Particle Storm

Platforms of Relation:

To follow up my elist post re: collaborative digital platforms, Mind Manager (www.mindjet.com) is a diagrammatic mind-mapping tool using an arbourescent tree model (i know, D&G would roll in their graves) with nodes that open / close, where you can move and relink ideas, attach files and hyperlinks, use scheduling tools, appearance/view options. There's also a secure online extension for co-editing maps in real-time, using workspaces, web conferencing and chat (Mindjet Connect).

Sorry if that sounds like an ad (i paraphrased their site a bit), but perhaps this is useful or there is something else like that out there we can use? Mindjet Connect isn't cheap ($350 or so for individual licenses), but perhaps its possible to get a short-term group license sponsored/funded as an R&D angle? The readers are free, and maybe licenses for the interactive version can be hosted by affiliated institutions..

i woke up at 4am last night haunted by metaphors... if for SoM 'the molecule' is of necessity conflated to the scale of social groups located in different cities/countries, how can we use online collaborative tools to generate a molecular micropolitics of the event? To extend (or prehend?) the metaphor into an operative molecularity, if SoM molecules are locally situated social bodies, what are the consitutents parts of these molecules for individual bodies? In our global online communications do we become 'like' non-local wave-particles or protein folds... am i mixing too many metaphors - how do you theorise D&Gs molecularity vis-a-vis the wave-particle duality as immanent transmission?... this recalls somehow the complementarity of singularity and multiplicity, as an aspect of folding... (Greg Lynn i think from the HTB reading last year).

Anyway, if we can integrate an online digital ecology of collaborative tools, perhaps we can hold a global media jam at some point during SoM, which may take the simultaneous form(s) of a party, a dinner, a performance etc, etc... eventing a Particle Storm as non-local assemblage for the Society of Molecules. From a radical predagogical POV we might establish affiliations with one or several wolverine open-source / media-jam communities to help facilitaite/operate such an interface, opening a mutual transmission of conceptual and technical platforms of relation, as interventions of thought within already molecular techno-social assemblages.

Le Musée comme la Silhouette

Process Seed for Gathering a Potential Micropolitcal Intervention:

I am designing an exhibition that exists only in description because I notice that in my ‘book as a museum’ I can offer a place for cultural artifacts to speak from, a place that doesn’t exist outside. This comes out of a larger investigation of the museum as a silhouette for an exhibition at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Cherbourg-Octeville. The SoM iteration could be made simply by light cast on a temporary structure (a four sided screen built in collaboration with architect/artist Alex Schweder). A gathering of people behind this screen would form a silhouette, like Plato’s shadow the museum represents itself. I have been talking with Mike Hornblow about a possible collaboration on a molecule that brings a phenomenology of display to the SoM event. I am not directly affiliated with an existing molecule, but the Australian or German one would be possible, and I would be open to hearing how people in those molecules may respond to these ideas. Either in Melbourne, where I was born, or in Berlin, where I live now, I would like to have the Musée comme la Silhouette act as an ephemeral restaurant that recreates an Aboriginal meal. The food would be gathered in Port Phillip working with indigenous artists that I have been collaborating with on museum interventions in the past three years. During the SoM week in May you would be invited to a meal but also to the choreography of this museum as it is built in real time, by gestures during the evening. The gathered participants would be parts of the building in that their movement shifts the silhouette. Hereby the artists/participants sitting at the table cast a shadow on the museum, perhaps to ask whether for the very validation of ourselves as artists must we form and be formed by this structure? Here at the table a toast brings our arms together to produce the silhouette of a pediment. Our bodies are the pillars, our conversation the frieze on which the stories are told. At the moment the museum as silhouette is formed it is also deformed by its performers who may discuss its inability to house objects related to indigenous performances.
To begin this engagement with the indigenous as a micropolitcal intervention, a conversation about the problematic process of appropriations from within academia and via the museum was what i hoped here to contribute as a platform for relation. It is an invitation to open debate and develop ideas on how other projects can employ/adapt this silhouette, food platform, museum in a book, potentially as a SoM proposal.

Projets Écologiques/Natasha Prévost

Catégories : Enabling Constraints/Platforms for Relation/Techniques of Relation/Problematics
Titre : Projets Écologiques de Cap-Pelé à Miramichi au Nouveau-Brunswick 2009-2019 (un an à la fois): Lorsque la communauté fait appelle à ses gens et à ceux d’ailleurs.

Les différents projets qui suivent peuvent être implantés successivement ou simultanément. Tout dépend de l’accueil qui leurs sont faits dans chacune des communautés, districts scolaires, écoles primaires et secondaires et des sources de financement obtenues. L’idéal est bien évidemment de donner vie à chacun d’entre eux. Tous les agriculteurs écologiques, les Écoartistes, les chefs cuisiniers, les cueilleurs de champignons sauvages et plantes indigènes, les magasins d’outils de jardinage et bien d’autres de chacune des communautés et aussi d’ailleurs seront appelés à se mobiliser pour développer, faire fonctionner et durer ce projet.

Projet 1: Les Jardins Écologiques et Artistiques
Idée Matrice :
À partir de la maternelle jusqu’à la dernière année du primaire les enfants seront appelés à découvrir ce qu’est le jardinage écologique par l’entremise de l’apprentissage de la reconnaissance des différents légumes, de leur semence, de la culture de la terre, des soins à prodiguer aux plantes et à la terre, les différents cycles agricoles : la préparation de la terre, l’ensemencement, la croissance, la récolte. Ces différentes activités seront adaptées au curriculum scolaire.
Les enfants seront aussi sensibilisés à l’art éphémère, la sculpture vivante et l’art jardinier; dans la disposition des plantes, l’aménagement du terrain, le choix des plantes et autres.
Chacune des années aura des responsabilités de jardinage : de la confection d’épouvantails et de l’architecture du paysage, à la production de semences, à l’ensemencement, à l’arrosage, au désherbage, au composte, à la cueillette, à la distribution, à la vente, etc.
Les parents seront invités à participer aux différents ateliers proposés.

Rôle des chercheurEs : Observer et décrire les connaissances, les compétences et les attitudes des enfants à l’égard des légumes et des arts du jardinage. Accompagner leurs découvertes. Ajuster les différents Ateliers à la lumière de nos observations et dialogues avec les enfants, les parents, les professeurEs, les agentEs de développement et les directeur/rices. Refléter sur l’expérience et suivre les participantEs de près jusqu’à la complétion du cycle, c’est-à-dire lorsque les enfants de la première année du projet passeront à l’école secondaire (ceci est mon investissement de chercheure dans un projet longitudinal, ça n’a pas trait au financement des activités annuelles).

Projet 2: L’école des Grands-parents
Idée matrice : Profiter de la proximité des écoles de certaines résidences pour personnes âgées pour inviter ces dernières à venir donner un coup de main aux enfants dans les jardins. L’échange de savoir traditionnel et contemporain sera ainsi favorisé. Les personnes âgées qui aiment jardiner mais qui ne peuvent plus s’adonner à cette activité sur le terrain de la résidence en profiterons. Les Ateliers leur seront aussi ouverts.

Le rôle des chercheurEs : Observer et décrire l’évolution des interactions entre les enfants et les personnes âgées. Documenter l’échange de connaissances intergénérationnelles, de sentiment d’appartenance à la communauté de la part des enfants, sentiment d’être utile, un modèle et détenteur de l’histoire communale pour les personnes âgées. Filmer ces rencontres et échanges jardiniers. Proposer une activité lors de laquelle une copie du film sera remise en souvenir à tous les participantEs.

Projet 3 : Enrayer la Malbouffe
Idée Matrice : Sensibiliser les enfants, les parents, et tout le personnel de l’école à la malbouffe. Fonder un tentacule du mouvement slow-food au Nouveau-Brunswick. Le mouvement valorise particulièrement la production de type local, biologique et durable ainsi que l'éducation au goût, ce qui rejoint notre propre démarche. L’expérience des jeunes pousses au Québec inspirée d’expériences similaires en Europe et aux États-Unis nous servira de référence. L’idée est d’en arriver à utiliser la production horticole de l’école pour nourrir les élèves et le personnel enseignant. Faire découvrir de nouveaux produits, nouvelles façons d’apprêter les aliments et de nouvelles recettes. Organiser différents ateliers où les adultes seront aussi conviés.

Rôle des chercheurEs : Observer et décrire les changements opérés par cette sensibilisation au goût au niveau des habitudes alimentaires à partir de l’école à la maison.

Projet 4 : Jardinage et Thérapie
Apprendre à jardiner pour son propre bien-être. Offrir aux personnes à besoins spéciaux des ateliers en horticothérapie et les moyens de cultiver leurs propres jardins.

Projet 5 : Profession Agriculteur Écologique et Artiste
Profession Chef Cuisinier
Offrir aux niveaux primaire et secondaire des ateliers/stages professionnels en agriculture écologique et artistique, en agroforesterie, ainsi que comme chef cuisinier.

Rôle des chercheurEs : Observer et décrire le degré d’enthousiasme des jeunes pour ces professions au début du projet et leur changement d’attitude à mesure que les enfants acquièrent plus d’expériences et de connaissances sur ce qui entoure ces professions. Mesurer le nombre de jeunes s’orientant vers une profession en lien avec ces différents projets tout au long des dix années du projet (recherche personnelle).

Le Cercle des Concepts/Natasha Prévost

Catégorie : Enabling Constraints
Titre : Le Cercle des Concepts
Pour éviter de tourner en rond

Objectif : générer des idées et approches conceptuelles novatrices pour appréhender des phénomènes touchant nos disciplines respectives avec un regard nouveau.

Projet de rencontres mensuelles
Contribution multidisciplinaire
Création d’une banque de textes à partir des choix des participantes et participants (textes favoris et raisons de votre engouement)
Organisation d’un ordre de lecture informel


Lecture d’un des textes de la banque tous les mois. Présentation faite par la ou le participant dont le texte a été lu
Réaction des participantes et participants : appréciation du texte et façons dont ce texte touche ou pas leur approche/perspective/discipline
Quelles idées peuvent être extraites du texte et développées à l’aide des concepts avec lesquels vous travaillez?
Création d’une banque d’Idées/Concepts à partir de nos échanges mensuels

Une fois la banque d’Idées/Concepts pleine à craquer (à la discrétion des participantes et participants… disons environs 6 mois), les membres écrivent un chapitre inspiré d’un ou de plusieurs des textes lus :
D’une autre discipline
Courte présentation de l’auteur et du texte
Développement de votre cru des Idées/Concepts en un chapitre original nous faisant découvrir votre discipline sous un nouvel angle

How to disappear completely? The advertisment

How to disappear completely ?
A Collective Listening of Radiohead’s Album “Kid A” through which you will become-imperceptible

“What appears is good; what is good appears.”
Guy Debord, The society of the spectacle.

“I am what I am”. For most of us, the new Reebok slogan sounds like the expression of absolute freedom. In this view, corporate promotion of freedom doesn’t seem like a bad thing at all. But the real meaning of this injunction is to be found elsewhere. Display yourself. Everyday. All the time. Like everybody else. In the era of the triumph of global capitalism, if you don’t display yourself, you don’t exist. Cultural intoxication by means of over-exposition.

In such a world, there is nowhere to escape. But there might be an emergency exit after all. Becoming-imperceptible. Like the traditional Chinese painter-poet. Or like our little friend … Kid A.

This mind lab is intended to develop new perspectives on the mutations of identity and of being-together occurring in today’s China. By the end of the mind lab, participants should experience a reinforcement of their mental immune system, as well as an indescribable yet comforting feeling of community.

Warning: some participants might experiment a strong feeling of despair.

A Biogram for a Physiology of Language OR: a blueprint for an architecture of meaning

In his post: "the physiology of words", João proposes an exercise where for every word a physical bodily motion is performed, and visa versa.

When we think about it, each word already has a physicality of its own. It does something to the body when it is pronounced, it makes us move in a specific way to type it out our write it down. It involves the body and directs its movement. Artaud was very involved with making words corporeal, and Valère Novarina is very involved with expressing the corporeal-properties of words themselves. These two approches are very different, but should be though of together.

The meaning of a word cannot be separated from it's physics: it always influences both our mind and our bodies in a coextensive movement. It acts upon a mind-body assemblage (which we should probably just call “body”), making us move within virtual space (ie: thought-space, mind-space, memory) at the same time as we move through physical space to either pronounce the word in the larynx-tongue space or write it down in the line-backgound (ink-page) space, etc. But since all these movements through space are always perfomed as one continuous gesture, the differences between these different spaces is not categorical. They are all co-extensive to each other. A complex multispace.

So it would be interesting perhaps, as a companion or extension exercise to the one suggested by João, to try to explore what it is each word makes us do, how the words make us move when we are not "performing", that is when we are unintentionally moved by the words, when we are already beyond the word in the flow of motion, and not "in the present" of a consciously performed action. And with every move, ask ourselves what spaces these movements create, and try to map these spaces with each other. The resulting map would be a blueprint for an architecture of meaning: a diagram or even a biogram. As a model of meaning, it would be, of course, always provisional and non-exhaustive. Yet it would most probably be a more accurate description of what meaning is than, say, a semiotic or linguistic structure: not a network of signs with laws of syntax and grammatical logic, but a cooperatively constructed architecture that bodies live in and move through, an architecture that shapes the way we think and move, but that is always open to change, forever being built by the bodies moving through it. Then João's exercise could also be an attempt to change that architecture, to associate new moves and new spaces to each word, allowing us to go places the words or concepts usually do not allow.

BTW : This experiment is actually a central part of my PhD research. I’d be pleased if anyone would be interested in cooperating on such an exercise. I could help facilitate it’s co-structuring.

How to disappear completely? A mind lab (part one)

Here is a short reflexion on the "Mind lab" that I have presented in July 2006 in the DUOLUN museum of contemporary art in Shanghai. The idea is very simple: To convert the endemic desire for disappearance into a becoming-imperceptible. The operator of this conversion: Kid A, our little schizo friend.

I would describe the mind lab itself as a kind of therapeutic nihilism, in the sense that I "applied" the Kid A album as a kind of dispositive to create a spiritual claustrophobia. The idea was to create the conditions for a unilateralization of the pervasive existential malaise I could feel in Shanghai's youth at that time. I believe there is a lot to discuss about how to conceptualize the ambivalent power embedded in the desire for disappearance. Following Tiqqun, I use the concept of Bloom to describe the whatever singularities in the state of being absent to oneself and the world (see "Théorie du Bloom", La fabrique, 2004).

拆 -- chai -- to demolish

Pour le laboratoire, je portais un T-shirt sur lequel on lit un idéogramme qui, dans le contexte chinois actuel, est extrêmement chargé de signification : 拆 (chai). Chai signifie « démolir »; en Chine, ce caractère est omniprésent. On le peint sur les murs et édifices qui seront détruits pour faire place aux gratte-ciels et autres tours d’habitation hypermodernes qui redéfinissent radicalement le paysage urbain chinois. C’est sans surprise qu’il se retrouve au cœur d’œuvres chinoises contemporaines parmi les plus significatives : on n’a qu’à penser à l’œuvre de Huang Rui « Chai-na/China » (le titre est on ne peut plus explicite)[1]

Mais dans le cas du mind lab, qu’y a-t-il à détruire au juste? Pour faire court, on dira : tout ce qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, entrave l’accès direct au bloom et son inqualifiable puissance; tout ce qui, d’une manière ou d’une autre, nous empêche d’entrer dans le vif de l’anonymat et nous retient dans les affres hyper-réflexifs du performatif et du "comme si". Dans le cadre du laboratoire, chai est le symbole d’une interruption radicale d’un certain rapport à soi; il est le signe du nihilisme thérapeutique qui commande l’exécution du laboratoire. C’est tout un travail de désobstruction qui en quelque sorte sous-tend la possibilité d’un passage-anonymat, du vouloir disparaître au devenir-imperceptible.

[1] Pour plus de détails, voir « Huang Rui : la voie de la soustraction », in Esse art+opinion, N.61, « Peur », septembre 2007.

The physiology of words

A possible interaction: For every word a physical action. For every physical action a word. In conversation with oneself, with another or others.

Conversation

“…the ideas which we have of external bodies indicate the condition of our own body more than the nature of the external bodies.”1 And perhaps rearticulate: the ideas we have of external ideas indicate the condition of our ideas more than the nature of the external ideas. Think of the Stoics: make the mind into a corporal element; remember if it is soft, it will have limber ideas; if it is tight, its ideas will fit snugly; if it is fast, its ideas will move at a velocity to which other minds must move in relation; if it is slow, those who think with you must have the patience to suspend judgmental action. “Expression produces momentum […] To express is to speak-with. Any speaking-with implies a dialogue, an infinite conversation.”2
Awareness of one’s own thought-body and thought-movements arises simultaneously with awareness of other moving elements and bodies in the conversation. Such awareness comes at a price, since zoning in on one’s own or another’s or any particular individualized element can cause dizziness, disorientation, and thus provoke panic. It is best at such occasions to squint the mind as you might squint the eyes at an impressionist painting, thereby focusing less on detail and allowing movement and momentum to carry the loosened gaze. In this sense, it is orientation to particular impulses that leads to the greater disorientation.
Adapting another favorite turn of thought: the problem of such decentred conversation (besides the initial fright) is not that a discussion may be too abstract, but that it may not be abstract enough. The potential for precision in a conversation is related to its degree of infinity, which is in turn related to its capacity for abstraction. Infinity increases (yes, increases) to the degree of provision and im-provision: “An infinite conversation supposes that the work is yet to be invented.”3

1 Spinoza, Baruch. 1994. The Ethics. Ed. and trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Pg. 129
2 Manning, Erin. 2007. Politics of Touch. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Pg. 111
3 Ibid.

CATEGORIES - please designate your entries as belonging to one or more of the following categories

-Enabling Constraints - ways of setting the initial conditions for a coming event. They lay down operative parameters designed to open an arena of thought/action without pre-deciding the outcome. They are catalytic ratehr than containing. They are designed to be generative in their effect, not prescriptive. If they take the form of a rule-set, it is in order to structure an improvisation.

-Platforms for Relation - a material set-up of technical assemblage inviting a certain kind of participation (ie, around sound, or movement, or audiovision, or text, or verbalization, or more than one of these in an interactive system, responsive environment, institutional context or urban setting). A platform for relation provudes a processual site for the taking place of a participation. It builds in an implicit or explicit set of enabling constraints, such that the event in the making will embody a specific region of emergent potential. It orients, setting creative tendencies in place.

-Techniques of Relation - immaterial devices (strategies of tactics) for: activating enabling constraints; dynamizing platforms for relation; transitioning from one platform or  set of enabling constraints to another; or synergetically combining them. A technique for relation may strategize: how to ease participants whose practice is text-based into a movement activity, or the reverse; how to move eventfully and generatively from a small group  activity to a large-group setting, and vice-versa; how to couple multi-sensory or practice-based activity with a language-centered or conceptual activity in such a way as to place them in mutually enriching processual continuity with each other; how to fold remote participation into a local event, or fan out a local event into a distributive networking.

- Problematics - a conceptual construction or critical evaluation of collective creative practices from the point of view of: their conditions of possibility; their practices consequences; their ethical, aesthetic or political organizing force; their historical embeddedness and limitations, or against these, their powers of indetermination.

Please contribute to our process seed bank!

The Process Seed Bank is a growing textual compendium of experience on alternative practices of collaborative academic and artistic experimentation which share some or all of the following dispositions:

-favour experiential models of emergent relation over transmission models of knowledge content or ends-oriented models of product delivery

-recognize creative practices in media other than language as carrying a conceptual force of innovation, and concept formation in language as a creative activity in its own right

-work to cross-germinate creative thought and processes across disciplinary boundaries, at a level of emergence

-consider that thought, as emergent, is indissolubly aesthetic, and the aesthetic already political

-strive to make an event of thought

-strive to make the event of thought self-renewing, in dissemination rather than toward centralization

-consider "intellectual property" an oxymoron