„Rather than give out laptops (they‘re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, ‚hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!‘“ Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

the OLPC (one laptop per child) project found, that if you give learning technologies to kids, they learn something. what a surprise…

but the experiment went like this: people who are poor and thus excluded from education learned very fast how to handle a hightech device by motorola. after a short period of time the kids knew how to write in english, they learnt it by using the devices, and taught it also to their parents. dropping some fragments of wealth and then leaving the people alone with it, in the past from this came cargo cults (see WP for some documentations), religious practices, that fixed themselves to the technologies of transmission, resulting for example in cultist statues, that resemble the planes that drop relief items. connected to this would be the gadget cult. people who learn at a screen, don‘t just learn, they also learn how to be a screen worker. the difference to just placing children in front of a TV would be that these new screens have more interactive interfaces. instead of just being able to switch channels, now the kids can choose apps. but how similiar that is, that’s also a sad side of the project: instead of just giving access to high-tech, another cult was served, the app cult. it wasn‘t planned to teach the kids how to handle computers, but they should become users of very specific software. the kids didn‘t stick to this regulation, apparently they hacked their devices. it’s nice that this happened, but we wouldn‘t have needed this experiment to see that the app cult can be stopped. this is proven every day everywhere, by the speed in which every locked device is given mod-chips and jailbreak-codes.

„Accumulate cum so that your face becomes a volatile liquid surface with no eyes, nose, or mouth; keep the smell from rimming so that your face and ass are irreducible; let the pubic hair gather into different consistencies of stickiness; wipe the shit left on your fingers under your hidden, cum-filled eyes like war paint. Transform your face into a hypertrophized state of fag-ness. Let these new excesses dissolve readability. Let your fag face configure with these materials into that which is not identifiable. Once 1000 cocks have cum on my head and 1000 asses have wiped their shit and sweat there, try to tell me what my face is. We accelerate like this—fuck like this—to become faceless. Because a face is never ours.“ – Zach Blas on Version.org, March 15, 2011

A response to the fag face project of Zach Blas / queertechnologies.info (the project was presented through some texts and a 15 minutes video, and during the transmediale this year in berlin and it is currently in competition for funding through rhizome.org):

You want to provide as tools or weapons three kinds of masks: The first mask is the mask that unites homosexuals under what you suspect to be a kind of common mouth formation that supposedly can be unconsciously analyzed by humans. So the person carrying the mask would only be recognized as part of a group that performs a specific oral sex practice, and not identified as an individual. First step. The second step is aimed at providing a training ground for a new faciality, through building a mask that has more extreme dimensions of expression than what humans are capable of performing. The third step then is to evade recognition and facial expression altogether and go into a fog that provides invisibility as a precondition for revolt and queerness.

By setting the camera eye and the human eye in one, you reduce the problem to recognition, and therefore you argue as if without recognition of individual faces there would not be the exclusion of those that are defined as deviant. Where you touch the question of oppression of deviancy, you introduce the fog, as a little trick cloud in which everything is invisible and that makes everything possible.

And, as a basic problem in your project, you cut off the discourse around faciality, that you try to take part in, by putting a mask before the face.

In detail:

Human faces have a certain common form and a variety in the details, this connects faciality with the problem of standardization and exclusion of what is seen as not fitting. This also bothers Deleuze and Guattari in their text in Mille Plateaux about faciality, for example they discuss the dominance of the white face/dark holes system (All Deleuze/Guattari quotes below are also from this text that is also mentioned in the fag face presentations). But this visual process is a part of the general social process of inclusion and exclusion and standardisation. The imperative of control comes first, and then the seeking eye. The process of building individuals that are conform with the social is a completely violent process not only on the level of visibility. You want fags to escape into the fog because the conditions are bad. Fog is the closest thing to non-existence other than death that you can imagine. This comes from not wanting to talk about individuality and the social, but instead using a jargon of existence and being. You want to build up dense fogs in which one cannot see each other’s faces and where „we will find our friends and love“. My reply to this concept would be this: friendship and love are social „fog“ themselve, forms of relation that leave the order of control.

What goes together for you, is the gaze and the biometric reading. These two can be linked closer than in your presentation, through a McLuhan quote: „When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience.“ This too much information is quite an interesting point to include, because it shows us that how the face is viewed is a core problem. Your project presents a exaggerated mask, as a training ground for new expressions, like a static grimace. You aim at training unhuman grimaces, instead of training to have a softer reading of the face, one that takes it as a riddle that cannot be solved, as a living artwork. You propose artificially distorted faces. I propose to have a closer look at the difference between the parts of facial expression that are trained miens from culture industrial learning and those that are more free artistic expression, a conscious expression that is written and read as an coded hieroglyph that cannot be decoded (this idea of art being a hieroglyphic writing stems from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory).

The problem is of course, that faces are always (moving) images, and if one understands the image as readable representation, one gets into the field of cybernetics. But images understood as artworks cannot be read directly and also not throughoutly. A machine and a person can only recognize standardized expressions. You want a queerness that „refuses to be recognized“. But faces themselves refuse to be recognized. They are always a medium that asks to be interpreted.

Because the human way of seeing can evolve, it is possible to imagine other ways of seeing faces: „freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities.“ Deleuze/Guatari. This perspective can be seen as central for the specific seeing of faces, as Emmanuel Lévinas argues in Totality and Infinity, An Essay on Exteriority, by seeing a face the closed quality as an image and as an idea of the other gets overflown and destroyed.

You mention that the fag face is socially constructed and read through the process of stereotyping. But you drop that point immediately because you link two things on purpose: one being that a computer today can recognize face shapes and face surfaces, and the other one that, according to a study that you refer to, people can interpret from a face if a person has a homosexual orientation. You imagine that this is due to face deformation from oral sex. And not because of a microscopic standardized face performance, trained through culture industrial processes.
You want to pick up this way of inscription of sexual practice and extend and reverse it, to smear sperm and shit on the face to make the shape unrecognizable. But the basis before the designing part remains a quite vague assumption that what is considered a „fag face“ is not performed, played, stylized and interpreted, but a cemented formation due to a common sexual practice. Also again, this proposal only makes sense in your simple narrative of control versus unrecognizability, where people stare at each other like face recognition software.

By this you deny an important progressive perspective, that people can treat a face much different than a machine, through not only comparing faces in shape and surface, but to interpret expressions from their experience of culture-industrial and artistic experience. A machine cannot do that, people bring a non-standardized pool of aesthetic experience with them, a machine has standardized procedures, people can have soft areas of interpretation and they can accept and process unclear answers.

But also you go further than visibility, and say that existence is directly linked with recognition and control, and the only fleeing route that you see is the non-existence. You understand non-existence more or less as to escape visibility, through the use of masks and other obscuring. You mention the faciality text of Deleuze and Guattari, where they imagine to „get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the organization of the face“, They describe how the faces are used differently, in an unregulatory way. They also mention masks in that text, but in a different context, as a mode to deterritorialize the assemblages of power of the body.

The way you handle the concept of masks remind me more of a part of „Theorie of Bloom“ of Tiqqun, where it is talked about the faciality aswell and ended with a quote of Bataille: „Heureux celui que l’écœurement des visages vides et satisfaits décide à se couvrir lui-même du masque : il retrouvera le premier l’ivresse orageuse de tout ce qui danse à mort sur la cataracte du temps.“ G. Bataille, Le masque (the source of the quote is not given in the text, in the english online version is a wrong attribution to Hegel) [translation: Happy is he who’s own disgust for the empty and satisfied faces leads him to cover himself with a mask: he will be the first to rediscover the stormy euphoria of all those who dance to death on the cataract of time.]

Tiqqun describes how in present reality there is nothing behind the surface (a total spectacle so to say), and that the tragic thing is, that the faces resemble the mask quality of the spectacle very closely. According to Tiqqun, those who have life in them will feel touched by the Bataille quote of changing your face into a mask. This is like a counterattack, maybe close to what you suggest, to work with masks because the faces are linked to problematic cybernetic and significatory processes.

The sentence that follows in the Bataille text is: „Il apercevra que les réponses n’étaient comme des os rongés jetés aux chiens que les formules propres à maintenir l’esclavage paisible du travail.“ Roughly in english: the feedback/answers one gets are just like bones thrown at dogs, a process that makes you function in the „slavery of work“. This part, that Tiqqun left out, describes the negative totality that surrounds the faces and makes them as a tendency seem empty and satisfied: That all perform the same facial expressions as all are double free on the labour market. Interestingly the question for Deleuze/Guattari in the text that you mention is also to look at the conditions of the face: „The question then becomes what circumstances trigger the machine that produces the face and facialization.“Deleuze/Guatari. With your jargon of escape this message gets lost aswell. When the recognition process is sabotaged, there still is the faciality, that is more complex than recognition.

To summ up the criticism against the fag face project:
You assume that people can read from a face how it is used in sex. It is much more probable that the culture-industrial image of the homosexual has generated a stereotypical expression, that is trained but at least played. So queering the fag face would mean to become aware what everyone has done to their facial expression in terms of training and in terms of the scope of possible expressions.
Your exaggerated expressions mask is not helpful here, since people more and more have stopped to exaggerate their own face performance, in accordance to the cultural shift from dramatic and cruel theater to spectacularity. The possibilities of miens and grimaces have to be excavated through conceptual work and not by doing a simple caricature. And after that still lie the big possibilities of the discourse around faciality, that also waits to get picked up instead of being cut off.
What happens inside foggy spaces of freedom through invisibility is not so much of interest for faciality, but rather concepts of new ways of seeing and expressing and how a media competence can evolve beyond an interfaciality where persons are seen and act as screens and cameras

the situationist idea to let old city structures like the labyrinths of amsterdam grow into superstructures across the whole planet with psychogeographic zones according to the needs of the inhabitants (titled “new babylon”) was defeated by european cities being a collage of old and new. the old often being a simulacrum (e.g. the goethehaus in frankfurt which was reconstructed as if nazi germany and the bombing of it wouldn’t have existed), and zones of shopping, tourism, finance, industry, housing and regeneration instead of zones being open to consumption and transformation by the users.

le corbusier was recuperated in la défense, the concept of unitarian urbanism was defeated as a whole. the situationist attempt wasn’t the directorial cuts of haussmann, but rather cutting up the whole and to issue a socio-organic growth where the useful parts of present urban structures are approbiated. it wasn’t aimed at being a structuralist attempt, the core idea was the creation of an all-embracing playground (with playing being a serious and open process instead of a superflous activity).

the situationists changed their strategy before the defeat. the core group gave up the plans of new babylon, its former member constant nieuwenhuys moved to producing artistic instead of architectonic models of it (judging from an art historian point of view, for himself this step most probably doesn’t exist). the last situationist after all splits, guy debord, whose own artistic mode had become the essay film as an attack on the images of culture industry, later moved on to creating a game to train the people of the importance of communication networks on battlegrounds.

(thoughs after receiving a postcard from mulhouse. the picture on the card can also be found here.)

“In twenty-first century, whoever controls the screen controls consciousness, information and thought. The screen is a mirror of your mind, get it? If you are passively watching screens, you are getting programed. If you are editing you own screen, you are in control of you mind. George Orwell had it wrong. He was too optimistic. He wrote in 1984 that Big Brother would watch us from screens on the walls of our living rooms or bedrooms. But that is nothing. You could always duck out of sight. The current horror is that Americans voluntarily stick their amoeboid faces toward the screen six or seven hours a day and suck up information that Big Brother is putting there. Here is the key to our future: We can and will control our own screens. We are designing software that will empower you to produce and direct your own mind movies, your own prime-time shows.” Timothy Leary – 1987 Rolling Stone Magazine

Timothy Leary and George Orwell got it wrong, your own screen is your means of production in the market competition. The diffuse spectacle gets produced in an integrated mode (Debord). Work expands into free time (Adorno). A podcast economically is not a primetime show, because it’s tendency is superflous, hobby work. States will soon have to provide a basic income for the superflous people out of work, resulting in the eternalization of the poverty of the precarious proletariate. This is the real meaning of Big Brother, not a policy-maker, but state as a father figure that cares for you. You don’t get fed with information, you get fed with the self-reflection of today’s citizenship, with the ideology of the republic, with the consciousness of the free market. The tendency of this ideology being produced as media products by all, does not automatically question the hegemony of power. By reformulating the analysis of state and power to seemingly concrete entities little “Big Brother” in the sense of central authorities that need to be attacked, the perspective of using the means of production for subverting the mode of production got hurt. In the field of ideology it’s not the people against The Man today, it’s the people against themselves, the praxis of future politics will have to evolve from a process of critique. Participation is an empty phrase, as long as markets and thus the dogma of profitability are used to regulate it.

(just a little follow-up to The Screen Generation, Cult of the Dead Cow TexXxt #412 08/29/2008)

Europe seems like the Titanic, the course is non-historical and blind, yet someone pretends to steer, we are all dancing, some on the lower deck of Macedonia, and some on the upper deck or the liberal lounge of Berlin. In the middle of an ocean, we cannot see what is behind the iceberg, nor the horizont: revolution is the same fetish as progress, the ship will sink itself, or it will be sunken. We should try to be able to still think en-face of a cuming insurrection or more civil war or more integration. Progress for me is when social modes change towards a reconcilitation of global equality and diversity. Because this only opens the space for what we cannot yet imagine: freedom. I think the autonomy is not in the small community, but in other ways of communication (this means in the art). So this can happen at mass events, or in a painting, in a song or in a book. Today with hyperspace we cannot only talk of situations of “real” life. Also in general there is no real, in the sense of a seperate tangible, life anyways. (*)

In Berlin, the living conditions are mostly hidden, the parts of the city are basically gentries and ghettos, one part full of yuppies (in the original sense, young urban professionals) with kids and the other parts full of jobless chaos. Everyone is more free than in the rest of Germany on the one hand, but in a real marxist sense, double free: free of higher living standard, and free of hard work. So many smart and grown up people work in call centers and try to be artists the same time. Without thematizing this! And this is the big problem, the mass consciousness seems deranged. Here in berlin we have the real spectacle: not coming from the newspapers or anyone externally of our own lifes, but a collective production of images. These years these models of counterculture-industry even get successfull for tourism. If it wasn’t for real, one would have to imagine it, it’s like a zoo run by the animals and every breed of animal thinks the others are a danger to the zoo. Instead of criticising the zoo itself.

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(taken from our conversation about today’s situation in Athens and Berlin)
* These last two sentences are a bit cryptic in their shortness. More on the critique of immediate community and on the conditions of social situations is in this text.

„Der Begriff der Existenz, als der Wesenhaftigkeit von Vergängnis, der Zeitlichkeit des Zeitlichen, hält Existenz fern durch ihre Nennung. Am verfinsterten Himmel der Existenzlehre aber leuchtet kein Gestirn mehr. Existenz wird geweiht ohne das Weihende. Von der ewigen Idee, an der das Seiende teilhaben oder durch die es bedingt sein sollte, ist nichts übrig als die nackte Affirmation dessen, was ohnehin ist: Bejahung der Macht.“
Adorno – Negative Dialektik (Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6), S. 136

„Vielleicht wird in der gegenwärtigen philosophischen Ideologie nur deshalb so viel Aufhebens von der Zeit gemacht, weil sie den Menschen verlorengeht und beschworen werden soll. Der vielbemerkte Konkretismus und der Abstraktismus aber, der das Einzelne überhaupt nur noch als als Repräsentanten des Allgemeinen gelten läßt, mit dessen Namen es benannt wird, ergänzen sich. Der Begriff wird von der dekretorischen Subsumtion unter irgendwelche fertigen, der dialektischen Korrektur entzogenen Clichés abgelöst, die ihre verderbliche Gewalt unter totalitären Systemen enthüllen: auch ihre Form ist das isolierende, aufspießende, einspruchslose ‚Das ist‘. “ Adorno – Theorie der Halbbildung, GS 8, S. 116

„Die sinnerfüllten Zeiten, deren Wiederkunft der frühe Lukács ersehnte, waren ebenso das Produkt von Verdinglichung, unmenschlicher Institution, wie er es erst den bürgerlichen attestierte. Zeitgenössische Darstellungen mittelalterlicher Städte pflegen auszusehen, als ob gerade zur Volksbelustigung eine Hinrichtung stattfände. Sollte anno dazumal Harmonie von Subjekt und Objekt gewaltet haben, so war sie gleich der jüngsten vom Druck bewirkt und brüchig. Die Verklärung vergangener Zustände dient später und überflüssiger Versagung, die sich als ausweglos erfährt; erst als verlorene gewinnen sie ihren Glanz. “ Adorno – Negative Dialektik (Gesammelte Schriften, Band 6), S. 192

„Der abstrakte Wille zur sofortigen Wirksamkeit erkennt die Gesetze des herrschenden Denkens, den ausschließlichen Gesichtspunkt der Aktualität an, wenn er sich den Kompromittierungen des Reformismus oder der gemeinsamen Aktion pseudorevolutionärer Trümmerhaufen ergibt. Dadurch hat sich der Wahn in derselben Position wiederhergestellt, die ihn zu bekämpfen beansprucht. Die über das Spektakel hinausgehende Kritik muss vielmehr zu warten verstehen.“ Debord, Gesellschaft des Spektakels (#220)

„Zartheit zwischen Menschen ist nichts anderes als das Bewußtsein von der Möglichkeit zweckfreier Beziehungen, das noch die Zweckverhafteten tröstlich streift; Erbteil alter Privilegien, das den privilegienlosen Stand verspricht. Die Abschaffung des Privilegs durch die bürgerliche ratio schafft am Ende auch dies Versprechen ab. Wenn Zeit Geld ist, scheint es moralisch, Zeit zu sparen, vor allem die eigene, und man entschuldigt solche Sparsamkeit mit der Rücksicht auf den andern. Man ist geradezu. Jede Hülle, die sich im Verkehr zwischen die Menschen schiebt, wird als Störung des Funktionierens der Apparatur empfunden, der sie nicht nur objektiv eingegliedert sind, sondern als die sie mit Stolz sich selber betrachten. “ Adorno – Minima Moralia [Struwwelpeter], S. 45

Raumzeit in der Maschinenmusik:

„Schießt um die gehörte Musik die Zeit zum strahlenden Kristall zusammen, so fällt die ungehörte in die leere Zeit gleich einer verderblichen Kugel. Auf diese letzte Erfahrung hin, die mechanische Musik stündlich durchmacht, ist die neue Musik spontan angelegt, auf das absolute Vergessensein. Sie ist die wahre Flaschenpost.“ Adorno – Philosophie der neuen Musik S. 126

James Blake – Curbside

The interface not only crosses space: to look at means to empathize, to look at a face means to conceive feelings. Not towards the immediate. The modus is not dissection, but empathic association of constellations.

Appearance is partly played and partly unconscious visual expression of feelings. Language therefore is the fitting model, not the laid open heart, face recognition, lie detector. The communication without masks would be the abolishment of art, which in other concepts would be sublated in a play of miens. Otherwise hope would be scattered.

Search for the small – if even existing – fissure between the played facial expression in accordance with types, and that which is not possible to typify in the played mien, the true play, which even can survive in the image making process, and which has to resist twice, the industrial style and the identification constraint of the normed role models. It seems to get more abstract when the whole body is speaking, faces are too trained.

The face is caught in the crisis of history, aim to do Good Gesichtsphilosophy (a play of words, remixing the word Geschichtsphilosophie – philosophy of history – and making a philosophy of the history of the face), not just philosophize around on the face. It is not about truth, immediateness, the total mediation of all with all, the total transparancy, the knowledge about the inner and outer life of all fellows, it is about less pain (until the last pain of being human, the endlessly free human) and about another quality of being, it is about the conditions of the faces, the faces that are subject to history.

The mien presents itself as a played and conceived as played sign, in which, more obvious than it is with the words, a open space is kept in mind. It is basically a challenge to pick up this topic in art, for you have to consciously construct an open process, which goes against the grain for parts of contemporary art and its mentality of aiming at effect, be it highpass at the mixing console, color field signals, battles of symbols, cartoon figures or hard words poetry. Also not meant is arbitrariness, unpolitical, meaningless, endlessly open snapping and blotting.

Some work on this through stencils. As abstraction of the facial expression, to be sensed like seen through cloth. On the contrary: Mona Lisa, this incomprehensible and successful cultural product.

Play of miens: an utopist idea, in which the people freely play with a central means of communication, the playful system of signs, the face. Just that there is no historic break, like today only lookism, as a forced adaption of superficial norms, and tomorrow the free play of miens, but in the option to be quiet and letting the face speak, lies one of so many possibilities of communication. To be not understood, but to ask for empathy. This story needs models.

We already pay with likes, maybe we soon pay with a smile, the city becomes the catwalk of those who are superflous, the total integration of culture industry reconciles itself with bio politics. The class of the face performers and the laid open miens of the governed, who cannot control themselves. We have to recognize our tender mien play.

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interface II
literature

Protektorama ist eine spirituelle Materialistin, eine Hexe oder Priesterin, die mit einem kleinen Wald in die Stadt gekommen ist um darin ein Weltheilungsritual zu vollführen. Die Heilung der Welt funktioniert durch eine Rekuperation des Voodoo Prinzips: Geisterbeschwörung. So die Performance (Bilder von einem anderen Termin hier, inzwischen noch ein Bericht hier). Als Teilnehmende dieser wird sich auf Pilze gekniet und die Hände in die Äste von Bäumen gelegt. Die Pilze sind kleine gepolsterte Kniestützen, die Bäume verstellbare Schienen mit Vorrichtungen zum Befestigen des Arms mit dem Handy darin. Die Platzzuordnung erfolgt nach Geräteklasse: Telefon, Smartphone, Telefone mit Kamera und Lampe. Das Telefon kann nur schwach beleuchten, die Smartphones verbinden zum Text und die anderen dokumentieren und sind Scheinwerfer.

In dem kleinen abgegrenzten Raum der Galerie wird ein interner Raum erzeugt, der Wald, ein Wäldchen, oder wir könnten als Wortspiel sagen, das Weltchen. In diesem wird auf Zeit, dem Zeitraum den der Künstler für seine Transformation in die Hexe Protektorama bestimmt hat, geheilt. Und zwar die ganze Welt. Die ganze Welt insofern, als von der ganzen Welt gesprochen wird, von den Geistern: den ökonomischen sozialen Prinzipien dieser Welt, von ihrer Entkörperlichung zum Abstrakten und Unsichtbaren und ihrer Verkörperlichung durch Beschwörung, durch Besprechung, durch Kritik. Dies selbst ist der Heilungsprozess, dieses Sprechen von dem Prozess der Geisterwerdung und Geisterbeschwörung.

Die ganze Welt in den Raum hinein zu nehmen ist das Hexenwerk. Die abstrakten Geister könnten nicht lokal ausgetrieben werden, vielmehr geht es im Ritual darum, die Geisteraustreibung als Projekt in den Raum der Kunst zu holen, sowohl in die Sphäre bzw. den Kontext der Kunst als auch in den konkreten Kunstraum.

Ein Wald heutzutage ist nicht mehr die Grenze der Zivilisation, vielmehr sind Wälder von Menschen gestaltete Funktionsräume. Entspannung, Frischluftrefugium und Ort der Ruhe, Rohstofflieferant, romantische Kulisse. In diesem Fall jedoch: inhaltliche Anspannung, Nähe zu Anderen, Ort der Rede. Die Bäume in diesem Wäldchen stehen eng, es muss sich hineingequetscht werden. Die räumliche Verdichtung entspricht der Verdichtung der Gedanken, das Wäldchen ist ein Weltchen. Über das Internet, wireless über die Geräte der Gäste, kommt das Skript des Weltheilungsrituals zur Hexe, der Gastgeberin.

Die mit allerlei zauberhaften Dingen ausgestattet über und gegen die Verzauberung der Welt spricht: ausgestattet mit kleinen Yogamatten, Engeln, Buddhastatuen, alles Aneignungen wie die Aneignung des Voodoo. Feindliche Aneignungen, den die Hexe steht auf dem Markt der Weltheilenden in Konkurrenz zu Yogalehrern, Bio-Händlern und anderen Anbietern von Spiritualität. Auf der eigenen Seite hat sie die Gäste des Waldes, die ihre Technologie anbieten und schon hierbei eine Verkörperung einer Abstraktion erfahren: die Einordnung in eine Nutzergruppe eines Typs Mobiltelefon aus finanziellen oder ideologischen Gründen resultiert in eine räumliche Aufteilung. Desweiteren werden hinzugezogen Geister aus der Vergangenheit: Marx, die soziale Bewegung als möglicher Exorzismus des Fetisches, Maya Deren als andere Hexe.

In diesem Raum spielt Zeit eine große Rolle. Einmal als Aneignung der Geschichte, als Aktualisierung von Vergangenem, konkret die Thesen von Verstorbenen und die Perspektiven von früheren Bewegungen. Dann als Bereich der Performance. Der Bereich der Performance ist nicht nur der Wald als Raum, sondern auch das Zeitfenster des Rituals. Und schließlich als Denkmodell in der Geistererzählung des Rituals, in der Analogie von Vergänglichkeit und Abstraktion.

In der anschließenden Diskussion kam die Frage auf, was der Unterschied zwischen zwei Versionen von general public wäre: Auf der einen Seite der Galerieraum namens general public, in dem die Performance stattfand, mit freundlich gesonnenem Publikum, auf der anderen Seite ein öffentlicher Raum mit zufälligem Publikum. Wie ließe sich die Performance aus dem Galerieraum und damit auch Schutzraum transferieren, welche Erfahrungen sind zu erwarten?

Hier möchte ich einhaken und die oben gemachten Beschreibungen noch einmal anwenden. Erst der Raum: Mit dem Wegfallen der Begrenzung auf einen Kunstraum wäre nur noch das Wäldchen der Raum der Kunst. Dieses würde sich durch die visuelle Außergewöhnlichkeit abgrenzen, wie auch die poetische Figur der Hexe diesen Raum hervorheben würde. Die Hineinnahme der Welt in den Raum, durch den Textdownload und vor allem durch die Perspektive der Inhalte des Texts, sowie wiederum umgekehrt der Upload der Dokumentation würde auch funktionieren.

Das Problem beim Umzug ist eher die Geschlossenheit der Erzählung, die zwar keinen Höhepunkt hat, aber doch aufeinander aufbauende Elemente. Zeitlich wäre es also notwendig, die zerteilte Menge im öffentlich Raum zu bündeln um die Geschichte gebündelt vorstellen zu können. Die Frage ist also, ob die Performance, die so sehr auf Verdichtung von Zeit als Thema, Gleichzeitigkeit der Situation und klar strukturierter Aktualisierung basiert, im öffentlichen Raum funktionieren kann. Die Herausforderung wäre die Ungleichzeitigkeit der Tagesabläufe der Passanten, und damit das Finden eines Beginns, sowie einen Ort zu finden in der komplexen Struktur des Stadtraums. Wäre diese general public nicht vielmehr eine Illusion? 30 zufällige und spontan vorbeikommende Gäste zu haben statt 30 Informierte verstehe ich mehr als einen Versuch, ein Erfahrungsammeln, der Beginn einer Neuausrichtung des Konzepts, das räumlich einfach zu transformieren wäre, dessen neue Zeitlichkeit jedoch eine Menge Fragen aufwerfen würde.

- edit, gekürzt um den vergleich mit streetart -

“Die Auflösung aller Waren in Arbeitszeit ist keine größere Abstraktion, aber zugleich keine minder reelle als die aller organischen Körper in Luft. Die Arbeit, die so gemessen ist durch die Zeit, erscheint in der Tat nicht als Arbeit verschiedener Subjekte, sondern die verschiedenen arbeitenden Individuen erscheinen vielmehr als bloße Organe der Arbeit.” MEW Bd. 13, S.18

“Historische Zeit ist […] kein abstraktes Kontinuum, in dem Ereignisse stattfinden und dessen Fluß unabhängig von menschlicher Tätigkeit wäre, sondern ist die Bewegung der Zeit, im Gegensatz zur Bewegung in der Zeit.” Postone – Zeit, Arbeit und gesellschaftliche Herrschaft, S. 442

“Unser Leben ist, anders gesagt, ein Muskel, der Kraft genug hat, die ganze historische Zeit zu kontrahieren. Oder noch anders: Die echte Konzeption der historischen Zeit beruht ganz und gar auf dem Bild der Erlösung.” Walter Benjamin – Passagenwerk, N 13a,I

Die messianische Welt ist die Welt allseitiger und integraler Aktualität. Erst in ihr gibt es Universalgeschichte. Was sich heute so bezeichnet, kann immer nur eine Sorte von Esperanto sein. Es kann ihr nichts entsprechen, eh die Verwirrung, die vom Turmbau zu Babel herrührt, geschlichtet ist. Sie setzt die Sprache voraus, in die jeder Text einer lebenden oder toten ungeschmälert zu übersetzen ist. Oder besser, sie ist diese Sprache selbst. Aber nicht als geschriebene sondern vielmehr als die festlich begangene. Dieses Fest ist gereinigt von aller Feier und kennt keine Festgesänge. Seine Sprache ist die Idee der Prosa selbst, die von allen Menschen verstanden wird wie die Sprache der Vögel von Sonntagskindern. “ — Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, I/3, S. 1239

Eine Minute in der Kunst:

„Indem ein Text, ein Gemälde, eine Musik fixiert wird, ist das Gebilde tatsächlich vorhanden und täuscht das Werden, das es einschließt, seinen Gehalt, bloß vor; noch die äußeren Spannungen eines Verlaufs in ästhetischer Zeit sind soweit fiktiv, wie sie in dem Gebilde ein für allemal vorentschieden sind; tatsächlich ist ästhetische Zeit gegen die empirische, die sie neutralisiert, in gewissem Maß indifferent.“
Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1970, S. 162f.

One Minute Soundsculpture from Daniel Franke on Vimeo.