Rµbþð¬ - posts tagged 'art'

[rubbd] a season of birthdays, peppered with incident, highlights in my salt barrel include: organs and records, a hand, an absence of art, after maths, scoping out company offices, dinners of froth, jelly & Christ’s decomposition . find Alice

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:35:35 GMT

[rubbd] Occupy is a Revolutionary Subject or Still Life

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 23:14:27 GMT

- Balthus, Still Life, 1937

Occupy Wall Street as a Node of Resonance

The node of resonance analysis seems to me flawed because it takes the image from network theory. Receptive as well as resonant nodes imply a mechanical reduction: they are parts of a mechanism, not machines productive of transversal subjects.

Occupy has the power to effect change | Peter Hallward

Peter Hallward’s piece ignores even Judith Butler’s view of a material transformation effected by Occupy – which is at least suggestive – in favour of advocating a conventional protest movement, involving civil disobedience and non-compliance.

The tactics of occupation: Becoming cockroach

This is where the former analysis actually works, since it points out the difference between Occupy and a protest movement: the former does not Move! Here also the strength in the Cockroaches article is stasis. There is no movement.

What doesn’t happen when we stop? is the question. Not the more familiar: What happens? Or: What happens now that we have stopped here?

So: What or who cannot be excluded? Not: How can I be included?

Which points to Occupy as a simulation. There is an indication, several stories, an anecdote or two, that the Zuccotti Occupation began from an artistic reappropriation of the Tahrir Square Occupation. It was recognisable. People knew how to respond. And there was a sort of romance: maybe we are like Egyptians, fighting an overtly oppressive system.

It involved – and involves still, stillness being all – the putting into play of an aesthetic for which no further instructions were required. Simply occupy! It is this aesthetic phenomenon that the above analyses are trying to reduce to discourse, to analyse, to trace the outlines of, the etiology, the teleology, the origins and ends, and curlicuing, ornamenting out of sheer imaginative will, and failing to analyse, failing even to depict. Because such traditional forms of analysis are afraid of simulation, fakes, the hyperreal, or virtual.

Imagine a serious person finding value in the politically fake! There is an art to writing of such things.

What I would like to point out is that not only is Occupy not a movement, because it does not move, not only is Occupy a simulation, or fake, or play politics (!), but that in the bodies it immoblises it puts its own status – and stasis – at risk.

[rubbd] might a new dark age be announced by lack of colour? simply by a lack of colourful and joyful enough language to describe it? by a failure to acknowledge or synthesise, in time, of course, advances made ahead of it? 40 years ahead? by an ideologically inspired purblindness? that goes even now to the extreme of hating progress, dressing in mourning for it, intoning, Everything has been done! to the extent of a complicitous turning back of the clock…?

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 22:55:37 GMT

[rubbd] to placard: sufficient conditioning; a call to raise expectations of and from conditions considered sufficient

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:02:43 GMT

[-with minor alterations, the following was sent to the Listserv Unlike Us: Understanding Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives-]

Dear Un-Alike,
I’m intrigued by the support here for decentralization as a condition for a desirable network. Decentralization is what the social graph aspires to, lighting up the dark zones of the net, growing virally, accumulating capital from a closed circuit of service – P2P, yes, and emphasising personalization alongside offering software as a service. A network as I understand it leans towards a hub and feeder model before either a centripetally hierarchical, an egalitarian, or a random distribution.

The problem of social media is the many and the one and the various non-processual practices to which we, one, they are submitted. The box/circle/cutter of normalisation and presumptive (profiling) generalisation (based on a consumption-use dictatorship – i.e. what a majority will commit to, with a click – and what the power to sell will prescribe) strikes me, in other words, the constraint of expression of the individual and the reciprocal constraint of articulation of the societies, strike me as being more critical, and more problematic, in existing online social-individual arrangements.

Time, it seems to me, is of the essence in what is at stake for social networks to work: processual, non-presumptive – and non-patronising (!), constructive of both individual and social identities, multiple and whole – by turns, in time -, further, relational in so far as difference enters between and before the one and the many, you, me, one them …us.

I am working in the field of this problematic, this critical milieu, in order to build a poly-lingual dialogical commons, an online social processual and differential simulacrum, and am seeking collaborators in many fields, pre-eminently – where the need is greatest – in code-writing. Please contact me if you are interested. [here]

I feel I should add that I agree neither that entrepreneurial activity has a natural proclivity towards promoting unethical behaviour, nor that the commercial can somehow be separated from the constructive, creative and artistic – and socially responsible – spheres. In fact, it seems to me that a lot of art is exploitative and static, non-progressive, cynical, repressive, however enjoyable it may be; and a lot of commercial activity is affirmative, creative, constructive and ethical – despite erring on the side of lack of imagination, vision… often. I am interested in building an apparatus for online interaction with the support of entrepreneurs and expect this project to be artistically and commercially viable, adequate and effective: in fact, the standards that I am applying are those of both artistic and commercial efficacy – real-world intervention – for this constructivist undertaking.

…

…further, you can show your support for this project by signing in here – yes, it’s legit and safe, not a scam, and it is a help.

[rubbd] 艾未未 - detained activist, provocateur, artist, celebrity, m[yth]eme, repository for ‘Western’ false conscience/bad faith, lavatory for neurotic denial, lavabo for “dirty hands,” “probably the most-documented Chinese public figure alive,” the missing son of a poet

Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:50:35 GMT

- according to Ji Ruan – who reserves some rights over this photograph, if not the graffito – all over Hong Kong: Who’s afraid of Ai Weiwei / 谁在害怕艾未未

Calin Dan writes [Spectre, 16/04/11]: “why on earth do we need a celebrity to have problems in order to begin looking in the direction of a country that rolls over practically ALL of our standards concerning individual affirmation, freedom of speech and information, protection of the environment, free affirmation of ethnic and religious identity?”

He calls his commitment to political activism personal, saying, “If you don’t speak out, if you don’t clear your mind, who are you?” And his mother’s proud of him.

Ai Wei-wei: You can’t just say that the system is flawed, you have to work through the system and show it in all of its detail and that’s the only way that you can ultimately make a critique.

Ai Wei-wei declared the Communist Party’s demolition of his new Shang-hai studio complex, which he filmed and broadcast live online – the studios had taken him two years to build – to be one of his most powerful artworks ever.

Do ever examine yourself to see why is it that you are so fearless compared to other people?

Ai Wei-wei: I am so fearful. That’s not fearless. I’m more fearful than other people, maybe. Then I act more brave, because I know the danger is really there. If you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger.

The case of Ai Wei-wei is simply not relevant to New Zealanders; the fate of Ai Wei-wei is just not relevant for New Zealanders:

Rµbþð¬ - posts tagged 'art'

[rubbd] a season of birthdays, peppered with incident, highlights in my salt barrel include: organs and records, a hand, an absence of art, after maths, scoping out company offices, dinners of froth, jelly & Christ’s decomposition . find Alice

[rubbd] Occupy is a Revolutionary Subject or Still Life

[rubbd] to placard: sufficient conditioning; a call to raise expectations of and from conditions considered sufficient

[rubbd] 艾 未 未 - detained activist, provocateur, artist, celebrity, m[yth]eme, repository for ‘Western’ false conscience/bad faith, lavatory for neurotic denial, lavabo for “dirty hands,” “probably the most-documented Chinese public figure alive,” the missing son of a poet

[rubbd] 艾未未 - detained activist, provocateur, artist, celebrity, m[yth]eme, repository for ‘Western’ false conscience/bad faith, lavatory for neurotic denial, lavabo for “dirty hands,” “probably the most-documented Chinese public figure alive,” the missing son of a poet