One of things about studying this way (as opposed to in a classroom) is there’s plenty of freedom to go off and explore – which I do a-plenty. But because I tend to stray quite far (which is a good thing, I think, despite unavoidable pitfalls) I am prone to missing out on some basics which would make things simpler for me if I’d visited them before approaching certain topics, or at the start of doing so. I probably should have read the following and along with notes on philosopher John Austin before tackling Karen Barad’s paper. Having done a bit of digging, I get a much clearer picture about her rejection of language in favour of matter although I probably stand by my arguments for seeing language as a form of matter. I am also certain my experience of ‘actioning’ a script is going to inform my understanding and will be invaluable. I will add to this post once I’ve read Moya Lloyd’s chapter below.
To read and makes notes:
Metaphore widely used – perform
Derives from performance studies – dramatic terms OR sociology to perform a function in everyday life
Connote different things – 1 to act out or 2 to achieve an acceptable level of proficiency – a 50s man reached pique performance if he went to work and provided for the wife who achieved hers if she provided supper and slippers, etc. (no matter the cost to either) – etymologically different:
“late a5c., “accomplishment” (of something), from perform + -ance. Meaning “a thing performed” is from 1590s; that of “action of performing a play, etc.” is from 1610s; that of “a public entertainment” is from 1709. Performance art is attested from 1971.”
Difference between performance – performance studies and performativity from linguistic studies – (verbal acts which have an effect on the world)
Bulter in Gender trouble suggests both gender and sex are performative (3)
Austin JL – originates from
Beauvoir (Second Sex) body is not a ‘natural fact’ but an ‘historical idea’ (4)
An identity through a ‘stylized repetition of acts’ (Beauvior, 1988-519) (5)
Butler – Turner, life as a ritual social drama – depends on repetition of social performances – (see Chater) page 6
repeated social performances (6)
replication of corporeal repertoire (7)
a gendered subject is produced (little autonomy or volition) NBNBNB
Collective rules around acting out gender and sexuality
Page 11/12/13 Erving Goffman – “frames”
Sociological sorting 1977:302-3
Doing gender is unavoidable page 14/15 west and Zimmerman 1987:137
Differences in gender performance between Goffman and Butler page 17
(Remember entanglement – Barrie who wants value non-linguistic elements of an assembly that results in)
How to do things with words
MacKinnon 1987: 171 page 18 pornography see example in S&O – nail polish NB page
I have a meeting with Matt White on Monday and waiting to hear from Ruth te A2.
I feel the Pic London project introduced me to useful ideas, concepts, and practices that were good to come into contact with. The actual work produced feels more exploratory and research-led than anything – however, the image of the inside of the cave which has been in my work previously seems to have played a significant role. I am not sure how I take some of my frustrations forward re. the group’s inability to make the improvisations function. I have thought about attempting it with other people. I could suggest trying it with the Pic London group but I am not sure they are up for it. It’s very difficult to read what’s going on there – perhaps because we were only ever able to talk online, I cannot work it out. One of the things I noticed in the Ballpark Collective’s statement is how very clear the rules were and how they didn’t speak about the work outside of the game:
“The parameters of this involve creating a moving image from 5 individual works, each made by one of the artists. Through the random act of ‘pulling sticks,’ the collective decided on a chronological order to respond and react. The artist who pulled the shortest straw started the process by creating a moving image piece based on their response to the theme Interdependence. The work was presented to the next artist, who then responded with a work informed by their interpretation, or reaction to it. There was no discussion between the artists outside the ritual of passing the work to the next, allowing the process to highlight individual perspectives and the gaps in communication. When the process was complete, each of the works was edited together to create a whole.” (2019)
These images seemed to be expressing a sense of existing in what I referred to as my ‘grief cave’. I think I even wrote a short thing about it – falling into the cave and bumping into a projection down there, an imp who played tricks and wasn’t real but was.
I need to revisit some work I began last year which I called “Manipulated: My Leica and I, Leica Amateurs show their Pictures (1937) rephotographed, edited, uploaded; phone & proprietary apps only (c)SJField2018. Some examples from the page at the end of this blog. However, I am not sure about continuing with the Leica book for BOW but I may transfer the basic premise to another or film or text of some description. https://www.instagram.com/fieldsarahjane Also, the experiments there are too static, not dynamic enough. (Not that all need to be the same – variety of unstable imagery was what I was going for – also the base image needs to move and come out of its place.)
Returning to the TAOP A3 (colour) assignment briefly – As far back as then I was focused on the use of the word theatre which has so often been associated with photography – I included the following slide at the start of the assignment:
It’s been fascinating reading through Fried and then various responses to his thoughts on theatricality and anti-theatricality, and then seeing the use of the words performativity used by Barad. I’ve noticed several related words on the Contents page of Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections 2017 [PDF] – such as dance, masked, imaginary, rehearsal, acting out, play. I think Fried’s negation of theatre is a complete misnomer and that theatre and theatricality are at the core of what it is to be.
I really had no idea that I would find myself revisiting the first dissertation (1994). This has all come about after asking other students for an alternative view to James Elkins’ statement that photography might actually be rather dull. Freid was recommended and now here I am – See previous blogs on Barad – performativity, and Rubenstein on theatricality and Fried. I have no copy of my first dissertation and no way of finding one. I could barely write at the time but I suspect it dragged my overall grade up from a 2.2 to a 2.1. I looked at the ritualistic origins of theatre. I explored ‘commune’. One of the things I noticed in the Rubenstein response to Freid was how everyone sees theatre as intrinsically about representation, a separateness between viewer and action, othering – but it strikes me that the origins of theatre are about oneness – an attempt to re-engage with the universe rather than draw away from it. It’s an early church.
I wrote about trying to create a universe in my BOW A2. Theatre is a reality laboratory. It’s not about trying to create a fake. Well, at least, once Stanislavski got hold of it, it no longer was. And then there’s the Method. Maybe Stansilavski was simply taking theatre back to its origins. Isn’t it funny that the fakeness of a diorama is where photography purportedly began (putting aside Azoulay’s ant-Cartesian reading of the origins of photography). I feel I do need to revisit these ideas – although I am not sure how just yet.
Below – a couple of the Manipulated (2018) posts. Visit for more.
This article by Daniel Rubinstein confirms my recognition of Freid’s conservativism and does a super job of helping me to more fully comprehend some of the ideas in Barad’s essay. Beneath the argument about theatricality and anti-theatricality, it explores the changing nature of being and knowledge – or ontology and epistemology, as expressed via quantum sciences and philosophies, namely Barad (2003), Lupton (2019), Rovelli (2017), Capra (2014) – leading to what Barad terms “Onto-epistem-ology”[which is] —the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter.” (2003: 829) (See Rovelli and Kant in the previous blog.)
However, Barad argues against what she calls representationalism, which is; “the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented” (804) If you can overcome this and see “representationalism as a Cartesian by-product—a particularly inconspicuous consequence of the Cartesian division between “internal” and “external” that breaks along the line of the knowing subject.” (Rouse, 1996: 209, Barad, 2003:805) then the arguments made be Fried begin to disintegrate. As – “it is possible to develop coherent philosophical positions that deny that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other” (807) relying instead on emergence. And ff you see theatre as a laboratory (not just Growtowski’s but the entire history of it) then perhaps Fried’s entire argument collapses – although I am not sure Rubinstein gets there with this.
Some quotes below and perhaps an occasional note:
by way of identifying the dualist oppositions and the ideological investments that establish the ontological significance of this text. (44)
Fried is not criticising the work of certain artists, but devising a universal method for distinguishing true art from ‘objecthood’, based on the assumption that (Fried’s) consciousness can distinguish physical reality from art (44) (religiosity)
this rejection leads him to adopt a conception of art that is hierarchical, analytical and traditionalist (45)
contemporary philosophical thought that studies theatricality as part of the logocentric apparatus inherited from the Renaissance (45)
The conception of ‘objecthood’ in contemporary art can be traced to Duchamp’s readymades which he created by selecting, modifying and rectifying mass-produced objects (46)
this opposition between the image and the real has its roots in Platonism, where the sensible world is produced as a copy of the world of ideas, and it is the task of reason to overcome the errors of the copy in order to arrive at the truth (46) Far more simply explained here than in Barad’s essay
The touchstone for this distinction is whether the image declares itself to be an image (the fable of the cave is told as a fable) or whether the image pretends not to be one, disguising itself as an object (47)
Plato’s demand for ‘primary distinction’ between images and models is motivated by the moral need to protect the idea of truth from the dangerous world of simulacra. (47) In CS A2, I argue the shadows on the wall of the attic are the actual real – what looks like the simulacra is just as real as the flesh and blood version watching the slides – although more likely they exist together, both real, both valuable (see Jung – dream world equal to waking world)
The artworks that Fried designates as ‘theatrical’ seem to have a common denominator: they strive to take over the real, to immerse and to overwhelm us by replacing the real with a readymade and truth with simulacrum until we are no longer able to distinguish the artwork from the real, the referent from the sign, and the subject from the object. (48)
Critical opposition to theatricality will not get one very far, as opposition itself is a theatrical requisite (49)
Quote Fried, “The Platonic division of the cave, which is effectively the theatrical division between a real outside and an inside simulating this outside … The thing stands for something else, and it is less than what it represents. In order that it be what it is, there has been a lack of being. What is given to us, insofar as it is not similitude itself, is deficient in force. The theatricality of representation implies this deficiency, this depression. (pp. 68, 71, emphases in original)” (49) See Barad and her refusal of representation being something that acts as a sign for something previous and original. (50)
Here the antinomy to the ‘theatrical cube’ is being revealed not as anti- theatricality, but as an infinite movement of surfaces that continuously self- replicate and morph into each other (50)
If the origin of theatre is in negation, and if its operation is representational, then the deeper reason Fried can speak of a ‘war’ between theatricality and real art becomes clear. (51)
Anti-theatricality, in other words, implies that in order to be meaningful, accessible and ‘true’, the artwork has to inhabit some form of transcendental negation, or excluded middle or some other form of metaphysical ground (51)
by arguing against the dualism of theatricality and for the monism of ‘real’ art, he is unable to move beyond the very dualism he is trying to unsettle as his thought is chained to the common-sense notion that representation is a natural, ordinary, everyday occurrence (52)
The deeper structure of Fried’s argument is that true knowledge can transcend mere appearances and grasp their underlying presence. As Luce Irigaray (1985[1974]) has shown, this framework is based on the notion of a stable subject that comprehends – like Rodin’s Thinker – a world that is also stable and unchanging. (53)
Freid’s description of Caro’s sculptures are ‘performative’ therefore theatrical (53) They are also elitist and come about due to a his privileged and educated position.
according to Fried, the greatest danger: under the auspice of theatre, art loses its spiritual, sensual and theological dimension. When art is stripped of its mystical, spiritual powers, of its direct link with experience through the unmediated connection with life, all that remains is the theatre: a pale re-enactment of the mysteries of the sacrificial ritual. (53) This is a bizarre argument given theatre’s roots are deeply embedded in the spiritual and mystical, and was born out of attempts to commune with the gods (the universe).
Putting the object first will not work because the opposition between art and non-art is itself the product of an ideology that asserts that there is a real world that can be taken up and represented as an image (53) which Barad argues against using quantum knowledge.
Edited 01/09/2009 to correct the spelling of Rubinstein’s name
Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’ In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3) pp.801–831. At: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/345321 (Accessed 30/10/2019).
Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity. London: Penguin
Rubinstein, D. (2017) ‘Failure to Engage: Art Criticism in the Age of Simulacrum’ In: Journal of Visual Culture 16 (1) pp.43–55. At: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917690970 (Accessed 30/10/2019).
re Derrida and Austin’s Theory of Speech Acts, Judith Bulter develops the idea of sexuality and gender as performative
“Butler has put it herself: “This very concept of sex-as-matter, sex-as-instrument-of-cultural-signification […] is a discursive formation […]” (ibid., p. 50).”
“Haraway’s notion of the material-semiotic that thinks the material, bodily fleshiness and the discursive-linguistic together, and thus breaks through the long-standing nature/culture divide (see e.g. Haraway, 1988 and 1997) – critical re-readings and re-engagements with Butler’s notion of (gender) performativity slowly but surely came into being”
“For Barad, performativity is not only linked to the coming into being of the human subject and the (gendered) materialization of bodies, and the socio-political interpellation process that goes along with it (i.e. Butler’s more recent understanding of performativity as articulated in Bodies), but is about the processes of the materialization of “all bodies” and the “material-discursive practices” that engender differences between for example human and non-human bodies (Barad 2003, 810).”
Matter is not a passive actor – (i.e. body/camera, body/phone – see Charlotte Prodger, phone shot on phone)
Barad “moves away from an individualistic atomistic metaphysics, the modern Cartesian mind/body split, our strong cultural belief in representationalism, our Western tendency to thingify or basically objectify, and a mere discursive-linguistic concept of performativity”
“but bodies themselves “come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity – its performativity” (ibid., p. 824).” So – intra-activity is performativity in Barad’s theory. Rovelli talks about reality being relational – “reality is reduced to relation” “We, like waves, and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous…” Events, therefore, are performances, using Barad’s language. (Rovelli, 115/116)
“Reality, according to Barad, is rather “a dynamic process of intra-activity” or “an ongoing open process of mattering through which ‘mattering’ itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities” (ibid., p. 817).” So – therefore exactly what I have been unraveling and which is explained in the Hoffman book, Systems Theory, Rovelli etc. Barad applies it to the humanities and is interdisciplinary or in her words discursive and diffractive (I think?).
“Materiality is no longer “either given or a mere effect of human agency,” but rather “an active factor in processes of materialization” (ibid., p. 827)” See the previous point.
Susan Yi Sencindiver on the Oxford Bibliography website writes: “Important as this [constructivist] ideological vigilance has been for unearthing and denaturalizing power relations, and whose abiding urgency new materialism does not forego, the emphasis on discourse has compromised inquiry by circumscribing it to the self-contained sphere of sociocultural mediation, whereby an anthropocentric purview and nature-culture dualism, which constructivists sought to deconstruct, is inadvertently reinscribed.” (2017) https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0016.xml
Edit 2024: throughout I refer to Her/she. This is wrong. Barad is a they/them as far as I’m aware. I was not aware when making the notes originally. Please adjust accordingly as reading.
Following the previous two posts where I attempted to pinpoint what I have been exploring in one way or another, I have identified what seems like a perfect paper by Karen Barad called,
Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter
However, Barad’s rejection of language and signification in relation to ‘matter’ are in opposition to my own interest in language. This paper reflects so much I am interested in but devalues language in the process and gives higher value to other elements, in particular matter – although perhaps she is simply trying to even things out. Incidentally, Lupton refers to more-than-human rather than posthuman and I think I may prefer this adjustment.
I love this quote KB has at the top of the paper: “We are far too impressed by our own cleverness and self-consciousness. . . . We need to stop telling ourselves the same old anthropocentric bedtime stories.”
—Steve Shaviro 1997 (However, I think the stories make an otherwise terrifying existence bearable – just about. People are foolish, immature, vain and silly – how would we cope without our bedtime stories – I sense very little forgiveness or tolerance in some.)
“Language has been granted too much power” – starts Barad. This seems to be a rallying cry against Judo-Christian and therefore Western (paternalistic) doctrine which has been the foundation of our civilisation for centuries, i.e. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Gospel of John. The word is apparently – forgive the Wiki quote and I am aware I would need to dig deeper if included in an essay but it’s a useful start for this non-believer. “The phrase “the Word” (a translation of the Greek word “Logos”) is widely interpreted as referring to Jesus, as indicated in other verses later in the same chapter” Wiki. The relationship between mythology and science tells me this is really crucial; universal cognition, matter, liveliness and life cycle of particles, superposition – all of this could be interpreted via the story contained in that one line. The opening line of John also carries so much paternalistic fixedness which Sarah Lucas’ work God is Dad explores. If the word Jesus represents supposedly God’s flesh – is it not a metaphor for the manifestation of the emergence of matter?
“Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter”, she says.
But, and I know Barad is about addressing an imbalance – Language IS matter. Even if only focused on linguistics – and then only spoken, i.e. no text: breathe is expelled as part of the breathing process: we interrupt its journey out of the body with our epiglottis, and then our tongue, teeth, skull cavities, cheeks, etc help to form the breathe (material) into something shaped despite its apparent ephemerality. Add some vibrations with the help of your vocal nodes and you have sound. Plosives, implosives, glottal stops all contribute to making the breath and vibrations into a shaped sound that is then carried as/on a wave and interacts with the eardrum; and might also be understood in conjunction with sight and touch and smell – all forming a material interaction with whoever is listening even if the only one hearing is the same person who made the sound in the first place. The shaped breath/sound vibrations’ impact in the world may not be so ephemeral. The impact may indeed be long-lasting and extremely powerful, causing a definitive reaction visible in the material world.
I do not know enough about her ideas yet, but if the term assemblage which Lupton used so frequently emerges from Barad’s theories or related ones, then surely language is one of many emergent elements. The rejection feels like an understandable response to logocentrism and also the theories of structuralism which were dominated (as so much was/is) by men and misogynistic, racist, colonialist attitudes and beliefs, but I wonder if it risks chucking the ‘baby out with the bathwater’.
I find myself agreeing with so much Barad says and her highly educated ability to link quantum science to the humanities would have been so helpful when I wrote the essay for DI&C. Ariella Azoulay’s analysis of history which I referenced seems very much influenced by the same thought processes.
When I explained what underlies all my work to the first CS tutor, I said, I am driven by the desire to figure out why people say things which bare no relation to what they actually mean or intend even when they have no idea that may be the case. i.e. “John is a feminist and he tells everyone who will listen that he is one. Even so, John demands to know why his wife has not packed his cufflinks, or why she failed to wash his jeans because, in John’s mind, he’s the one earning the money and therefore it is not unfair to expect his wife to fulfill these domestic duties. John believes in feminism but says things like “No wife of mine will …. (insert things wives ‘shouldn’t’ be seen doing) ” John moans about his wife to his male friends when they are doing the same. When questioned about it, John insists it’s just banter. John cheats on his wife and lies to her and believes that’s just how men are. It doesn’t prevent him from being a feminist. John’s wife tells him he’s verbally abusive. John thinks this is ridiculous – because, he tells his wife, “You’re lucky to be with me. I’m a feminist and always have been. I would never hurt you. You’ve got no idea what other men do to their wives. Because John is a feminist, he cannot see why any of the above is anti-feminist.” Is John lying on purpose, does he really believe he is a feminist? Or does he know that’s the ‘right’ thing to be in his world but the role of Husband is so entrenched and deeply embedded that he simply can’t see outside the reality that he has constructed or that has been constructed as the landscape in which he exists? Perhaps this is an extreme example but it is one which represents how language is tied up with constant performance, and to dismiss it or devalue it feels strange. Even though, I can see we also need to value other elements of reality.
Architecture – the most obvious ‘matter’ – is a language – in semiotics, it might be referred to as a text just as a film or photograph or a book can be.
“The belief that grammatical categories reflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductive habit of mind worth questioning. Indeed, the representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs.” I’ve highlighted the phrase I think is critical – if words aren’t mirroring pre-existing phenomena but rather emergent creating and being the phenomena as they do then does this problem over overvaluing the word in favour of all else go away? I can’t help thinking about Hoffman’s book where he suggests we exist in an interface and that we recognise ‘things’ but these work along the same line as desktop icons. In Hoffman’s theory representation is really important even though its an illusion. (Hoffman’s book does have some extraordinary and surprising misogynistic thinking in it which I am still trying to figure out).
Barad makes no apologies about using language herself, which can at times separate her ideas from people without PhDs in physics or gender or critical studies trying to understand what she is saying. At a very basic level, she is saying the very nature of reality cannot be isolated from the knowing about it and being it; that both being and knowing are undergoing seismic reconfigurations upending everything we have thought for thousands of years. (This reconfiguration is taking place throughout our world as the technology we use is founded on the principles and science that began the transformation – and is involved in a feedback loop – we are instantiating (Hayles, 1999)) the technology, no longer expecting things to be present or absent but instead to be patterned, assembled, having come into being as intra-active relational phenomena. (Icons on our desktop, web pages, animated objects that appear to react and interact). Carlo Rovelli who writes specifically for non-physics-, critical theory- etc. PhDs, says, “Kant was perhaps right when he affirmed that the subject of knowledge and its object are inseparable” (169)
Having read the whole paper, I am yet to fully get my head around what Barad means by performative –given that is what the paper aims to explain, I feel a bit daft but its such a dense paper, for the central point becomes lost (having looked again -see next post – I’m pretty sure she means quantum events and processes). I am also slightly in the dark about the use of the word discursive/nondiscursive and need to understand that. Diffraction I get – perhaps it is similar.
Below are some useful quotations which I may refer back to in any future writing:
there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented.
The fact that representationalism has come under suspicion in the domain of science studies is less well known but of no less significance
where they differ is on the question of referent, whether scientific knowledge represents things in the world as they really are (i.e., “Nature”) or “objects” that are the product of social activities (i.e., “Culture”), but both groups subscribe to representationalism.
Having read Hoffman’s book, I came to a different conclusion – representation matters because it’s all we have. It’s the illusion with which we exist, and therefore how it functions and manifests is critical. Even if it cannot represent a place before representation as no such place exists – representation represents our parochial and myopic situation.
anthropological philosophy, representations were unproblematic prior to Democritus: “the word ‘real’ first meant just unqualified likeness” (142).
The presumption that we can know what we mean, or what our verbal performances say, more readily than we can know the objects those sayings are about is a Cartesian legacy, a linguistic variation on Descartes’ insistence that we have a direct and privileged access to the contents of our thoughts that we lack towards the “external” world. (1996, 209) I do not think we know what we mean – I think people have no idea what they mean. The stories we tell ourselves are the only comfort we have in an otherwise terrifying universe where there is no meaning.
Indeed, it is possible to develop coherent philosophical positions that deny that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other.
In this article, I propose a specifically posthumanist notion of performativity—one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors. A posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of “human” and “nonhuman,” examining the practices through which these differential 9
boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. Donna Haraway’s scholarly
opus—from primates to cyborgs to companion species—epitomizes this point.
Foucault – – – “show how the deployments of power are directly connected to the body—to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another . . . but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envision a “history of mentalities” that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but a “his- tory of bodies” and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (1980a, 151–52)
a diffraction grating for reading important insights from feminist and queer studies and science studies through one another while simultaneously proposing a materialist and posthumanist reworking of the notion of performativity. This entails a reworking of the familiar notions of discursive practices, materialization, agency, and causality, among others.
On an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and the theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role “we” play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming.
Physicist Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for his quantum model of the atom, which marks the beginning of his seminal contributions to the development of the quantum theory.
were inseparable for him) poses a radical challenge not only to Newtonian physics but also to Cartesian epistemology and its representationalist triadic structure of words, knowers, and things
This account refuses the representationalist fixation on “words” and “things” and the problematic of their relationality, advocating instead a causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than “words”) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather than “things”). This causal relationship between the apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced is one of “agential intra-action.”
Therefore, according to Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is not
independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather
phenomena.
relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata- within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions.
The notion of agential separability is of fundamental importance, for in the absence of a classical ontological condition of exteriority between observer and observed it provides the condition for the possibility of objectivity.
In my further elaboration of Bohr’s insights, apparatuses are not mere static arrangements in the world, but rather apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted. Apparatuses have no inherent “outside” boundary. This indeterminacy of the “outside” boundary represents the impossibility of closure—the ongoing intra-activity in the iterative reconfiguring of the apparatus of bodily production
This ongoing flow of agency through which “part” of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another “part” of the world and through which local causal structures, boundaries, and properties are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time but in the making of spacetime itself.
Temporality and spatiality emerge in this processual
they enact a local cut that produces “objects” of particular knowledge practices within the particular phenomena produced.
, or meanings apart from their mutual intra-actions, Bohr offers a new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world.
Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility. I
What constitutes the “human” (and the “nonhuman”) is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but nor is it a free-floating ideality
Nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nor the end product of cultural performances.
matter is not a fixed essence; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency
” are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity.
It was good to hear someone say don’t separate CS & BOW. Students keep saying, you don’t need to connect CS to BOW and I can’t for the life of me understand why you wouldn’t connect them or why you’d want to disconnect them either. I have actually been thinking about these reflections which are are usually relevant for both and wondering how to rearrange the menu system as both modules become more and more interconnected.
It was also useful to think CS A3 as a research document setting out my plans and suggested research question – which I have yet to identify.
The other useful thing that came out of the session for me was thinking about overarching topics I’ve been investigating since the end of UVC, and how I can put those into some kind of tangible form. Here is an attempt to pin down some of these very big themes and links to relevant subtopics.
Inside Outedness
From my Sketchbook blog:
For millennia, language was on the outside. We could, in retrospect, usually see it. On walls, in caves, then tablets, scrolls and eventually in books. [Lately on advertising hoarding and signs telling us how fast we can drive, where we can park, if we play, enter, stay out, smoke, shop, make noise, and of course, what we can buy, how much better we will be if we buy whatever it is.]
Today, as many but not all are aware, it [language] somehow exists more and more on the inside [but not the inside of us as it did before emerging – although I think it is generally thought of as outside – rather the inside of machines and devices]. And in places it can’t be seen.
This means we often have no idea what’s being said. We are less able to read the signs [Or even see them]. Vast dynamic archives of language exist – somewhere – affecting everything. We know they are there. But they’re invisible. We see the flimsy surface only.
It’s true, in the past archives tended to be secreted, were often sacred, and contained as well as emanated power.
Very few would have had access.
It’s just that today the whole world is one big archive. And it’s hard to imagine how anyone escapes. [Could do with expanding the final thought.]
Derrida’s Archive Fever, University of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (19 Sept. 2017)(The first chapter may be useful here)
Chapter 7, Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties of Philip K. Dick, Hayles, K. (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
When I was a child a boy in my class used to turn his eyelids out. It revolted me. The other boys found it hilarious. I hated seeing him do it. It hurt to look at and to think about, and still does. Seeing my reaction, he did it all the more to taunt me.
Gossip & Performance
I believe these aspects of our existence are inter-related. From my BOW A2 assignment:
As part of my on-going research into language, culture and reality, I’d been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (2019) and books by Nicholas Christakis who wrote Connected (2009) which is about social networks (in general, not just digital ones.)
Wrangham’s book centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, while simultaneously developing a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence. Humans also became hyper-co-operative; today collaboration is part of our DNA. Wrangham suggests these trends are underwritten by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that we have an ever-present unconscious fear someone might be watching, gossiping, and planning to do away with us if we don’t conform. Gossip allows us to conjure up stories, deny and blame others, and plan punishment for anyone deemed a deviant. Wrangham’s theory along with Christakis’ ideas about connection sit at the centre of my contribution to the project. (2019a)
Performance grows out of the knowledge we will be seen and so we must ‘act’ the part in order to be accepted, to survive in the group. However, as Karen Barad tells us – entanglement is critical and without it perhaps nothing at all emerges. Her description changes my understanding of the conscious agent which I wrote about CS A2 – assuming a notion which I accepted in books about systems. However, Barad says something which fundamentally changes the underlying nature of performance and I’m still trying to get my ehad around it: ““A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019 From https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/10/21/bow-cs-notes-research-karen-barad/
Today we appear to perform for ourselves and the manifestation of such is available for all to see on social media. But there are also more private performances which people don’t necessarily share widely (although some do) which emerges from tracking devices. See Lupton’s Data Selves book.
Langauge
At the beginning of Self & Other I wrote about Léopold Szondi. After reading The Body & the Archive by Allan Sekula I was reminded about his thoughts on language. I said, “Szondi was also I believe interested in those ‘in-between spaces’ I’m so keen to find out more about. “language is a ‘social fact’. It is the glue that holds society together; through ‘language a child becomes integrated with a social community,’ and ‘it serves to maintain social interaction’. Since dialogue is the primary vehicle of interpersonal relations – what Szondi calls the sphere of the between -it lords it over traditional theatre” (Holmberg, 1996; 67).”
I am interested in the changing nature of language, the structural implications of a language which is coded and incomprehensible to most of us. Flusser’s thoughts on the ease with which we use devices compared to the complex nature of them which bypasses most of us may be useful to revisit.
Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.
Data Selves by Deborah Lupton also contains useful content about language and its relationship to new materialism. “In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn towards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (2019: 15) However, she also writes a great deal about how data (language) manifests as those things – so although data seems immaterial, “things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh” (19).
I suspect Karen Barad’s ideas are going to be important. And I suspect they will inform all three of these key themes. I need to investigate further before adding them here. However, I think I have identified three key topics: Inside Outedness, Gossip & Performanceand Language. I wonder if the latter is the umbrella under which Inside Outedness, Gossip & Performance exist. And the term assemblage which I’ve talked about quite a lot lately is not a theme but rather a structural reality, and our modern form of assemblages are what’s resulting in inside outedness. How I bring any of this into a semi-coherent work yet is anyone’s guess a this time!
Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.
I am not sure when I started following Deborah Lupton’s blog or how I came across it but as we were preparing the installation for Pic London, I read her post about the forthcoming publication of her book Data Selves in my WordPress app. The word ‘assemblage’ stood out as one of the other artists, Josh Phillips had mentioned it several times. I wrote about it here and mentioned a discomfort with the word as it felt like an adjective that was being used as a noun. I have become used to the word now and it no longer jars every time I hear it. (I am not sure why I felt annoyed by the word – irrational irritation perhaps.)
Whatever the reasons, the work our group constructed, A rumour reached the village (2019) might be described as an assemblage of many smaller assemblages. There is something fractal about the ‘village’ of things we constructed. And so after reading Lupton’s blog, I ordered her book and am glad to have read it now, not only because it seems so relevant to my overall inquiry in which I am attempting to make sense of the way in which digital culture is changing the structural nature of existence, but because it led me to Karen Barad’s work. Actually, Barad had been mentioned to me before by another of my Pic London collaborators, Rowan Lear. But her name only sunk in while reading Data Selves.
I expect I will need to investigate Barad further for CS and BOW but in the meantime here are some quotations from Lipton’s book with page numbers that could come in handy.
“Popular representations of these personal data and their futures often lean towards polar extremes.” (4)
“lively data” and “these data can continue to be lively even once the human they refer to is dead” (6)
“function creep” – tech used in ways that go beyond their original purpose. (8)
“predictions that are made by data analytics can result in predictive privacy harms, in which people can be categorized against within certain social groups” (8) (See end of book where she talks about the limitations of data analytics – how our paranoia that too much is known about us prevents us from seeing how basic and limiting the categorisations can be (124)
(13 – NB pa) Personal data blur and challenge many of the binary oppositions and cultural boundaries that dominate in contemporary Western societies.
Rather than user – exister Amanda Lagerkvist (2017)
“In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn torwards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (15)
“Braidotti (2018) terms ‘critical posthumanities’, in which the concept of human exceptionalism is done away with. This more-than-human approach sees human bodies as extending beyond their fleshy envelopes into the physicalenvironmentt, while the environment likewise colonised human bodies” (15)
“If we view personal digital data as manifestations of vitality, as recording, monitoring and influencing human lives, generating biolvalue and indeed as essentially part of humans, then they become part fo the domain of biopolitics.” (15)
“Feminist new materialists celebrate the renewal and liveliness of the capacities that human-nonhuman assemblages generate at the same time as identifying the ways in which these capacities can be closed off or limit the freedoms and potentials of some people or social groups or generate harm for the more-than-human world, as in environmental degradation, global warming, species extinction, pollution and climate change.” (17)
“While digital data assemblages are often conceptualised as immaterial, invisible and intangible, I contend that they are things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh (19)
See quote by Koro-Ljungber et al. 2017; Taylor et al. 2018) NB
Diffractive methodology – making entanglements visible. Barad suggests a diffractive approach is “good to think with”. (21) I agree. (Also 29)
More-than-human rather than posthuman (22) good para over to 23 – “interconnected and trans-agential.” Life, or vitality is not seen as possessed by any individual actor, but rather as constantly generated” (24)
Line about Caterisan dualism between mind and body (but see Alan Jasanoff (2018) for this too)
Animism – (25) quotes Haraway ” human ontologies must be understood as multiple and dynamic rather than fixed and essential (Bhavnani and Haraway, 1994)
Haraway’s ‘composite’ theory (26) See my own comments in BOW A2. (tentacular thinking)
Barad – “humans don’t know about the world because they are observing from outside it. They know about the world because they are inseparably part of it” (27)
Re agential cuts (29) And “Photographs make agential cuts that produce life forms rather than simply documenting them. “It is a way of giving form to matter” (Kember and Sylinska 2012:84) See 45 Years in lit review. more about agential cuts here: https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/a/agential-cut.html – “Any attempt to impose meaning and order” […] “inevitably part of the matter it seeks to preserve or document” . Link this to Flusser and apparatus – what he says about photographers (funny!)
Thing power and enchantment (30) “strange ability of ordinary, man-made items to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence and aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience” Quoting Jane Bennett (2001 and 2009) – compare this to OOO Graham Harmen
Page 31 – assemblage “function of grouping of different things in an assemblage, each operating in conjunction with the others (including humans)” (Bennett 2004: 354)
32 – Bennett recognises “mass-produced commodities as possible sites of enchantment” NB para
33 – others working in technological design …recognise “humans invest digital devices with animistic or magical properties” See Marx and use-value.
39 “death is more of a continuum” see page 40 too (Re mummies text)
42/43 Summary about human and non-human entanglement inc. data and machine.
Liquid metaphor “data sweat” (Melissa Gregg 2015) ; data leaking, emerging from within the body to outside – reveal ambivalence to data as it moves between “high value and useless – or even disgusting – waste product” (Abjection) 46
63 – emphasis on all senses, not just visual “data physicalisations” See http://dataphys.org. Plenty of artists listed who are making alternative to visual art drawn from data
68 NB – bias/visual data materialisations – instead list artists making “multisensory, unconventional and surprising” materialisations
Doing Data chapter – less than critical of some of the neoliberal ways in which data is enmeshed with people’s lives, potentially making them more rather less neurotic. Little critical analysis, more reporting of her data about how this affects people who use the data.
Sharing and exploiting data – caring/intimate surveillance concerns 103
The first section of the book is probably the most useful to me as it expresses ideas that I have found while reading about systems, a move away from mind-body dualism and digitisation’s impact on our perception of a less fragmented world. It is one of many books and articles which follow on from Kathryn Hayle’s posthuman book which has been so influential for me. I am inundated by such essays on Academia since reading a number of them. I like the sensible and pragmatic relationship Lupton has with data and technology even though she doesn’t seem all that critical of some aspects of data monitoring which strike me as nuts/unhealthy/hellish such as the constant surveillance of babies breathing – this kind of thing is very telling about our society and I could probably write a thesis on it alone.
“A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019
From Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) I have discovered Karen Barad who is a key figure within new materialist philosophy. Her background in quantum physics makes her significantly important to the ideas behind the work I’ve been developing. There are lots of relevant things going on in this short video but I will do some reading before doing a longer post about some of her ideas. But essentially, for her, everything starts with entanglement and in the following video, she describes how measurement is one aspect of an assemblage (entangled collection of processes) that results in a phenomenon (how does this relate to objecthood?). Things don’t exist independently of each other – they come into being due to their interaction. I feel like there will be much to gain from looking into her theories further and I may need to reword some of my lit review to be more accurate/specific and ascertain that measurement is seen as an emergent process not a fixed external object. Here are some links for now.
Ideas in here relate to DI&C work specifically A2 & A5
One of the other collaborators from A rumour reached the village posted the following, so I had come across Barad before but her name had not stuck – although I liked the post very much when it first appeared.
All of this also ties in very much with some of the arguments I made in the DI&C essay I wrote in particular referencing Ariella Azoulay’s ideas about reconfiguring logocentric linear history.
Spend some time reviewing your personal reflection and yourtutor feedback. Develop a series of carefully considered images that moves your idea forward. Hand in this series to your tutor together with a new reflective commentary setting out where you plan to go from here.
After discussing my plans with Ruth, I decided to submit new work rather than developing the first assignment, Sirens (2019) any further. The research, development, and various elements I made during the leadup to this submission have many of the same qualities and tropes as Sirens, i.e. exploring versions of collaboration, working with archival images and moving-image collage. However, what I’m actually submitting is very different. Nevertheless, the work is still ‘my voice’ and ‘style’ and I see it as a development from the previous work.
A brief preamble:
I submitted OCA DI&C work to pic.london’s open call. A blog for We Are OCA (Field 2019) describes my experience albeit in a relatively easy to digest way. I didn’t feel in a position to write anything more analytical in that forum but it may be worth scanning, (although there is no need for the purpose of this assignment as everything necessary should be on this page).
Up until very recently, I thought I would submit the work included in the show for this assignment – see here. However, after more thought (explained below), I decided not to, as the book I’ve made seems more of a cohesive project than the collective ‘manifestation’ – and stronger than the collage film I edited.
Therefore, for this assignment, I will talk about my experience in the collaboration as well but submit a proposal for a book which is not part of the pic.london exhibition but a development using some of the material I included there in a different format.
In the book version, the verse is split across pages emulating the Bourgeois book below but I might prefer it on one page.
Assignment work
ON THE EDGE OF THE VILLAGE
Individual Plates below or PDF of A5 -BOW Assignment Two Draft 5 (Please click on images to see a larger version)
Work in progress and contact sheet
Some of these images were originally included in the film – I really wanted to experiment with found and original images together. But I didn’t feel it was working so took them out. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t work but I was unable to find a way with this. I feel like this work has the potential to grow into something else and may eventually include something of the film or an element that might emerge from it.
I am submitting this work as work in progress – knowing the sequence isn’t finalised and some of the images could yet be replaced and crop revisited, the text re-set. Below is a small contact sheet. Should I wish to add to these in the future (perhaps before assessment) I think I would want to make sure they were taken in the same village, which would mean waiting for my next trip there.
I have also wondered if I would just present the text with a single image and played around with that option.
Additional layout suggestion (added 16/10/2019) which does not follow Bourgeois’ pattern and keeps the verse in one place (although still not content with the way it’s presented here). Again – sequencing not set.
Although there is a wide range of influences feeding into my ongoing work, and I discuss them at length in all my blogs, some key artists and writers are summarised in L3 BOW A2 Research & Reflection, Cultural Influences blog, there are three significant ones for this project as presented above.
Louise Bourgeois He Disappeared into Complete Silence 1947
I was very struck by Bourgious’ book He Disappeared into Complete Silence (1947) when I saw the plates in a retrospective at Tate Modern (2015). I have wanted to do something inspired by the layout, and combination of text and image which don’t seem obviously related. (See my UVC notes on Barthes Rhetoric of the Image (2016)) Bourgious’parabels are individual whereas my text follows on, but I hope that my plates could function as self-contained items too. I have emulated the layout in the PDF mock-up above.
2. Assemblage
I am currently reading Deborah Lupton’s Data Selves (2019) as I suspect it will be integral to CS and BOW work. She summarises her ‘more-than-human’ approach in the opening chapter: she “recognizes that humans and non-humans are entangled in hybrid, unstable, and generative ways; takes into account the importance of considering the distributed agency and ‘vital capacities’ (‘thing-power’) of human and non-human assemblages” and “places an emphasis on the embodied, sensory and otherwise material nature of meaning, knowing, perceiving and making as part of human embodiment” (43)
Lupton is interested in “where the boundaries between object and life are constantly blurred” (25). “Western societies”, she says, privilege “world views that seek to stringently define and police the boundaries between humans and non-humans and nature and culture.” (25). She defines her approach as diffractive but stemming from a feminist new materialist viewpoint. A significant part of her book is about the boundaries between life and death, and of course, digital culture and technology’s impact on that. Although I had not read or even heard of Deborah Lupton until recently, many of her ideas seem related to systems theory, Santiago’s theory of cognition, and quantum-influenced philosophy which inform my own thoughts. I have also since discovered, thanks to fellow OCA student Holly Woodward, Object Orientated Ontology (OOO) (Field, 2019b) which rejects materialism and is suspicious of the over-belief in scientific philosophies where the idea of process rather than object dominates, but also rejects the privileging of human beings over everything else in the universe. (I don’t understand the view that materialism is reductive because emergence is so important – emergence, it seems to me, is where the inexplicable occurs, where the strangeness and ‘enchantment’ (Lupton, 2019: 32) (Bennet, 2001: 2) take place. Emergence, I think, gives us this vast mysterious area that exists between raw information (process) and solid lived experience (objects). For emergence to occur there has to be various types of assemblage.
Lupton also quotes Donna Haraway who “now positions humans metaphorically as compost, intertwined with other living and non-human entities in a rich dense matter in which the boundaries between objects cannot be distinguished” (Lupton, 2019: 26) (Franklin and Haraway, 2015: 50). She refers to herself as a compost-ite according to Lupton. (26) As much as I like the metaphor (and the humour) and personally buy into a rejection of Cartesian separateness while embracing the idea of relationship and a multi-dimensional meshlike universe, I think language, our parochial positioning, and our evolutionary visual system prevents it from accurately describing our reality. Granted, our version of reality may indeed be a complete illusion and according to Donald D Hoffman, author of The Case Against Reality (2019), the objects we see may effectively be icons on a desktop, contrivances in a user-interface which we have evolved over a very long time to give us the best chance of surviving long enough to make and raise offspring. Nevertheless, it’s the only reality we’ve got access to for the moment and I suspect quite a long time to come. And isolating, defining language is fundamental to our being.
3. Alain Fleisher Mummy, mummies 2002
I have quoted and referenced Alain Fleisher’s work repeatedly since Self & Other when I stumbled across a mention of him in another student’s blog. I describe why I noticed him on my Sketchbook blog while writing about some images I took of my family,
“Each year I visit a small village in Umbria called Ferentillo where my mother owns a house. While there, like most mothers I take lots of photographs of my children. Ferentillo is one of two places in Italy with a strange and unusual history relating to mummification. Beneath the church, Santo Stefano, in Precept, one of two sides to Ferentillo, there is a crypt where 20 mummies are displayed. The bodies become mummified due an unusual micro-orgamism in the soil. You can read a little more here. After reading a paper via a fellow student’s blog which links the mummies to photography I decided to explore this further since I had already made work for an early module in the photography degree I am doing while visiting Ferentillo about my family called This Family. In the previous project I documented my family and combined words in a short book. (2017)
I mention and refer to him again at the end of S&O when describing the still images element of my A5 project, i will have call you
“Mummification and photography are united against the disappearance of appearances: they are alike in their materiality, their techniques, and their codes of resemblance” (Alain Fleischer) A photographic performance, placing mirrors in my mother’s garden in Ferentillo, known for a micro-chemical in its soil which mummifies the dead. Mirrors have historically been seen as a doorway between the living and the dead. Phones nowadays perform some of the same functions as a mirror, seen most notably in relation to Selfies. (2018)
There is a decent image of the front cover of Fleischer’s book here. He has photographed the mummies in black and white and made them look very much more dramatic than they do in real life. Although that is quite dramatic too. But in Fleisher’s images he’s beautified the mundaneness of them. For many years there was a huge shabby 70s table (which my ex-husband was desperate to buy and I’m very glad he didn’t/couldn’t because it struck me as ugly, shabby and not in a good way, which could also describe the venue) at the entrance fo the ‘museum’ which has the feel of someone’s basement. The mummies are behind glass and are rotting (albeit arrested/extremely slow rotting) and there is something quite tacky about these poor souls on show. They are simply dead bodies – the word mummies exoticizes them somehow. They’re not very pleasant as you might imagine. However, as Deborah Lupton says about some other remains, they are “reanimated with affective force and meaning” (38) and so a ‘lively’ element in the universe (which she likens to digital data). Death when seen in this way, she says, is a continuum. (39)
Collaboration
A rumour reached the village is a collective inquiry that began in a game set in an imagined community, riven with witchcraft, industry and accusation. Over three months, six artists exchanged challenges and responses, out of which common themes emerged: loops and circles, colonies and growth, architecture and language, nature and storytelling. The culminating exhibition is a settlement of images, objects, moving image and living cultures, questioning the stories and materials on which communities are built. (2019)
The work I’m submitting emerged from my collaborative time with 5 other artists working under the auspices of pic.london. My collaborators were:
As part of my on-going research into language, culture and reality, I’d been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (2019) and books by Nicholas Christakis who wrote Connected (2009) which is about social networks (in general, not just digital ones.)
Wrangham’s book centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, while simultaneously developing a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence. Humans also became hyper-co-operative; and today collaboration is part of our DNA. Wrangham suggests these trends are underwritten by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that we have an ever-present unconscious fear someone might be watching, gossiping, and planning to do away with us if we don’t conform. Gossip allows us to conjure up stories, deny and blame others, and plan punishment for anyone deemed a deviant. Wrangham’s theory along with Christakis’ ideas about connection sit at the centre of my contribution to the project. (2019a)
We created a research booklet, thanks to the efforts of Rowan Lear and the Publication Studio at CCA Glasgow, and built an installation onto which we placed images, objects, moving image, and living cultures. (see below)
I hesitate to write the following as I am well aware much of my frustration comes from my own uncertain place which is bound up with having been an actor and wanting to incorporate that into new work. Despite leaving acting years ago, it’s still a huge part of my inner being. What’s probably important for me to take on board is the others are visual artists rather than actors. They did not go to drama school nor did they spend a lot of time attending acting classes and learning to improvise.
When you begin a theatre job as long as you’re lucky with your director you might spend a good amount of time playing games that allow you to build up relationships. Even simple rehearsing with a text should be like game-playing and games are often used to facilitate exploration. These relationships go on to help form a universe. It has to happen fast – you might get three weeks to rehearse and then you must create the universe you’ve made every day in a show where it should continue to evolve and grow. At the end of a job (they are often just a few weeks long), it often dissipates just as fast which can feel weird given how close everyone might have felt a few days earlier.
I come from a school in which ensemble is highy valued – companies who work this way often work together for a long time. You cannot have an ensemble unless all contributors are invested in the universe you’re creating. Being invested means different things, but having conversations and responding to others helps. For some reason, this was extremely difficult and I don’t think it was simply because we were scattered about the world, although technology did play a part.
Ensemble is – I think – all about making that compost which Haraway describes. But definition or form which might emerge cannot happen unless the compost has been made. And because we are creatures of language, definition seems worth aiming for – when collaborations are most successful the definition is often something no individual could have created on their own. There is a synthesis in that middle emergence ground as described above.
Although there is some valuable work, I don’t feel we made rich enough compost. And so the work is less of an ensemble than a collection of individual’s work presented in a form which shows potential but which ultimately doesn’t meet the criteria for ensemble. The word collaboration seems to carry many versions of people working together though – and ensemble is probably the most cohesive ideal to aim for.
Saying all of that we worked together well when we began to install the work. And communication is much freer now after the event. We were also by far more of an ensemble than any of the othe groups who worked in pairs or alone or with others outside their group. (William Kentridge is a good example of an artist who embraces collaboration and ensemble).
Nevertheless, an overwhelming sense of isolation is what I’ve made work about here. Because that is what I picked up during the months we were trying to forge a common language. And it probably began to emerge quite specifically for me when I suggested a visual improvisation. We had agreed we wouldattempt to improvise using images/text via social media. After saying, let’s create a ‘self-portrait’ based on the character we’d played in a game during one of our workshops, someone refused saying, “portraiture was so isolating”. I felt blocked and frustrated by this probably because I had this memory of ensemble in my expectations; but, while I respect someone’s discomfort with the idea of photographing themselves (I don’t like it either) that kind of response goes very much against the spirit of the process. One of the most important rules in improvisation is to avoid blocking. If you’re handed something, no matter how awkward or difficult or uncomfortable, you go with it. You transform it. You make it work. If you don’t the improvisation dies and so when you refuse something, which you may feel ideologically compelled to, you should know you’re making that call. What’s more, what I’ve submitted here is a self-portrait although I don’t physically appear in any of the images. We can and must take liberties with language when improvising. For improvisation to flourish, we absolutely must take the baton pass it on. Anything else goes. That’s it for improvisation. But without those two crucial foundations, it cannot come to anything. I didn’t feel this happened and perhaps mainly because it’s not a familiar language for artists who are used to working on thier own.
Hence, my work explores that isolating experience and literally isolates objects using the flash, and in the text, I convey isolation hinting to much that was discussed before the Collaboration section in this blog as well as those feelings I’ve described. I was interested to watch Netflix’s The AO (2016/19) which explores the isolated lives of the characters who are separated by glass while forced to live in a cave – one of a plethora of modern productions about people who break boundaries between life and death, or else live in the afterlife (and I am looking at the significance of this if any in CS.). As I say in my CS literature review, unlike Plato’s Cave, the reality is not happening outside. It is inside the cave, the characters are the shadows themselves. There are many references to digital culture in the programme.
**
In the end, I made a film for the exhibition. All of the elements in it are a response to the conversations we did manage to have. But it was made alone and we never reached a place where we could share constructive criticism which I do find useful – plus it allows for a collaborative conversation to take place. I do know reaching such a point can take a good while and requires trust.
A group where the impro/game rules were very clear and the resulting example here truly collaborative https://artlicksweekend.com/2019/event/short-straw/ I woud not have known about this group if not for one of my ccollaborators. (Added 17/10)
What I showed there:
I showed three minutes of four-minute film on a Kindle within the collective circle (as described here)
The Kindle is an object of value itself and perhaps in a McLuhanesque way, perhaps it doesn’t matter what was on it. However, I wish I’d showed the final minute (Challenger exploding) rather than the first three. It’s called Gossip.
I also showed the same three minutes on a TV screen on the wall which alternated with a film of us playing the stick game. In fact, I wish I hadn’t added it. It’s a film made for projecting or watching on a computer or small digital device. Not a TV. But that’s just something to learn for next time. Before making final decisions about equipment make sure you’ve seen the work on various options.
The room is very light so projecting it wasn’t really an option although others just put up with the light or got the organisers to build them a dark space (which wasn’t desirable in our case).
I made a full version of the film available online. (see below) This differs from the exhibition version too as the sound online is the Game Boy audio-track. I do not like the space sounds I added to the exhibition version – it’s quite rubbish, really. And there are silly reasons for making that mistake but it’s done. I like the kitschiness of the online version of the film – it’s made that way by the combination of colours and the music and that works for me.
I showed the verse in full unlike here where it’s cut into segments on each plate. It was placed beside and under other’s contributions which worked well enough.
These elements existed in relation to others’ work and functioned as objects regardless of the material (digital/growing/image/archive/glass – crockery etc).
See the installation below. I do plan to take some images when I invigilate on Wednesday.
Some of the images I constructed on my phone while away and added to the IG platform (often but not always appropriated, some from a Situationist book, and adjusted using proprietary apps – playing with the accessibility of digital tools) Sadly my phone broke while away and I lost quite a few too. (click to see larger version)
Although I feel I have submitted a more cohesive element/work which emerged from this process, I like the kitschiness of the online version of the film. I think it is far better in the end than the version in the gallery but the sound was too much without earphones and one of the collaborators expressed ‘a hatred’ of earphones in galleries and I didn’t feel it was worth arguing about, perhaps because I was uncertain about the work in the first place. I also think the first section of the film is too long and it could afford to lose a minute or so.
I was also grateful to Josh Phillips for being in charge of the wooden platform and building it and making it work. Installation images:
OCA Reflection:
Demonstration of technical and visual skills
Further evidence of strengthening skills and the ability to recognise what and why things work or not. Lots of work to draw from.
Quality of Outcome
I think the book I’ve suggested is potentially much less incoherent than the film or the collective work. I quite like incoherence to be honest, or at least don’t’ have a problem with it but think something potentially precious never emerged in the collective, although it might have done. I think there is some interesting and strong individual work within the collective but that it does not work as an ensemble piece as well as it could have done. I am really interested in collaborating, assemblages and objects, however, and look forward to exploring this more. A book or an online version of some type is an assemblage in any case, as is the film above. I found it very difficult to think straight in a group of six quite different people. I think I also prefer the verse unbroken so if I decide to print a booklet for assessment I will play with different ways of compiling it.
Demonstration of creativity
The book format is much more sedate, perhaps even more mature, less histrionic than previous work. The written work is a good standard. (The film which I’ve not submitted is not as potent as my previous one although some aspects of the montage are are successful, the music with the challenger seems to have an effect on viewers.)
Context
Strong, pulling from different sources. Perhaps could add a photographer although looking at the issue of photography as a medium (rather than an art in itself) to make art within CS A2. References:
Blatt, Ari J.(2009) ‘The interphototextual dimension of Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie’s L’usage de la photo‘, Word & Image, 25: 1, 46 — 55, 27 – Alain Fleischer, Mummy, mummies (Lagrasse: E ́ ditions Verdier, 2002), pp. 15–16. Translations mine. (Blatt) Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/French/assets/doc/BlattOnErnauxMarie.pdf (Accessed: 24/5/2017)
Cluitmans L & Zeqo A(2011) He Disappeared Into Complete Silence, Rereading A Single Artwork by Louise Bourgeois, Amsterdam, De Hallen Haarlem/Onomatapee
Christakis, N. and Fowler, J. (2011). Connected. 1st ed. London: HarperPress.
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