in collaboration with Joao Villas, JP Garcia, Diego Rios, Gaby Hartel, Alex Gezhey, Nora Hartel, Clara Verdier, Margo van Rooyen, Adam Relihan, Emmie Ray, Qiang Li, John Atherton, Dafni Athanasopoulou, Eleni Athanasopoulou

Preserving an object that cannot be used for its purpose is quite common for archival or museum practices.

The first ever phonographic recording was made with ink. The sound was marked onto a sheet of paper by a vibrating needle; it was in some sense more of a visual representation of the sound than a phonograph recording, as it could not be reproduced. Wax cylinders embed the grooves visible to the eye in a physical transcription of the recording onto the wax surface. The sounds carved onto an object offer a productive metaphor for the traces events may leave, of their conservation and their transformation into something else.

From a technical point of view, phonographic recording is the most direct way to transfer a sound onto a ‘physical support’ and ensures that the sound is reproducible. This method to record sound has very few obstacles between the actual sound and its physical marking on the surface of the cylinder. The recording is the result of the needle scratching across the wax surface that aims to produce the fewest possible interferences and mediation between the situation and its material embodiment.

The big difference between analog and digital is that analog recording engraves the moment, while digital imitates it. Digital recording and digital reproduction is an imitation of an event that happened; the phonographic engraving is not an imitation because the analog recording, by precisely using that sound wave , impresses the event onto a surface and thus captures a moment with all the inaccuracies and errors of that specific moment. The digital – instead by imitating – removes everything that is considered error or inaccuracy. Phonograph recording is a momentum.

The sound that we hear on a wax cylinder has strong background noises that can be understood as signals that mark the metaphorical distance between the listener and the time-space where the recording was produced. These noises of the mechanical recording are both part of the event that was recorded and the moment of listening.

The physicality of the sound reproduced on the wax cylinder is also embodied in its tendency to disappear from the surface if listened to too many times. In fact, the quality and the survival of this object depends precisely on how much it is used: the more you replay it, the more it frays. In this sense, listening to the ephemeral material of the cylinder is an excellent metaphor for the moment that is moving away. The more you listen to it, the more that moment becomes vaguer and less decisive: disturbances, inaccuracies and noises take over. The digital instead idealizes an event in a ‘perfect’ form that does not change over time.

Phonographic recording signaled the first moment in history when humans were able to listen to an event whose present had already passed through exclusively technical mediation. This relationship and perception of sound events has shaped the sonic perception of the past: a scratched, disturbed sound. A phonographic recording, photograph or manuscript are objects that tend to ‘vanish’ over time and create distance between the listener-viewer and the source event.

Throughout European history and culture, archiving has been made equal to the possession of a physical object and the storage of that object somewhere (i.e. in a museum or state archive). This condition is characteristic of the West’s material approach to culture and knowledge that orders a physical proof of existence. Such an approach is diametrically opposed to that of so-called oral cultures, of those not based on written or material matter for transmitting and conserving knowledge. This epistemic divide is crucial for the re-thinking and re-imagining of archives. Should the immaterial and intangible be stored? How and where should it be embodied?

What else if not a wax cylinder?

Edi Danartono, Ollie George, Ekaterina Golovko

14.08.2021

in collaboration with Ingrid Kraus, Diego Rios, Anna Sari, Jermaine Brian, Rosalind Wilson, Songkun Wan, Kelvin Atmadibrata

Lygia Clarks seminal piece, Caminhando, 1964, enables two different outcomes, depending on the way the participant chooses to act. By following her instructions, he diversifies the piece and by not following her instructions he simply reproduces it.

Our subjectivity is not just ourselves. There is a part of our subjectivity that is affected by the forces of the world outside ourselves. This is the strange, the unknown. It escapes our cultural repertoire, not in a spiritual imaginative way, but the real effects of the environment on our body. Something that cannot be translated by our cultural repertoire. We are not used to activate this capacity. On the contrary, all our rituals and rules are against the possibility to activate this experience.

Why am I saying all this? It is the idea of the uncanny, that the strange and the familiar are inseparable, that we are always experiencing both. You cannot dissociate on with the other, but they exist in a paradox form. They exist together even though logically they cannot. How we deal with this tension in our subjectivity is what interests me. When desire directs us to follow the uncanny, what is created from this act will be bearer of this experience. If desire ignores this uncanny the result is generic. Reproduction instead of diversification. For me the most successful operation of western modern culture, is the anaesthesia to be affected by the world as a field of forces. The obstruction of the access to sensations.

“By desiring and acting in response to these forces one can reconfigure the colonial unconscious.”

Suely Rolnik

in collaboration with Bo Yoon Won, Katarina Sylvan, Robin-Dimitrije Gosselin-Monasevic, Susie Olczac, Diego Valente

Guattari defines subjectivity: "All the conditions making it possible for individual and/or collective agencies to be in a position to emerge as sui-referential existencial Territory, adjacent to or in a relation of delimitation with an otherness that is itself subjective". Otherwise put, subjectivity can only be defined by the presence of a second subjectivity. It does not form a "territory" except on the basis of the other territories it comes across; as an evolving formation, it is modelled on the diference which forms it itself, on the principle of otherness. It is in this plural, polyphonic definition of subjectivity that we find the perspective tremor that Guattari inflicts on philosofical economy. Subjectivity he explains, cannot exist in an independent way, and in no case can it ground the existence of the subject. It only exists in the pairing mode: association with "human groups, socio-economic machines, informational machines". Involved here is decisive, dazzling intuition. If the force of Marx's impact, in his Thesis on Feuerbach, consisted in defining the crux of man as "the set of social relations", Guattari, for his part, defined subjectivity as the set of relations that are created between the individual and the vehicles of subjectivity he comes across, be they individual or collective, human or inhuman.

Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud

in collaboration with Alex Athorn

And who will dare to militate in favor of unlimited freedom of movement, in favor of unlimited freedom? Do you mean: lawless? [...] The double blind concerns the fact that it would be necessary to deconstruct at the same time, theoretically and practically, a certain political ontotheology of sovereignty without calling into question a certain thought of freedom in the name of which this deconstruction is set to work. [...] The day when this double blind, when this implacable contradiction was lifted, [...] would be paradise.

The Beast and the Sovereign

J. Derrida

in collaboration with
Ingrid Kraus, Kayhan Lannes Ozmen, Rita Albano, Vicente Tigre, Luiza Amaral, Carlos Herique Gomes Salvador, Francisco Xavier do Carmo, Daniel de Jesus Pereira, Valdeci da C. M. Junior, Paulo Rogério Toledo Santos, Alexandre Bernardo da Silva

The comments that I usually get when people are confronted with my work is that the participatory aspect is not always explicit. In a time of commodities, the work is seen as the object it becomes and not how it became that object. It is like judging an instrument without listening to its music. The relationship is not important, only what is left from it. This resistance has made me realize that it is working.

Last year we had elections in Brazil. The entire campaign was based on hate and polarization. One of the most culturally complex and socially traumatized countries of the world had its subjectivity completely taken away from its people and rendered by a fixed idea that had to represent them. Dialogue did not exist. Everyone was made separate, everyone was alone.

When there is no dialogue your thoughts become concrete.

This was a specially difficult time for me. This illusion that something is fixed bothered me in a very deep way. For my crit I showed a piece that attempted to address this topic. The work was then selected for a show in the Brazilian embassy in London. Here is a brief description: The work Water and Glass developed in reference to the early works of Cildo Meireles. Between 1970 and 19775, Meireles produced two of his most iconic pieces: Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Coca-Cola and Eureka/Blindhotland. One, which expressed a specific attempt to pursue a democratic art practice and the other which dealt with concerns surrounding the difference between appearance and reality. Feeding on these concepts Pluralismo, Pluralism, attempts to embody both works in one. The bottles - this time found jars and glass pots - are filled with different quantities of water; however, they seem to be perfectly levelled with each other. Even though the objects are different they all play the exact same role in maintaining this balance. The ephemeral nature of water and the transformation that it has over time connects the work with its environment and representation becomes blurred with reality.

Here the participation of the viewer is deliberately subtle. It depends on his perception of time. All the people in the show where connected to the piece and had influence in the way it “evaporated” but the consciousness of their action depended on their awareness and acceptance of change through time.

“He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. Expect poison from the standing water.”

William Blake.

in collaboration with Alex Athorn 

in collaboration with Naomi Dines

“We have theatre inside. We can observe ourselves in action. We are at the same time actors and spectators.”

Augusto Boal

When we get together for a crit, we create a space with both memory and imagination. For me it is one of those beautiful moments in art practice. Its dynamics encourage action, awareness of your body in relation to others, and the ability of learning through living. There is an internal dialogue between being yourself and becoming others. And in this doing, the realization that you are a diversity of people.

Participation is the reason I chose to come to art school in the first place, and it is becoming in a way, essential in what drives my practice. In my understanding, the moment in time when participation is happening in its purest (possible) form inside the institutional structure, is during crits. Looking back one conversation particularly stands out to me; we were commenting on a students work, and this student was surprised by the interpretation of another. This, however, cannot be avoided, and as I mentioned before, should even be stimulated. Thinking about it, crits, by the way they are structured, have (or at least should have) this mentality. And that is why I appreciate them. It is a time for the group, the dialogue, regard to the other, it is not for one interpretation. There is clear understanding of this in the moment, for example, when you are commenting on other people’s work. There is a kind of learning that happens through making, through becoming the other, while discovering yourself. In a way the same happens when making art.

in collaboration with Aigli Tsirogani