perspektive 43/44

das perspektive doppelheft: der erste teil liefert eine zusammenschau von avantgardeansätzen im www und bietet einen theorieüberblick zum thema “avantgarde_under_net_condtions”.
im zweiten heftteil sammeln sich in gewohnter dichte theoriefragmente (etwa das neue kontrollverfahren) und diverse experimentelle autorinnen wie d. holland-moritz, sylvia geist, louis armand, rodrigo toscano u.a..

lesen sie doch einfach nach diesem text weiter auf unserer webseite http://www.perspektive.at im bereich “hefte“ oder “autoren“ oder stöbern sie auf der webseite http://avantgarde.perspektive.at im vollständigen material zu “avantgarde_under_net_conditions”.

das ganze heft können sie dort ebenfalls downloaden im pdf-format oder rtf-format.

perspektive 43 // avantgarde_under_net_conditions //

391.org

you are not quite so blank as you think
interview - english

[question 1 - perspektive] the situationists draw attention on society as a spectacle. 391.org as a kind of situationist follower reflects the spectacle on itself. makes the audience know that it is (in) a great spectacle. in a multimedia show of a great blank robbery. do you believe dada today can play the role of an enlightened avatar or does it still range into madder virtual basements?

[391.org - arteficial]

391.org is a website, which is to say that it exists in cyberspace; 391.org is an product of international collaboration, and as such transcends national borders.  Nevertheless, it would be but bad faith for 391.org to overly hype this transnationalism and universalism; while it is true that one of the planned future issues of 391.org will contain only pictures and no words, nevertheless in the post-dada culture of today it would be absurd to claim that the visual ‘esparanto’ developed within this future issue is actually an ‘international language’ (today we can say with some assurance that the picture, as much as the word, has meaning only within and relative to the various local contexts within which it performs).  And all of these words so far are by way of pointing to an almost self-evident fact about 391.org - it is written in English.

The fact that 391.org is written in English is not a reflection of the way in which, because of American economic and cultural hegemony, English has come to be dominant form of verbal and written communication in the world today.  Rather this fact reflects the accident that two of the (re)founders of 391(.org) were native English speakers - which is to say that they were by both birth and culture, English.  While in no way wishing to lessen the fundamental intention behind 391.org - viz, to provide platforms for international communication, the cultural significance behind this accident of birth should not be underestimated.

The wheels of cultural self-understanding spin in ever smaller circles.  

A hundred and thirty years ago the vision of modernism was forged; not by continental artsits, but by Victorian engineers.  The celebration of the machine followed in England in the wake of the industrial revolution.  But those same engineers who worshipped at the alter of speed and precision in their work, imposed a border between the aesthetics of engineering on the one hand, and the gaudy ornamentation which they called ‘art’ on the other (the structural form of their buildings celebrated function, the neo-gothic facades which cloaked their modern architecture was their art).  

From this English perspective the early twentieth century movements of Futurism, of Constructivism, even of Dada, can be understood as simply the removal of this artificial boundary between work and art - the worship of the aesthetics of the machine elevated beyond the engineering workshop.  But to the peculiarly bourgoise English mind, this new machine aesthetics could not be countenanced - that which was holy was being profaned.  The splutterings of Vorticism and the rash of post-WWII council housing development aside, English culture withstood the tide of modernism until 1977.
Situationism was appropriate for Paris 1968. We come from a different place and time.  Through our own attempts to transcend our own parochialisms we reach out and take what we can from the Situationists (as do others around us - witness the street theatre of the anti-roads movement or see the ‘new left’ manifestos of the Hyper Reality Center ( www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk ), nevertheless our grounding inspiration is of another world.  

The English Punk movement of the late 1970s, (as indeed can the Situationism of the late 1960s), can be seen as another step in the tradition of Dada.  The aesthetics of Punk was born in the art schools of London (“anti-art was the start” - X-Ray Spex).  But English Punk was Dada grown wise.  Firstly, Punk turned the wheel of history: if the history of modernism up to that moment had been “from weapon to fashion”, in 1977 fashion became a weapon in the social struggle.  Secondly, Punk - “the poor man’s rock invasion” - rejected the very notion of an avant-garde and proclaimed the era of proletarian Do It Yourself (DIY).

Punk proclaimed its death from the moment of its birth.  In 1977, those who knew their history knew that in this capitalist world, the cycle from weapon to fashion to weapon, could only but return again to fashion.  But through its anti-elitist DIY ethos, something henceforth would remain unsullied - underground and alive.

In truth that vestige, that residuul element of English Punk that continues to feed our very cultural souls is, in form, no different from whatever vestiges remain of Situationism - or of Dada itself for that matter.  When with a new digital medium emerging within new cultural era of post-Cold War history a new ism is recognized as fully appropriate to the late/post/pre-modern era of the twenty-first century, it will be possible to trace its roots though anything one wants - Dada, Punk, modern poetry, DJ culture, Situationism, or whatever.  All of the legacies of Dada were dead before they were born - and 391.org is no different.

What lives, what is that is to say, common to all these forms, is a critical awareness of both history and the present, a deep fascination with the forms of cultural communication, a determination to disrupt, and a sense of humour.

391.org is dead, indeed!

[391.org - babel]

The situationists made explicit the idea of life as spectacle. However (hyper)capitalism commodified the spectacle itself, along with the situationists. Yet their revolution continues, bit by bit (byte by byte). The alienated/fragmented worker is now a producer-consumer, aware of the spectacle and an active participant in it. In the virtual world fragmentation becomes an advantage: identities are created, played with, traded.  
The relevancy of dada is that virtual society IS dada... and so can suffer the paralysis of dada (all dressed up and nowhere to go). 391 uses dada as one language particularly appropriate this situation, with the intention of moving beyond the b(l)ank spaces of this virtual world. Duchamp also pointed out that the very ‘blankness’ of Dada can be a remedy of its own: it reminds you that you are not quite so blank as you think you are...

[question 2 - perspektive] dada cabarets turn into multimedia love affairs today. the surfing self cannot really be shocked. only by cutting down the waves. 391.org postulate to be the living lost futurists who claim speed as a fractal set named 391. is 391.org more like a hakim bey-ic TAZ in a “MADimensional” world. speedy. autonomous and allways on the point or does it tend to reach speed of light and ends up like every futuristic machine: a heroic mechanical death liner.

[391.org - arteficial]

What is this talk of ‘death’?  To paraphrase Mick Jones, whoever said ‘punk is dead is a cunt’.  Indeed.  391 is a website; it is not a living organism, hence, it cannot die.  We suspect that you are conflating the human with the machine - the surfer and the surfed.  Speed belongs to those who wish to travel somewhere, and also to that which is used to travel.  391 is an instrument that takes the surfer round and round.  Our loops can be
conducted as fast or as slow as is desired.  But why hurry when the place you get off is the always the same as the place in which you started?  Or is it?  Perhaps you need to ponder more the nature of the questions that you are asking.  This question is identical to the one above.  Enlightenment occurs with and for the subject, no machine or instrument undergoes enlightenment (we reject totally the fetishism and animism of so much so called cyberculture).  For some speedy travel might help refashion the senses and enlighten the mind; for some, the reverse.  And for some 391 may indeed by a mechanical death liner.  These are issues beyond the issues of 391.  391 just is.  To paraphrase again: Ask not what 391 can do for you - ask what you can do for 391.

[question 3 - perspektive] 391.org shakes between Dada (input) and Mada (output). between the long distance run and pushing the off button. how does your terminological operation system look like and is it possible to disrupt or interrupt the distance between sender and receiver? is interactivity only a mad rendering of streaming corporate identies?

[391.org - babel]

The traditional relationships between artist/producer/sender on the one hand and audience/receiver on the other can be totally dissolved in virtual space. Interactivity, multiple identities, collaborative and non-static art involve the audience in a very different way to the historic input/output model of dada.

D: input, observe output
2
M: output, observe input

With reference to Benjamin’s auratic concept of art, aura no longer originates from the art object: it comes from the audience. In the mechanical age, reproduction dissolved the aura of the art object. In the digital age, it is the reproduction of audiences that actually creates the aura of the art object.

[391.org - arteficial]

No. Well, yes and no. (see 391 issues 22, 23, 24 for clarification).

The new audience sit behind the portals to the web sites they have constructed and observe the art object through a perusal of the site markers and counters, chat rooms, message boards, and hacker warnings that they have themselves placed liberally around the auditorium before the objects of art entered.

Alternatively, one could postulate that the audience sends question sessions to the objects of art, asking obscure questions about ‘mechanical death liners’ - and then waits with mild amusement the objections of art.

Alternatively, one can say that the audience today establishes its own ‘art object’ in the attempt (sometimes successful) to procure for itself a new art object in  the form of questions about itself.

Or one could just cut the crap, and say that previous dichotomies are fast merging into identities.

[question 4 - perspektive] 391.org wants to set library stacks on fire and undermine the hegemonial structures of blouson cities and virtual towns. terminology poets - a subsidary of 391.org - tends to make interaction and replieness to an overall point in poetry. can literature still be decopyrighted by stealing interactive users and how does it as terminology rifle book borders?

[391.org - babel]

Terminology Poets was the first stage of 391 broadcasts, live spaces where users interact with each other on several levels. One level is purely textual - as seen in Terminology Poets - where words are written, re-written and overwritten in a common ‘copy-left’ environment. Future levels will incorporate audio and visual mixing spaces, and the new literature that is created will have a similar fluidity of authenticity or ownership. However it should not be called literature, for the literate element will only be one element, or may not exist at all.

[question 5 - perspektive] you propose not to use trams. but tend to accelerate speed limit to 391 beyond tapestry. is the antitram movement a kind of “war machine” as deleuze&guattari stated for the exterritorial warrior on the boundaries of state and stack machinery?

[391.org - babel]

antitram’s intention is to act as a catalyst to discussions regarding the role of public vs private transport (particularly in england). The focus of antitram’s attentions are not state or its apparatus as such, however it does use the language and methods of the extraterritorial warrior as appropriate to such an intention. 

[391.org - arteficial]

You are perhaps confusing antitram with the English print publication, ‘Trams are Tops’.  This rag, which must be treated not simply with disdain, but actually with a recognition of its potential nature as dynamite that may at any moment explode the impressionable minds of English youngsters into a thousand trammaged fragments: certainly, a kind of Anti-Oedipal war machine.

impressum

43/44/2002							ISSN 1021-9242

-	avantgarde_under_net_conditions (43)
-	zentral_einheit_come_together (44)
-	
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konzeption heft 43 “avantgarde_under_net_conditions”:
	sylvia egger

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