35 Robertson Street Hastings TN34 1HT. Details to follow.

Will.

 1.

Where did my country go, in leaving behind this vapid numbers machine, void of life?

Don’t ask after when I return to my homeland, for I cannot return to what was is gone.

And in tracing a line of history to better understand what went so wrong, seek not to ask when the banker became the butcher. Ask, rather, when the butcher became the banker.

2.

When the mechanic becomes the hangman, and the civil servant is inking death warrants.
When the architect is building camps. When the butcher has become torturer, will you hold your nerve? When the baton has cracked your skull. When freed detainees greet you, with a sodomised demeanour. When life greets you warm, simply because you’re alive, but you greet it cold, because you envy death.

3.

And ask not when the government became a speculator. Ask instead when the public became its shareholder. As Che Guevara’s bloodied final grin froths eternal, don’t ask for revolution. Seek after resolution. Turn fast the screws that fix your mind Let go the grip that holds your party dear. Back slap that fat grocer as the numbers whir. For you did not seek to stop his meteoric rise.

4.

Don’t look to divide, or ask when, or in who’s name your country, your town, your body, became franchised, to the economic war machine. Brave comrades, citizens, keen to be the revolutionary. The one who went that extra mile. The top comrade. But, enough, you are an honourable man. And so are we all honourable men and women.

5.

Do not criticise the colonel and politician, as they visit death upon the hapless. For war does not only rain as fire, from the sky upon the ground. Is not alone the saber for maiming. the dicktat for systematic killing. War’s stricken grimace is with you. Turned smile as you fund it and reap its rewards. Your war. Peace child.

Living in the physical realm you cannot experience living in the emotional realm.

Living emotionally you are unable to understand living spiritually.

Living in the spiritual realm you cannot understand living in the cognitive realm.

Living in the physical realm you will not live in the spiritual realm.

This is true for all the combinations.

2.

Yet living solely in the cognitive realm you will be blind also to the cognitive realm.

In the emotional realm you will be deaf to emotions.

In the spiritual realm you will be blind to spirit.

In the physical realm you will be mute to physical experience.

To experience one realm alone you must be open to all realms.

3.

It is incorrect to say, following Jung, that ‘mankind’ is in search of a soul.

For humanity – man and woman, kind – is in search of a body for its soul.

A mind for its body.

Emotions for its mind and its body.

Humanity searches for lived experience in a world deadened to it.

The human corpus and anima entire.

Where?

Wherever. We can be sure it’s not ‘in here’.

But somewhere ‘out there’.

ZAK Project Space, Castello di Monteriggioni (Siena)

14 January – 4 p.m./ 15 January – 12 a.m.

A series of video projections and a round table to reflect how the World Wide Web
has changed the geographies private and collective.

A meta-linguistic reflection, which investigates the web interconnectivity through the same means.

An Internet platform will host the work of the following artists: Andreas Angelidakis, Alterazioni Video,
Cory Arcangel, Marco Cadioli, Diego Caglioni, Gregory Chatonsky, Mauro Ceolin, Constant Dullaart, Chris
Heller, Arne Huebner, IOCOSE, Gretta Louw, Albertine Meunier, Claudia Rossini, Daniel Stäbler, Spam the
musical, Carlo Zanni, Theo Seeman.

SPECIAL GUESTS: Alessio Bertallot, Andrea Bruciati, Marco Cadioli, Vito Campanelli, Gloria Maria
Cappelletti, Mauro Ceolin, IOCOSE, Miltos Manetas, Fabio Paris, Domenico Quaranta, Elena Giulia Rossi,
Valentina Tanni, Carlo Zanni.
FOLLOW US online at www.ustream.tv

By 2015, global Internet traffic will quadruple. Over the past decade, the global spread of Web 2.0 has
revolutionized the approach to the individual network and the way in which the individual represents him
or herself and relates to the outside world. In a few years, we have moved from a simple passive use of static
hypertext documents, the typical Web 1.0, to a more accessible way of managing content, typical of online
applications such as blogs, IM, google, youtube, facebook , myspace, twitter, giving everybody the opportunity
to speak in real time and without space limitations. The urgency of sharing the intimate becomes more
pronounced as it increases the availability and distribution of these means of expression. The flâneur observes
the network, but at the same time wants to be seen as the protagonist of life that he has built. He plays through
a self-representation not only dictated by a desire for narcissistic self-congratulation, but also by an obsessive
search for consensus and approval from his audience that makes the virtual interaction and exchange more
intense. “The world wants to watch and be watched at the same moment” teaches Palomar, and just like Italo
Calvino’s character, the modern individual in his self-representation is a virtual window from which the inner
universe overlooks the outer and vice versa.
The expansion of Web 2.0 on a global scale also seems to have generated a change in the perception of distance
and geographical boundaries. This phenomenon would, in turn, helped to spread a general feeling of belonging
to a mutable and open world, the boundaries of which seem to constantly re-register. The internal geography
of the individual changes, alongside these territorial changes and, consequently, so does the relationship
between the individual and its territory of origin, intended as a socio-political space. While it will exacerbate the
impression of rootlessness, cultural nomadic orientation and of an intellectual challenge to the authorities, on
the other hand there is an increasingly widespread desire for membership within a free, non-political and non-
geographically localized community , representing a sort of alternative world where everything is possible.

Dedicated to you, who want a simpler and kinder world.

There is no love in bads-ville. Those mad and bad dogs marshal a hinterland. An expansive and infinite tar field, where love is pushed to the periphery, because it cannot enter into the grand count, in which everything is made colourless, because colours present risks. Above all, the risk of a world being entirely other to that we now live in. A world where things are not counted and categorised and controlled. A world which is unsafe because people will know how to love, dangerously and truthfully. Ruthlessly, even. For we live in a society where love has been stripped of its power. We love when it suits us, and when there will be a payback. We love for profit, when we know that love will be returned and will give us good feelings, good sensations. We love a selected few people. Good people, nice people, familiar people. Deserving people. We express our love with a pithy three word phrase. I. Love. You. I love you and I will protect you from the bad people, who are not loved, or who are loved by others. And those others are bad.

This is how we love. In our houses. In huddled groups. And in this way we can carry on our lives even in the knowledge that we fund faraway wars, in which people are pummelled and tortured and raped and killed. For eveything is ok if we are loved. For if we love and if we are loved we know it is not us who is killing people in faraway countries. Because killing is not love.

Yet the ‘others’ who are bad, who love each other but who you do not love, and who will never love you, those others who are richer or poorer than you, and more or less careful, decent, spirited than you, wouldn’t care if you were being raped or tortured in a faraway war. So long as they are loved. And you would not care if they were killed in a distant conflict. Would you?

But who told you to love only those close to you, only those who give you security and pleasure? Who told you what love is? Who encouraged a world where the protection of what is just and good became equated with safety from the indifference of those others who love each other, but who do not love you? As you all fund faraway wars in which innocent people – who love other innocent people, but who are not loved by you – are maimed and killed? Who? No one. For you have not been told to love, but to fear.

And does it not say something about our society, that whilst you love your friends and family, and some other ‘good’ people, both you, and those you don’t love – but who love good people – are paying for other people, who also love ‘good’ people, to be killed? In faraway places. Faraway places that never feel faraway when you’re the one being raped, killed or tortured in them.

But you do not love your friends and family and a few other good people because you want people to be killed in faraway wars. Rather, you love your friends and family and some other ‘good’ people because you do not want them to be hurt, maimed, killed, raped and tortured. These are ultimately the things you wish to avoid, and this is why you love. And your love springs eternal, like the wars you pay for, in faraway places.

MWatson 2011

—

Text written for:

COSA SI PROVA AD AVERE UN SUONO IN TESTA?
3’ traccia
Il paradosso della ripetizione

a cura di Elena Abbiatici e Valentina G. Levy

11 novembre – 20 dicembre 2011

Piazzia de’ Ricci, 127 – Roma

Vernissage 11|11|11 – ore 19

«Cosa si prova ad avere un suono in testa» arriva alla sua terza e ultima fase, con una collettiva dedicata al concetto di ripetizione.

Ryoji Ikeda e Carsten Nicolai. Lamberto Teotino, Gregory Chatonsky, Daniela De Paulis, Alia Scalvini

Nella ripetizione di un gesto, di una parola, di un elemento visivo o sonoro è insita una silenziosa volontà di arrestare il tempo e inseguire il mito dell’eterno ritorno, che si manifesta attraverso il perpetrarsi del presente, all’infinito. La reiterazione in loop di un oggetto-evento produce un eco del reale, che sfida le leggi spazio-temporali, dando vita a una dimensione parallela che trova origine nell’istante presente e in esso si rigenera, ciclicamente, mentre la sua matrice originale si proietta nel futuro, votandosi al non ritorno e all’oblio.
Secondo Deleuze, la teoria di Hume per cui la ripetizione non muta nulla nell’oggetto che si ripete, ma cambia qualcosa nello spirito di chi lo contempla, sarebbe alla base di quello che lui definisce il paradosso della ripetizione. La percezione della ripetizione sarebbe possibile, infatti in base alla presa di coscienza soggettiva di una differenza, d’un errore, equivalente allo scarto rispetto al reale.

All’ingresso si è accolti dal riecheggiare di lavori audio nati dalla collaborazione tra Ryoji Ikeda e Carsten Nicolai. I brani presentati sono estratti dal progetto CYCLO iniziato nel 1999 dai due artisti e non ancora archiviato, che costituisce una ricerca sulle sequenze errate e i cicli ripetitivi nei software e nella computer music. Gli artisti compongono i loro brani scegliendo i suoni in funzione della loro immagine, attraverso l’utilizzo di moduli audiovisivi per la visualizzazione in tempo reale del suono. (Un particolare ringraziamento a Raster-noton 2001, 2011).

Al piano terra l’installazione sonora di Lamberto Teotino (Napoli, 1974; attualmente vive e lavora a Roma), Luther Blissett è italiano, presentata qui per la prima volta, si compone di un ritratto ed una scultura sonora, capaci di riportare alla luce un personaggio/fenomeno collettivo. Un nome multiplo, uno pseudonimo collettivo utilizzato da un numero imprecisato di performer, artisti, riviste underground, operatori del virtuale e collettivi di squatter americani ed europei negli anni ottanta e novanta: un nome preso a prestito da un omonimo centravanti inglese di origine giamaicana ingaggiato dal Milan alla metà degli anni ottanta. Un’icona pop: Luther Blissett. Una voce di donna – della traduttrice di Google translations – ripete ciclicamente in maniera sintetica e didattica la frase da cui prende nome l’opera stessa rivendicando una presunta origine italiana di questo personaggio fittizio.

Accanto a lui Gregory Chatonsky (nato a Parigi, vive tra Montreal e Parigi) con Composition I, il primo di una serie di tre lavori realizzati, a partire dal 2001, attraverso l’uso di un programma informatico, creato dallo stesso artista, che è in grado di generare sequenze ripetute di estratti video, selezionate autonomamente. In Composition I, l’artista propone una sonata per pianoforte eseguita dal jazzista americano Keith Jarrett. Chatonsky presenta anche Traduction (2011), installazione audio creata appositamente per quest’evento in cui un brano estratto da Differenza e ripetizione di Gilles Deleuze viene letto da una voce di sintesi inglese, mentre una versione in inglese dello stesso testo viene letta da una voce di sintesi italiana. Il lavoro è frutto di una ricerca che s’interroga sia sull’arbitrarietà del concetto di traduzione come riproduzione, sia sulle infinite possibilità di errore dei sistemi informatici di sintesi che si basano sulla ripetitiva schematizzazione di funzioni matematiche.

Scendendo al piano inferiore, Daniela De Paulis (Roma, 1973, vive e lavora a Rotterdam) con 768.000 Kilometres (2011). Realizzato durante la residenza dell’artista al radio telescopio di Dwingeloo in Olanda, 768.000 Kilometres è il suono riflesso dalla superficie lunare della lettura del secondo canto del Paradiso, in cui Dante affronta la teoria della macchie lunari e delle influenze astrali. La voce viene inviata alla luna come segnale radio dall’antenna del radio telescopio, prima di essere riflessa dalla superficie del satellite ed essere ricevuta come eco da due diverse stazioni radio in Inghilterra. La doppia ricezione in due siti diversi ha generato il suono stereo, mentre l’effetto Doppler causato dalla rotazione terrestre ha generato la distorsione della voce. Altri fattori tuttavia contribuiscono alla distorsione, tra cui l’indebolimento del segnale radio causato della distanza percorsa e l”assorbimento’ da parte del segnale di onde radio di varia origine.Il titolo indica la distanza percorsa dalla voce come segnale radio, che impiega 2.30 secondi per viaggiare fino alla luna e tornare sulla terra.
Il video inedito in b/n Le Voyage dans la Lune (2011) completa il lavoro audio: ispirato al celebre film di George Méliès, “Le Voyage dans la Lune” e realizzato usando 25 fotogrammi delle fasi lunari, scattate da Michael Oates della Manchester Astronomical Society, è il primo video al mondo ad essere stato realizzato con immagini inviate sulla luna come segnali radio, poi riflesse dalla superficie lunare e ricevute dal radio telescopio di Dwingeloo. L’artista è infatti la pioniera del Visual Moonbounce, utilizzato per la prima volta nel suo progetto OPTICKS (www.opticks.info). (Uno speciale ringraziamento a CAMRAS, ASTRON, Jan van Muijlwijk e tutto il team del radio telescopio di Dwingeloo, a Howard Ling, Bruce Halasz, Fabio Santesarti, Marco Douma and Michael Oates – Manchester Astronomical Society).

La videoinstallazione Crossing the field di Alia Scalvini (Desenzano, 1980) ci proietta a sua volta in una nuova geografia. Ad un video registrato attraversando un campo lungo una linea retta è associato il suono di una pioggia di meteoriti che attraversano l’atmosfera interagendo con l’elettromagnetismo terrestre. Il video è proiettato su di un lato dell’igloo utilizzato come rifugio durante il viaggio mentre l’audio è udibile da speaker dislocati nella stanza. Il video è stato prodotto creando un loop di registrazione dello stesso filmato su nastro magnetico: ad ogni passaggio il gap tra l’emissione e la traduzione della frequenza elettromagnetica in entrata ha suscitato errori di codifica, quindi di scrittura dell’immagine. Il suono che accompagna il video è anch’esso la traduzione di un’interferenza analogica: una pioggia meteoritica delle Leonidi che muovendosi interagisce con la continuità dell’onda elettromagnetica terrestre. (Le tracce audio utilizzate nell’istallazione sono state selezionate in collaborazione con I.N.A.F. Osservatorio Astronomico Cagliari e rese disponibili per gentile concessione ).
In galleria il saggio “Your love repeats itself, in far away places. Dedicated to you, who want a simpler and kinder world” scritto per l’occasione da Mike Watson.
Contatti:
Elena Abbiatici – elena.abbiatici@gmail.com
Valentina G. Levy – valentinag.levy@gmail.com

[...]

God is Deaf: Five Meditations on Noise

i.

‘Noise’, a perpetual residue of the universe’s origin, yet the universe did not have one origin, but two: its coming into being, and its coming into being for the human subject, such that the continuous coming into being of the Universe could be heard. Philosophy splits itself into two camps: Those who believe that the Universe has always emitted Noise, and those that believe that it cannot have emitted Noise prior to the advent of beings sophisticated enough to hear that Noise.

ii.

Letter to an ex-wife: ‘… and if you sleep with anyone else can you please do it in a soundproofed room, because I find the thought of the sound nauseating.’

iii.

On a screen in an empty room an automated stock market monitoring programme displays numbers falling rapidly, and silently. Its movement accompanied only by the faint hum of the computer heralds the start of recession, mass unemployment and war.

iv.

A GBU-43/B or ‘MOAB’ – ‘Mother of all bomb’s’ – is tested in the desert, just prior to the outbreak of the Iraq war. Containing 9’525 kilos of high explosives, apart from being able to destroy an area up to ‘nine city blocks wide’, the MOAB was aimed at creating panic in the Iraqi population so that they would then remove their own leader. Whilst that plan did not work, leading the US and UK to enter into a costly invasion, civilians subjected to the constant aerial bombardment that took place in the Iraqi Winter of 2003 suffer nervous disorders as a result of the noise to this very day. If there is proof God is deaf, it is because this noise could not be heard by the far away tax paying citizens of the invading countries. The notion that Noise cannot exist if there is no subject present to hear it is subconsciously utilised by the citizens of war-mongering nations to excuse their apathy and protect their comfortable lifestyles. If there were such a thing as divine justice it ought to include as just one aspect a cacophony of aerial bombardment, screams of the dying, and sounds of systemic rape and torture, played on a loop into the ears of those UK and US civilians who wouldn’t acknowledge, let alone speak out against the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

v.

A child eats crisps and asks his grandmother if she can hear the crunching noise as loudly in the room as he can hear it in his head.

Mike Watson. 2011.

Physiogmony of a Nation: http://www.frieze.com/comment/article/the-physiognomy-of-a-nation/

(In Italian): http://www.artapartofculture.net/2011/07/30/la-fisionomia-di-una-nazione-di-mike-watson/

Review of Speculum Celestiale, Fondazione Morra, Napoli: http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/speculum-celestiale/

Review of Stefano Minzi at Lorcan O’ Neil: http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/stefano-minzi/

Art Review

(print and online) Review of Michelangelo Pistoletto at MAXXI: http://www.artreview.com/forum/topics/michelangelo-pistoletto-da-uno

Radical Philosophy

(print, online for subscribers): http://www.radicalphilosophy.c​om/issues/168

Upcoming

Review of Coinquilini – Guendalina Salini and Marinella Senatore -  at MACRO, Frieze (print and online)

Commentary on The Arts Cuts and response in Italy Frieze (online)

Preview of The Otolith Group at MAXXI (print and online)

Forthcoming Book

Joan of Art: Towards a Conceptual Militancy (Zero Books 2012/13)

 AN ESSAY ON JOAN OF ARC BY MIKE WATSON //

IN HONOUR OF HER DEATH DAY 30TH MAY

Joan of ART: Towards a Conceptual Militancy

Excursus/intro

Joan of Arc, madwoman and/or seer.

Yet it is neither madness nor spiritual adeptness that will be enquired of here, but the operative AND/OR itself.

For the ‘and/or’ cuts through the stifling din of rationality, which seeks to drown out the resistance of ‘spirit’ to the monotonous and deadly advance of capital through the imposition of scientific certainty, aimed at stifling the wayward peripheries of life.

Yet those peripheries are what gives life to an otherwise ossified subject.

We are unfree, subject to the runaway capitalist machine and/or free, capable of generating positive new realities. The and/or confounds reality as a militant conceptual tool. We cannot escape the auspices of capital and science in reality and/or we can, through the conceptual projection of our escape.

[…]

All Hail Joan of Art

For what rationality cannot tolerate is the ambiguity of, say, the madwoman who functions at high levels. The voices in the head which might be from God. Or otherwise put, the voices from God, which are ‘only’ in the head, when ‘in the head’ might only be possible on account of God. But further, the voices in the head which might in fact be both ordained by God and completely banal. The possibility that there both is and isn’t a God.

Joan of Arc could have been led by a mere mental malfunction, in that she believed to be hearing holy voices, when they were possibly ‘mere’ chemical interactions acting so as to delude their unwitting vessel, or carrier. Yet, given the abnormality of Joan of Arc’s rise to power, her military success and the considerable influence she has wielded since her death in 1429, it cannot surely be possible to speak of malfunction. And if it cannot be possible to speak of malfunction, it makes little sense to argue that Joan of Arc did not speak with and did not receive visions from those she claimed to communicate with, unless Joan of Arc was one of very few psychotics who randomly have the fortune to experience delusions which tally with reality in such a way as to be influential in the wider social realm. However, this latter approach – which is both the common scientitifc one and the one taken by her Christian persecutors – is lacking in the sense that it seeks to impose a hegemony of truth from out of the minds of the ‘rational’ into the mind of Joan of Arc. In so doing the rational mind supposes an ability to surpass it own physical boundaries and enter into the outside world of others, to say ‘what is true for me must be true for you’, which is precisely the mistake that rationality supposedly mitigates against – i.e. the assumption of extra-physical powers which can transcend measurable material boundaries.

Rationality, whilst seeking to rid the world of fallacies based on intutition, mental malfunction, hallucination and delusion, cannot entertain the possibility of different, or contradictory realities, even as these very possibilities are suggested by quantum physics. For unfortunately, the science of the pysche, the mind and the individual is prone to the very limitations of the mind, which in seeking to eradicate irrationality in terms a belief in ‘outside’ forces, replicates irrationality as a projection of the reality perceived by the mind onto what resides beyond it, including onto the experiences of a given individual, even when those individual experiences defy rationality. Whereas what would be truly rational would be to accept the reality of spiritual experience for the individual, synonmyous to its unreality for rationality. That is to say, there are two rationalities; the first being that which denies the reality of non-concrete experience, the second being that which allows for alternative realities. Rationality should be dialectically split down the middle, as the ‘and/or’ of ambiguous experience, meaning that, for example, Joan of Arc was deluded and/or divine, where the and/or represents simultaneously her madness on the one hand, her divinity on the other, and both her madness and her divinity at once.

What is politically significant here is the possibility given over to challenging hegemony – I refer particularly here to the dominance of capitalist interests – from within society, even if that society be completely dominated by hegemonic forces. For in a completely dominated society only a contradition of reality, proclaimed by the individual subject, allows for the possibility of transcending dominance. That that possibility must necessarily be thwarted is the very reason it must be engaged with, given that the alternative, to engage with our unfreedom as an insurpassable given – the knowledge of our irrevocable unfreedom – merely serves to play up to that unfreedom. This is indeed the principle error in the mainstream leftist hypothesis. The ‘us and them’ mentality, concieved in the interest that the individual is not hoodwinked into believing that they are free when they are not, further engrains the situation of the individual subject as embedded within a class struggle that reinforces hegemony, for hegemony relies on the struggle of the worker as a means of keeping the individual, and the group, in stasis.

A reinvigorated leftism requires a conceptual projection. We must first declare our freedom, in spite of our lack of freedom, but never in such a way as to forget that unfreedom. We are free and/or unfree. A proclamation that can only be sustained as an artistic statement, for only Art – above science, politics and religion – can be seen to deceive out of deliberate intent whilst still maintaining its integrity. Therefore the proclamation of our freedom is a conceptual art statement, out of which new social posibilities can emerge in practice, through the mimesis of educational and other social insitutions as art.

In light of the current education funding and fees increase crisis, a low cost accredited tertiary level education system, delivered as art, utilising art spaces and the personnel associated with them, as well as academics willing to invest time, would serve as a basis upon which to develop an art-conceptual militancy. Yet beyond this – an idea that almost suggests itself in the current political climate – the irrationality of art, the ‘and/or’ discussed above, should be utilised to challenge the self-serving rational of capitalism and rationality per se. For the clear and present reality of life’s material composition, makes the accumulation of individual wealth and power, at all costs and at the expense of other beings, appear to be the only viable path. The contrary path, towards a selfless altruism, makes little sense within a rationalistic framework, for if all beings are mere matter, there can be no sense in diminishing one’s own individual wealth or security for the sake of someone else. Ultimately only what can be counted – i.e. capital – can stand up to the auspices of rationality. For what can be counted is banal and lifeless, presenting nothing in the way of an anomaly which might otherwise raise the issue of its own pointlessness. For all activity outside the strict numerical count is pointless in a rigourously rational world. The numerical count only escapes such a judgment because it is from the offset utterly pointless, in that it merely proceeds along a preordained path.

Yet art, in its intrinsic irrationality, has no duty to truth and is by its nature opposed to the count. It is therefore for the artist to oppose the rabid individualism spawned by capital, and which in reality stifles individual freedom. The artist – and anyone can be an artist in this sense – must reclaim individuality from rationality, declaring themselves as free, a factor which must be demonstrated through the enactment of selfless acts – altruism for its own sake – as evidence of the rejection of the numerical count. Our galleries must be turned towards Charity shorn of religious or political obligation. All Hail Joan of ART; Towards a Conceptual Militancy.

— Joan of Art; Towards a Conceptual Militancy, from which the above text is adapted, is currently being written for ZerO Books. Mike Watson mike.r.watson@gmail.com creative commons. Distribute freely. Always cite author.

‘More than 30 international and Italian artists – working in video, installation and photography – contribute to Galleria V.M. 21 Contemporanea’s current exhibition, which ambitiously attempts both a ‘crosscutting view of the artistic scene’ and an examination of national identity…’