“Imagine a virtual reality mapping environment designed to perfectly replicate a city’s streets and buildings. It could be powered by the data from a team of cars driving around with roof-mounted cameras pointing in every direction, whose images can then be manipulated into a map-based wireframe grid to fully immerse users. OK, so you’re thinking this is old hat, right? I mean, Google Street View has been doing this for years now. Thing is, the idea was around long before Google. In fact, M.I.T. students were doing the same thing on the rich streets of Aspen as far back as 1978…” More here. (Read Naimark’s comments for clarification)

I thought I should post the intro to my Still There research here. There must be still people on the list who remember what I remember, or remember it differently.

In September 1996, I came to Rotterdam to participate in the Dutch Electronic Art Festival – not as an artist yet but as a film curator, or, to say it better, as a film curator from Moscow who made a website for a film club. For many people, the mid-90s were all about going online, making websites, travelling to the East and to the West.[1]

It was my very first media art event. I was overwhelmed by the scope and scale of the interactive installations – the huge, loud constructions of Knowbotic Research; the scary performances of half-human, half-cyborg Stelarc; the trips in a virtual submarine that seemed so real, and other interactive and immersive stuff distributed throughout the city. The modern architecture of Rotterdam was truly enhanced by all of these futuristic objects with their surprises inside.

One of them – an inflatable internet café floating on a canal in Rotterdam’s centre – left a strong impression on me. I kept thinking about it and talking about it over the years. After all, it was the first thing I saw as I headed from the railway station to the DEAF offices, and it was so different from any other previous experiences I’d had with the internet in public spaces. I had never been to a “normal” internet café before and suddenly I found myself in this totally over-the-top place.

Well, years later I found out that it was not really an internet café but an “an intelligent object,” an “inflatable sculpture with brains connected to the World Wide Web”[2] called ParaSITE and built by the Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis and his team.

After I squeezed inside through the tight soft gates, I found myself in a space that can probably best be described as the inside of a spaceship or other apparatus designed to take you into outer space. Stylish pillows wrapped in plastic invited you to make yourself comfortable and situate yourself behind the connected computers. As well as check your email — for free.

The place was crowded. People were reading and writing emails, looking up the URLs they had recently received from other festival venues on business cards and pieces of paper. Everyone really enjoyed the atmosphere there.

The festival’s participants would no doubt have enjoyed being online in more trivial situations. They would have happily rushed to the computers even if they hadn’t been installed inside this zeppelin-like bubble. The extraterrestrial beeps and blinks it was producing were not the reason why people were coming and staying inside. But still, it felt very right that the internet-connected PCs had a special space constructed just for them in a special location. After all accessing a mail server is not nearly as exciting as entering the CAVE. Opening a page in a browser can’t be compared to the spectacular act of manipulating Stelarc through electronic impulses. On the other hand, the notion that there was something bigger happening right now was in the air. The interactive monsters of the day were just about to become obsolete, making way for bigger and more important things, namely, the World Wide Web.

Back then, going online and just being online were the thing to do. Networking was the passcode into the new millennium. And we, people on the web, even those who just had started to make their own pages, would fly into it soon to become human apparatuses like that gorgeous zeppelin moored on the channel in Westersingel street.

I came back to Rotterdam in October 2010 with an exciting new challenge from the research program at the Willem de Kooning Academy – to write about Rotterdam’s internet cafés. After years of working online, researching the vernacular web and digital folklore, I was about to begin my investigations of the “low forms” of digital culture in real life.

From my window in my Goethe Institute apartment on the Westersingel, I could see the canal, but, of course, ParaSITE was long gone and, I should add, along with it, all of that mid-90s excitement about the Web as well. But this kind of statement doesn’t really begin to capture what has actually happened since then.

Over the past one-and-a-half decades, the internet has experienced its ups and downs, the WWW has been kissed goodbye and welcomed back a number of times. And as I write this, it has again disappeared from the centre of media attention. In fact, in August 2010, Wired declared the web dead again, with its editor-in-chief casually observing that “The Web is not the culmination of digital revolution.”[3]

Ironically, the next big thing according to Wired is all about interactivity, just like in the early 90s. Only this time, the focus has been narrowed down to the interactions that people have with that one particular mobile device that you can touch and shake. The New Media world is totally preoccupied with imagining and testing new apps for mobile phones. This made it an interesting time for me to commence with my research, just as the spiral of technological evolution was making yet another new turn, bringing a certain completeness to the entire period before it, which gives us an opportunity to highlight it and analyse the phenomena that are still there, but already belong to another era.

Among them are the internet cafés, places you won’t need to visit if you are equipped according to modern standards. And users are fleeing the number one Dutch social network, Hyves, for the seemingly cleaner and better organized Facebook, marking another endpoint of the web’s diversity and decentralisation.

In the mean time, Geocities, millions of home pages created over the past 15 years, was officially shut down by Yahoo in 2009, but was quickly rescued by a group of underground archivists who made it public again in late 2010. Both, Geocities’ destruction and the resurrection, are significant events for web culture.

I’ve been buying connection time in various Rotterdam belhuizen (Dutch for “call shop”), browsing through Hyves user profiles, analyzing Geocities pages, to find myself amongst the ruins of the Web that I believe was a culmination of the digital revolution.

Rotterdam, 2011 - 2012

[1] And getting funding for all those activities from George Soros.
[2] ONL, ParaSITE, 1996, version from 31 December 2011
http://www.oosterhuis.nl/quickstart/index.php?id=173

[3] Chris Anderson, The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Wired, 17 August 2010 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1

http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/

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These are some speculations that have been bouncing around in my head for some time, particularly with reference to architecture — the discipline I practice — but perhaps having wider implications: Ever since the early stages of the modernist movement (since the second half of the 19th century) artistic innovation has been underpinned by the idea of the avant-garde.

The avant-garde are (to use a term from Thomas Kuhn) paradigm shifters. Their work consists of two facets that operate simultaneously. One is a deep critique of current paradigms of cultural production. And the other is production of artistic work that demonstrates a new paradigm and a new set of possibilities. One cannot privilege either of these facets saying it is primary, and the other derives from it - the relationship between the two is far more complex. However the two always go together. Gradually the works of the avant-garde become accepted and are mainstreamed. But this mainstreaming is subject to displacement by the next generation of the avant-garde. This continuous thread of displacement forms modernism’s alignment with progress and history.

As has been pointed out by Goldhaber, Davenport and others, we are now in an attention economy. If we are in the information age, the one thing that information consumes is attention, and consequently attention becomes a scarce resource. As an economy is substantively affected by those resources that are scarce and important, our lives are now being affected by the quest for attention.

The scarcity of attention is exacerbated by the changing nature of alienation (as defined by Baudrillard). Alienation was earlier characterized by distance — a separation from the normal routines of life. But it is now characterized by an overwhelming proximity to everything. The construction of sheltered spaces for reflection, which were provided by the regular routines of life, are now difficult to come by, and require substantive and sustained effort that few are willing to devote effort to in an attention starved world. Deprived of space for reflection, we face the challenge of being “reduced to pure screen: a switching centre for the networks of influence”.

The twin problems of attention and alienation have created a rupture in the avant-garde. The facet of critique, which requires rigorous attention, does not now receive sufficient consideration. The facet of artistic production receives far greater attention, but tends to be read superficially, focusing on the work’s apparent visuality.

Two major modes of capturing attention are scale and novelty.

Scale involves achieving a size that is difficult to ignore. It is seen in the increasing scale of real estate projects, the wave of corporate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions, and the leveraging of technology to achieve self-referential size (as seen in the global financial services sector).

The impulse to novelty centres on displacing us from the anesthetizing influence of habit, and making us see and notice things.

The avant-garde are now recast as a resource to be mined for the production of novelty. Their work is taken, detached from its critical foundations, and presented for its apparent visual novelty. So one sees architects such as Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, whose statements early in their careers aligned with an avant-garde identity of iconoclastic rebels, and whose work is now being utilized as vehicles of mainstream branding.

It could be argued that this detachment from critical foundations is a normal process of mainstreaming the avant-garde. However the speed with which it now occurs is significant. In an earlier generation, the first step in mainstreaming the avant-garde occurred through a set of “enlightened” patrons, whose idealism could be aligned with the cultural critique of the avant-garde. For example, if Jawaharlal Nehru hired Le Corbusier to design the new Indian city of Chandigarh, it was because Nehru’s vision of modernism for his newly independent nation could be aligned to Corbusier’s critique of traditional urbanism and the potential he saw in new city forms.

But it is rare to find patrons with this idealism today. The patron of today tends to have motives that are largely commercial rather than idealistic, whose primary request to the artist is “make me noticeable on the global stage”. The resultant quest for novelty makes the disruption between the critique and production of the avant-garde occur with a speed and vehemence that threatens the very status of the avant-garde.

In an earlier era, the engagement of an iconic star avant-garde artist was substantively affected by an ideological alignment with the artist’s ideology. But now the iconic status of the artist, together with the novelty of the work, have become ends in themselves. We are reminded of Daniel Boorstin’s prescient definition that the celebrity in this world of pure image making is to be “a person well known for his well-knownness”.

The impulse to novelty has rapidly diminishing returns, and one struggles to keep balance on an accelerating treadmill of visual stimulation.

Modernist art has centralized the notions of creativity and innovation because it seeks to align with history. Without seeking to either diminish or sideline creativity and innovation, we now must simultaneously seek to align art with timelessness through a quest for authenticity.

Prem

Brian Holmes wrote:

On 01/10/2012 02:39 AM, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

Modernist art has centralized the notions of creativity and innovation because it seeks to align with history. Without seeking to either diminish or sideline creativity and innovation, we now must simultaneously seek to align art with timelessness through a quest for authenticity.

The dissolution of the avant-garde through media-flashes of innovation and monuments of overwhelming scale is certain. But I wonder if timelessness can be thought, not through any reference to eternity but with the Benjaminian category of Jetztzeit — that is, “now-time”?

I am sure everyone remembers WB’s famous declaration from the Theses on History: “‘History is the object of a construction, whose site is not that of homogeneous and empty time, but one filled with now-time.”

There is currently a rare and excellent article about art in the Arab Spring on the opinion pages of Al Jazeera. The author, Daanish Faruqi, comments on what appears to be a quite spectacular exhibition by Cai Guo-Quiang at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. With the “biggest ever” daylight fireworks show composing the central artistic statement, this seems to have exactly those characteristics of scale and innovation you are talking about, Prem. Surely we will all forget this almost instantly!

Faruqi picks up on Hamid Dabashi’s critique of this exhibition for its lack of relevance to the present, and though he doesn’t bother with Walter Benjamin he does offer an insight into where the intensities of the present currently gather:

“Art’s role, as Dabashi correctly describes, is to imagine the emancipatory politics of our impossibilities. To imagine is not to chronicle in minute detail. The artists of the Arab Spring are tasked with simply igniting a spark, of reinjecting the radical imagination into Arab society, through envisioning the utopian possibility of hope and a better life, undergirded by the basic dignity of the Arab people as non-negotiable and sacrosanct.”

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/20121612493122450.html

I think the text is really good, check it out. Maybe an actual building full of now-time is currently impossible. Maybe this is a moment for architects who do not build? Who work instead with the grassroots transformation of spaces that have been frozen by capital?

warmly, Brian

Keith Hart wrote:

Very interesting, Prem, thanks. I think of time as both linear and timeless. I have an icon of this idea which I call the T-bar. The crossbar constructs tense as a line from past through present to future. The upright is timeless, the present conceived of as rooted in a continuous past. The two axes intersect in the present which is therefore inevitably both — a movement of difference and always the same. I realise that this does not account for cyclical theories of time, but I think it says a lot about the modern world.

Keith

John Hopkins wrote:

Brian Holmes wrote:

I think the text is really good, check it out. Maybe an actual building full of now-time is currently impossible. Maybe this is a moment for architects who do not build? Who work instead with the grassroots transformation of spaces that have been frozen by capital?

now-time arises in the Self, deeply sourced in incarnate being: be here now. When one or when many are reaching into this source simultaneously, life will richly arise (Rilke’s ‘Ninth Elegy’ “Superabundant being wells up in my heart.”)

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” (also Rilke)

A building as a seemingly static and closed protocol is perhaps not the right metaphor to frame now-time, it would be better to place it in the breath which is a dynamic union of opposites. Dynamism is crucial to being in the moment, following ones own breath is of course a recognized (yogic) path for ‘finding’ the now. The finding of collective breath is accessed through the chanting and singing in the squares and brings the now into the body through the in- and ex-piration.

Better to eat frozen Italian gelato that worry about frozen capital…
Attention to capital allows it to persist.

thanks, Brian…

jh

In the wing mirror of the passenger side of a vehicle, objects are closer than they appear.

The texts re-published in the Rearview series are those that we wish to draw attention to perhaps because they reveal certain “blind spots” in contemporary art criticism. Each month, these “found” reviews (indeed, quasi-artifacts) will be prefaced by one of our writers.

After stumbling across Robert Smithson’s vituperative response to the 1966 Armory Show, I had to wonder what exactly it was that he saw. “Bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures”? His focus on the “funeral of technology” made me imagine that he’d seen a really bad Tinguely (which wouldn’t have surprised me) or maybe a bad Nam June Paik (which would). As it turns out, his ire was directed at a side-dish show at the Armory organized by Billy Klüver (an engineer) along with 10 artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Öyvind Fahlström, and Yvonne Rainer. Under the witty acronym E.A.T., the performances nonetheless pioneered the way for the now-common practice of artists collaborating with practitioners from different fields. For the most part, the result of bringing 30 engineers together with 10 artists yielded performance kitsch at its worst (John Cage’s recordings of brain waves being the exception). You can watch a condensed (20-minute) version of the “Nine Evenings” here. — April Lamm

Robert Smithson: An Esthetics of Disappointment on the Occasion of the Art and Technology Show at the Armory

Many are disappointed at the nullity of art. Many try to pump life or space into the confusion that surrounds art. An incurable optimism like a mad dog rushes into the vacuum that the art suggests. A dread of voids and blanks brings on a horrible anticipation. Everybody wonders what art is, because they’re never seems to be any around. Many feel coldly repulsed by concrete unrealities, and demand some kind of proof or at least a few facts. Facts seem to ease the disappointment. But quickly those facts are exhausted and fall to the bottom of the mind. This mental relapse is incessant and tends to make our esthetic view stale. Nothing is more faded than esthetics. As a result, painting, sculpture, and architecture are finished, but the art habit continues. The more transparent and vain the esthetic, the less chance there is for reverting back to purity. Purity is a desperate nostalgia, that exfoliates like a hideous need. Purity also suggests a need for the absolute with all its perpetual traps. Yet, we are overburdened with countless absolutes, and driven to inefficient habits. These futile and stupefying habits are thought to have meaning. Futility, one of the more durable things of this world is nearer to the artistic experience than excitement. Yet, the life-forcer is always around trying to incite a fake madness. The mind is important, but only when it is empty. The greater the emptiness the grander the art.

Esthetics have devolved into rare types of stupidity. Each kind of stupidity may be broken down into categories such as bovine formalism, tired painting, eccentric concentrics or numb structures. All these categories and many others all petrify into a vast banality called the art world which is no world. A nice negativism seems to be spawning. A sweet nihilism is everywhere. Immobility and inertia are what many of the most gifted artists prefer. Vacant at the center, dull at the edge, a few artists are on the true path of stultification. Muddleheaded logic is taking the place of clearheaded illogic, much to nobody’s surprise.

Art’s latest derangement at the 25th Armory seemed like The Funeral of Technology. Everything electrical and mechanical was buried under various esthetic mutations. The energy of technology was smothered and dimmed. Noise and static opened up the negative dimensions. The audience steeped in agitated stagnation, conditioned by simulated action, and generally turned on, were turned off. This at least was a victory for art. — Robert Smithson

Originally published in The Writings of Robert Smithson, edited by Nancy Holt, New York, New York University Press, 1979.

Text © Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

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“I use these video excerpts from Hole in Space in teaching. I end with a short public-policy rant.”" - “lpress” on YouTube, March 15, 2008

See this for more on the event.

In There is nothing left different works by Céline Condorelli and Uriel Orlow are in dialogue with each other in a new multi-part installation.

There is nothing left explores blind spots, unexpected epilogues and disappearances in the grand narratives of history; it starts from Alexandria and the Suez canal in twentieth century Egypt. A series of installations engage with the constitutive movements affecting time and space: movements of people and goods, the flow of capital, political movements, removal of statues (and regimes) and migrating species.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist book, Terrains Vagues/ محادثات /Persistent Images designed by Sophie Demay and Lola Halifa-Legrand; it includes interviews with Bassam El Baroni, Marianne Hultman, Jean-Marie Straub, and a text by Gilane Tawadros.

Céline Condorelli: “We know that story-telling, misreading or errors can produce real historical events. And in some way, as an artist, I am implicated in forging documents, devising utopias, and constructing imaginary schemes about the future, and in this way I actively participate in the production of the real. The project is not so much a fictionalized version of real events, than a narrative, a construct, enabling a different understanding of history and the re-imagination of possible futures.”

Uriel Orlow: “This means that history is up for grabs — it doesn’t have to be related to as a truth that is neatly re-inserted into a historical chronology. Instead, the imaginary, evocative potential of a minor event, forgotten in the twilight of history, connects to a whole host of associative chains and appears extra-ordinary, almost mythical. The work itself is articulated through fragments, shards of research, reconstructions and hallucinations: images and text beyond the dichotomy of fact and fiction.”

CC: “A series of pieces, then, are ordered into movements, as in a piece of music: the First movement deals with the cotton industry and the mass departures from Egypt of the 1950s. The Second movement is concerned with the literal removal, disappearance and transformations of landmarks in a city. And finally the last movement is that of revolution, taking its cue from the 1981 film Trop tôt, trop tard by Straub-Huillet that now appears to be almost prophetic.”

UO: “And other kinds of movement or stoppages: the stranded cargo ships, trapped in the Suez Canal for eight years, while below maritime species continue their migration from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and finally different versions of the removal of Lesseps’ statue when the canal was nationalised, all carrying a latency of meaning that is consonant with different versions of liberation and is tied to the historical present.”

CC: “Everything starts with a sentence “Il n’y a plus rien” [There is nothing left], that keeps appearing like a refrain in a multitude of voices describing the city of Alexandria; the work explores the narratives hidden by this blanketing of reality, and follows its echo back to the multiple occupations of Egypt.”

“Il n’y a plus Rien” by Condorelli started at Manifesta 8, Murcia, and the first iteration of the overall project is at ACAF, Alexandria, curated by Bassam El Baroni. The publication is developed in collaboration with Oslo Fine Art Society /Oslo Kunstforening, where a different version of the exhibition will be exhibited in March 2012, curated by Marianne Hultman. The Project is Supported by Pro Helvetia, The Swiss Arts Council, Cairo.

Internet Rising is a labor of love comprising a rapid fire mashup stream of live webcam interviews all conducted within the web sphere. The film’s participants include many profound personalities and key internet influencers ranging from professors, corporate academics, futurists, researchers, writers, bloggers, media creators, activists, gamers, educators, scientists, artists, innovators - real humans, all of whom provide amazing insights into how our state of the world is changing and transforming via various forces of economic, social, geographic, political, philosophical development… all centered around technology’s transformative and generative power.

Around the turn of the century, Geocities had tens of millions of “homesteaders” as the digital tennants were called and was bought by Yahoo! for three and a half billion dollars. Ten years later in 2009, as other metaphors of the internet (such as the social network) had taken over, and the homesteaders had left their properties vacant after migrating to Facebook, Geocities was shutdown and deleted. In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.