Projects 2004

Manyfacture

Manyfacture

Parallel to the international conference “Rethinking the Interface between Human Creativity and Technology” in Reykjavik, March 20 - 22, participants of the Critical Studies course at Malmö Art Academy and Rooseum will unfold a mapping around the term “artistic research” at the Living Art Museum. Implications, differences and resonances related to the broad spectra of creativity and technology will be explored through the confluent modes of theoretical and practical production.


If rethinking the interface between human creativity and technology may be said to imply a re-examination of the respective fields, it emerges as a profoundly political activity.

Rethinking the meeting point between two fields requires that both undergo a similar process of analysis. Art is constantly involved in an internal, critical questioning of its potentials and places in a social, political, economic and creative context. An intricate part of the process is to stretch [conceptions of] art institutions: The focus is knowledge [produced by the] institutions. The metaphor of stretching is useful here: we imagine the point at which something breaks or expands when put under pressure.

The word interface evokes friction, an action of surfaces rubbing or chafing against each other - the resistance encountered when one surface moves over another. In each case, the surface changes. If we can agree that art is a meeting point of the elastic kind, we may already be close to imagining a usable model for rethinking that interface.

Friction causes heat – the interface between art and technology is a critical/creative moment.


Thought often takes a circuitous route. As the mind wanders, it may stumble upon something new. This mental meandering can provide insight into connections between multiple ideas and events, whether spectacular or mundane.

And this assimilation and dissemination of information is not limited to the verbal.
It may be practiced solo or collectively. But it is always experienced subjectively by a single individual. The showgirl high kicking in tandem with fifty other dancers may be moving in near-perfect unison, but she is having her own experience of that movement. Yet, she shares it with her colleagues and the audience.

This sharing of subjective experience, which may not ”make
sense” in a linear way, is nonetheless a kind of knowing. Art provides a forum in which this kind of exchange can take place and be questioned.
Where will this train of thought take us? How can we draw on subjective knowledge and share it – creating a loop in which ideas take shape individually and collectively? What do we do with this knowledge? Are there practical applications? What kinds of structures (material or immaterial) might be needed to hold this knowledge, allowing it to evolve over time?


[click ] and Dérive
The internet is indubitably the most common motor of references. On the one hand, the user, by oblique hunches determined by a simple [click ], accesses data galore, existing in various forms such as visual, archived, scripted, pdf, personal, jpeg,…uploaded for common usage. On the other, unfolded and available private or public information is exposed throughout the virtual binary ensemble. Moreover, the impressive quality of the engine does not reside in the sum of sites, but rather throughout the plethora of links. A journey on the internet can lead the user to endlessly non-linear destinations. One could ask in which manner the user is drawn by the various locations or how one’s horizon is constantly negotiated? Thus, which route can one take while meandering from diverse windows of representation? This practice of a dismantled mapping could be understood through Dérive, a technique introduced by the Situationist International. The practice consists of transient passages in order to understand the space in which one lives. Technology announces a paradox, the notion of progress and of evolution, whereas internet has no linear, cumulative, vertical or progressive way of gathering knowledge.


x
Philosophy, art and science come into relation of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal reasons. In this sense, then, we really have to see philosophy, art and science as separate melodic lines in constant interplay with one another. (Deleuze)

y
Isn’t that a reason to bring these lines together, a starting point for a group like us, coming from different backgrounds and disciplines collaborating, hoping that the internal reasons will become personal and thus collective reasons? To quote from an advertisement billboard: ‘What collaboration does – you can’t do alone’.

x
It’s a series: if you don’t belong to a series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: one is always working in a group, even when it doesn’t appear to be the case. (Deleuze)

y
Exactly. And sometimes it can be most interesting to make this series visible knowing that it will never be complete and that it produces difference. I would say this is a part of what we mean when we talk about our effort to break down the barriers between art theory and practice.


Understanding as well as producing knowledge, identities, relations and lines of communication requires investigations of the interface between different languages. This is a field of interest in art situated between theory and practice–a field of translation, transaction and transformation. Mental, physical and spatial de/coding produce a continually modified organism in a process where experience rather than models, reversals rather than replacements, are generated.

Means of communication, movement and mobility are important tools in operations of translation. The immaterial nature of thoughts, ideas and potentialities require mediation into concrete negotiable objects or nodal points. The fact that vulnerable tools are worked into the very kernel of our everyday life stresses the importance of a constructive two-way interface between technology and human creativity - an organic tool to break down and rework mental, physical as well as spatial boundaries.


Spaces of Research Connected
Fieldtrip around the term “creativity“
When we look more closely at models of contemporary social textures, we find a formerly comprehensive society now fragmented in scenes, groups and
micropublics. Disassociation is emphasised, insider knowledge, the value of
distinction. Strangely enough very different communities use common key terms. The notion “creativity“ appears in discourses reaching from emancipatory education, anti-alienation groups to fast forward or esoteric management. “Ignoring conventions creative people are distinguished by their ability to piece together connections that don’t match“. What will come out if we put terms from very different contexts together in a relational field? A field that includes lexical definitions, “open space”, Derrida, Discursive Picnic and Sarai for example: “A creative process is marked by openness” - “thinking which is not identifying, not putting down the other and the different to the similar” - “wandering around, mapping, exploring” - a variety of aspects as a discursive practice of “researchers, practitioners, activists, programmers and so on” - spaces of research connected.


school of applied spatial anthropologists
When the S.A.S.A. was founded, we were sitting on a pavement with cameras and audio recording devices. The main concern was to develop a body of work around the “minibar” in Ankara. Minibars occupy the spaces between buildings, which are not destined to host such activities. They undo and re-function the existing physical elements, just by being there, for nocturnal practices of drinking and socializing. This situation was never a planned or a preconceived activity. Just something that happened, due to a set of conjunctural and coincidental reasons, evolving through time.

one can try another path: one can try another path:
It is not the data or the explanations that are claimed to be “facts”, “true” or “false”, but acknowledging the strands of observation / fact formation / theoretical reflection. To think about situations, deriving possibilities and putting them forward.

The quasi-scientific practices in artistic research do not strive for authority and singularity of knowledge. This placelessness needs to be embraced, rather than trying to fix or anchor artistic research in any location of sorts.


Interfaces by Artistic interfacing

The word “interface” is a virtual ground that may be organised and re-organised depending on diverse conditions. Therefore, one can recognise interface as the effect of today’s empowered discourse and socio-political and cultural constitution. On the other hand, interface can be a kind of active ground, which gives us possibilities for intervention in ruling conventions of society, releasing individual perspectives.

Finally, it makes us stress “interface” as a verb. What kind of performance would take place in our diverse interfaces? How do we perform and interact to produce new interfaces? These are key questions for the project in the Living Art Museum, Reykjavik. What does it mean to live in a given system, adjusting to it? Or to produce and to activate individual systems? To create the meeting points between multiple and diverse spheres? If the negotiation is one of tactical actions in practice, how do we negotiate it? These are ontological questions, concerning everyday life, found in today’s artistic questioning and practices.


Participants:
Dorothee Albrecht, Can Altay, Kristina Ask, Hyunjin Kim, Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen, Hanna Styrmisdóttir, Christina Werner, Christine Wolfe