content simply to tackle industrial pollution, and then from a purely technocratic perspective, whereas only an ethico-political articulation - which I call ecosophy - between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions. Henceforth it is the ways of living on this planet that are in question, in the context of the acceleration of techno-scientific mutations and of considerable demographic growth. Through the continuous development of machinic labour, multiplied by the information revolution, productive forces can make available an increasing amount of time for potential human activity. But to what end? Unemployment, oppressive marginalization, loneliness, boredom, anxiety and neurosis? Or culture, creation, development, the reinvention of the environment and the enrichment of modes of life and sensibility? In both the Third World and the developed world, whole sections of the collective subjectivity are floundering or simply huddle around archaisms; as is the case, for example, with the dreadful rise of religious fundamentalism. Guattari//The Three Ecologies//57

The only true response to the ecological crisis is on a global scale, provided that it brings about an authentic political, social and cultural revolution, reshaping the objectives of the production of both material and immaterial assets. Therefore this revolution must not be exclusively concerned with visible relations of force on a grand scale, but will also take into account molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire. [ ... ] Felix Guattari, extract from Les trois ecologies (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1989); trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, The Three Ecologies (London: Athlone Press, 2000) 27-9 [footnotes not included].

Vaclovas Mikailionis Power of the Earth//2007 Here is an attempt at determining the geo-energy structure of Allenheads [ in Northumberland] and its surroundings. We have sought to reveal this structure through bio-location and observations of local plant life. Already the Druids knew that the Earth is 'breathing'. It radiates streams of energy from its nucleus into the universe, which at a certain distance are refracted back into the depths of the planet. Such points of active, heightened energy can be observed every 20 or 22 metres on the Earth's surface. Because these two streams of energy go in different directions and are differently marked, part of the energy streams that rise upwards is captured by the downward streams. Therefore energy 'lines' of irregular rhomboid form appear on the Earth's surface, and these are called grids. The shorter-term impact of both 'lines' and 'points' is practically impossible to sense. However, trees that grow in such places will eventually either grow much faster than other trees or, on the contrary, lag behind their neighbours or even die. If a linden or a similar tree (for instance a rowan) happens to be at a point where energy streams upwards from the Earth's core, it will grow particularly well, and sometimes even sprout several tall trunks. The tree not only absorbs part of the energy, it also reflects it onto the surrounding environment, so that children, for instance, grow faster and become healthier. This kind of energy effect is called 'feminine' and the points themselves are called 'linden points'. On the map they are marked with green. The colour red marks the 'oak points'. Oaks and other similar trees are particularly susceptible to the energy streams returning to Earth from the 58//CONNECTIVITY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

universe. Oaks not only absorb part of this energy themselves, they also reflect it onto the surrounding environment. This energy effect is 'masculine'; it strengthens will-power, endurance, stamina and other 'masculine' qualities. The 'linden points' and the 'oak points' are not equally powerful all over the Earth's surface. The power is particularly strong where water reservoirs, geological fault lines or other anomalies are hidden deep down. At Allenheads the impact of technology is also tangible, particularly the empty disused mines. These and other factors have probably encouraged the growing of particularly tall trees in some locations, which are marked with circles on the map. Allenheads is also characterized by the many 'wounds' inflicted on the landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When ore was extracted, large amounts of broken stone were discarded, containing traces of lead and other heavy metals that are particularly harmful to the living environment. There are plenty of crooked and sickly trees in such locations. Today almost all of these 'wounds' have been healed through the initiatives of clever people, and Allenheads is becoming an ever more harmonious and accommodating place. If we aspire to a fuller and healthier life, we should refrain from building houses on the energy 'walls' and particularly at the points where they intersect. We should particularly avoid sleeping or doing our daily work in such places. All these functions should be located inside the grids, in 'calm' places, so that we may avoid illness and other disturbances. Britain is famous for its particularly powerful ley lines, which form enormous grids, and it is no coincidence that the Druids erected astronomical observatories or temples at their intersections. One such line also cuts through Allenheads, and is marked with a thicker line on the map. It is especially noteworthy that the intersection of these lines is located on a hill, named Curricks on the map. This is a place that radiates a particularly strong 'linden' energy and becomes a source of health and 'motherly' protection to the whole village and its surroundings. Vaclovas Mikailionis, 'Power of the Earth/ Allenheads', text written for the artist Artur as Raila's Power of the Earth project at Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Northumberland (2007), which mapped the earth's power grids, with the participation of geophysical practitioner Mikailionis and the Trinkunas family, a neo-pagan group (www.raila.lt/power-of-the-earth).

Mikailionis//Power of the Earth//59

Pia Lindman Learning from Mould//2013 Breathing mould drove me to investigate the processes of building houses Being poisoned by nerve toxins produced by mould means that a complex set of biochemical and biomechanical events are set in motion in the body. The personal experience of poisoning is an even more complex set in which symptoms and sensations travel in feedback loops between the brain and sensing organs and cel ls. Since the toxin affecting you is often quite invisible and indeed scientifically immeasurable, your symptoms appear - even to yourself - absurd and weird. This incongruence of your own bodily experience with the rationale to which your surroundings ( other people and you yourself) adhere makes the condition of being poisoned always also a social and psychological event. It is a highly personal experience and you feel isolated from those who do not experience the same. Your friends suggest you are a hypochondriac. In this moment, Evelyn Fox Keller's criticism of scientific processes is a helpful reminder of the relativity of medical 'facts'. Some decades ago, Fox Keller proved that intuition plays a major part in the processes of scientific discovery and invention, beyond rational thinking. In 'Slime Mould', an essay from 2011, Fox Keller tells us how a small, amoeba-like protist, a mould called Dictyostelium, challenged the 1960s anthropomorphic views on nature - those which assumed that life forms were organized by some predetermined plan or conscious will: ' . . . the aggregation of a population of single-celled amoebae proceeds spontaneously, without . . . founder cells; the population emerges as the product of decentralized and local in teractions among molecules secreted by individual cells.' In other words, slime mould is a self-organizing dynamic system, and Fox Keller continues: 'There is no "intention" guiding the development . . . no agent "doing" the work.' Instead there are local and individual parameters for action ( or reaction) for changing circumstances on a cellular level : the slime mould transforms its life­ forms depending on food supply. Fox Keller's slime mould research proposed new ways of understanding the organization of life. Like the slime mould, moulds in general appear to be semi-conscious and confusingly animal-like, yet plants. Understanding the hybridity of moulds does require giving up strict scientific categories - something scientists often resist, and thus Fox Keller's research was not wel l understood until decades later.

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Learning my lesson from mould Our relationship to our environment starts with our senses. The first field mediating this relationship to us is our skin; a connective tissue to the outside realm ; a communicative and sensory organ. Indeed, it is not an impermeable border of an individual in regards to others. Mind, body and skin comprise a minute realm where everything existing in the world can appear and fold into the mix of passions, sensations and experiences. Thinking, practices of living and research are located both in our bodies and elsewhere in the universe, and are immediately interconnected through affect. In this sense, our bodies are the perfect sensory organs, 'measuring' instruments, in regards to all potential knowledge and action in the world. Here it becomes relevant to introduce an expanded notion of senses and skin, one that includes taste, tactility, memory and genetics. For instance, my knee is hurting because I am no longer running barefoot on the sandy surfaces of a savannah. Yet the bone structure of my knee supports that kind of movement rather than sitting in a chair all day. In other words, my bones include information of former life forms tens of thousands of years back in time. The sensed world includes such elements as time and space. The sensed world can be seen as an intersection between materials, objects, human and non-human life forms. What are the dynamics between all these elements and how do they feel, obstruct or activate energy and the sensory world around them? I propose to view this dynamics in terms of both human social interaction and human and non-human interaction with space, materials and objects, as well as with animals, microbes and various kinds of resonances. This means to say that I place no exceptional value on the human-to-other relationship but want to understand how other relationships (not including human parties ) may affect the sensed world as well. Approaches to Research Human rationality seems to be drawn to a teleological approach to research. A sensory organism is seen to offer known inputs, and research is conducted so that the effects of given inputs are observed and measured in the organism. Based on these findings we develop applications (services, products, inventions ) to this known input-output relationship, which is isolated from other relationships. In this model the sensory organism is separate from the 'application' that has an effect on it. The body is also seen as separate from the input that gave rise to the invention of the application. I do not see the world functioning according to the model above. I suggest approaching 'input' and 'output' as mutually transforming in dialogue, and simultaneously intertwined with many other processes in the same time and Lindman//Learning from Mould//61

space. A sensory organ is not a separate entity. Rather, its borders are fuzzy and porous. Many fuzzy and porous sensory organs together form fields of interaction and influences in which many inputs and outputs converge towards and away from each other in various patterns. These are fields and bodies of varying intensity of attention and action. To relate to and to invent and connect an 'application' to these fields requires a more complex and always partial understanding of the interconnectedness of a sensory organ with itself and the surroundings. Maybe the 'application' no longer can be thought of as such, but rather as yet another field of influence. In my research I try to identify fields of influences and learn what elements make them energized. I experience this in my own body: impulses of various forms and origin traverse through me, in and out of my skin. Impulses of touch, temperature, bacteria, sounds, vibrations, even the resonances of various atoms, all cross through, in and out of my body. Many of these events pass me by without any interaction with my brain, and yet some may emerge to consciousness, even as infinitely small as just hints. These notions may be baked back into the traversing of impulses in my body, now folded in together with memories, further impulses from the nervous system, ethical and utilitarian judgements and emotions, emanating more or less from my conscious mind. Affect, baked in with these 'rudiments' of my mind, forms this field of potentialities, pathways comprising both direct signals of the nerves and conscious thoughts. Pathways that sometimes look like decisions. The rudimentary pathways, those that are never expressed ( lost out in the final decision-making process), remain in the body as tendencies, suspended actions, impulses, a field of potential. A laboratory in real life I am currently building my new home with straw-bales and clay in Solbacka­ Fagervik. I collaborate with the Natural Building Company and architect Kati Juola. On the farm Solbacka, our community of five households is building an eco-village, which is at the same time a research laboratory for ecological living, community building, construction, and work - including energy production, waste management, heating, soil maintenance and production, and water systems. Building my house in Solbacka, I train myself for further interventions into and collaborations with current common processes of planning and constructing of buildings. Making the construction process my laboratory, I want to research the tuning of buildings: how is a building connected to the soil it is rooted in, with the air it breathes, the organisms that traverse through and dwell in it, the water that flows and fumes in it. Air, water, soil, heat ( energy) harbour molecules, 62//CONNECTMTY BEFORE AND BEYOND THE NET

resonances and microbes facilitating various processes relevant to the tuning of a building. This tuning is also contingent upon human social energy, something that is 'baked' into the processes of constructing and living in the building together with the microbes, resonances and molecules. Building as a body of sensory organs I propose the perspective of a building as a body, with various sensory organs. This building is also connected to the field it is built upon. It has a relationship to the soil under itself, and to the water streams and air around it. To give a few examples, if we collect heat out of soil to heat our houses ( a technology currently in use), what does that mean to the energy of the soil? If we harvest electricity out of bodies of water (from the minute movements of microbes - also a feasible technology), what does that mean to the energy of the water? What happens to the quality of the space and air in a house, when it is heated by fire, or by electricity? Different application of energy, i.e. heating, ionizes the air differently. Do we sense it? Or do the microbes sense it, change their constellation, and then we sense the change in the constellation of microbes in the air? How do various techniques and materials influence the atmospheric, social and sensual realms of those who dwell in them? For instance, covering walls with mixtures of clay containing fibres, microbes and minerals influence the haptic quality of the walls and the air inside the building. Further, is it possible to diminish negative effects of electricity and electromagnetic radiation with clay - as some current research suggests? Indeed mould traverses our living bodies as if we were a bundle of inanimate proteins for them to burrow or eat, and bacteria communicate with our cells, telling them about a world 'out there', a chatter of which we are very little aware, not to mention the resonances of all matter in the world, constantly humming to every part of our bodies, the boundaries of which thus dissolve, because we are also resonance, a cloud of microbes, energy, smell and light. Bringing back the social Can we democratize or do-cratize planning and building processes, and create event/ceremony/performance-based processes of building? How can we build working with social processes and community action? For instance, can we amass people to contribute with recyclable materials and help produce matters/objects for dwelling and for social and material nourishment, such as furniture and soil for gardening? Can we set up collective production and re-use -cycles, intended to sustain the health of the building and those who dwell in it? Can we touch and be touched by our buildings and can buildings help us touch each other?

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Concrete functions with which to experiment - Transformation and application of energy: heating and cooling of space, bodies and food - Light: colour, artificial, sun and fire - Water, filtering, energizing (salts, stones, plants and light) - Soil, ground, objects : energizing with heating, cooling, microbes and light Practices ( social manifestations of the above) Sauna, bathing, sleeping, dancing, cooking, eating, drinking, dwelling, gardening This research suggests an aesthetics that manifests itself to humans only on a sensorial level, since it is mostly about life on a molecular scale, rather than something visible to the human eye. Most of these minute activities are not consciously sensed. Indeed, perhaps microbes sense them on some not-so­ conscious level. Therefore, we could talk about 'aesthetics of atmosphere' and 'sense-sphere'. In Finnish, we could use the words olon estetiil