Media Mutandis - a NODE.London Reader - NODE.London

From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again • B.Neilson, N.Rossiter

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:33:01 +0000

Labour, Life and Unstable Networks

by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: "My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be". Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour?

Free Media from the Mouth of the Thames • Harwood

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:13:06 +0000

by Harwood

C2C Railway Journey <-> ADULT RETURN = The mouth of the Thames to the Tower of London.

Digital Objects • M.Fuller

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:36:51 +0000

by Matthew Fuller

Digitality and objects
If software has a social and technical imaginary, if it is culturally active as a force in itself, what does that mean for data more generally, the objects constructed, giving rise to or handled by software?

From Systems-Oriented Art to Biopolitical Art Practice • S.Buchmann

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:46:24 +0000

by Sabeth Buchmann

(from a talk first given at the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 conference, Tate Modern, London, 17 September 2005)

Concerning the question which the curator Donna de Salvo raises in her abstract of the conference on Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970^[1] “How can we use the period of the 60s and 70s to rethink notions like open systems today?”, I’ll focus on the conceptual and technological 'rhetorics' and 'aesthetics' which are still relevant today to claims for more interdisciplinarity between art, science and new technologies. Three years ago, in their text 'Software Art', Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel wrote about, “a shift of the artist’s view from displays to the creation of systems and processes themselves".^[2] This shift implies a transformation to a mode of production which traditional definitions of artistic practice no longer adequately describe. Keeping in mind the form of presenting instructions for action which has historically been so central to conceptual art, Cramer and Gabriel contest the assumption that there is a “generative code exclusive to computer programming“ [in so doing, they extend a mathematical model of computer programming from the realm of technology to that of artistic practice]. The authors take, as an example, the immateriality of the work of Fluxus artist La Monte Young titled Composition 1961, No. I, January I. In Young’s presentation of the written instructions to “draw a straight line and follow it,“ Cramer and Gabriel recognize a new, metaphysical, conceptual and epistemological tendency in art practice. They see this emerging practice as capable of transcending or moving beyond the confines of the object. Cramer and Gabriel find this tendency in other projects of historical significance such as the exhibition entitled Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art which was curated by artist and critic Jack Burnham in 1970 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Before curating this show, Jack Burnham had participated in several interdisciplinary projects at MIT. His show Software… also took place one year after the publication of Joseph Kosuth’s 'Art after Philosophy'. Burnham’s reference to Kosuth’s controversial manifesto of Conceptual Art becomes obvious in the foreword of the catalogue. Building on Kosuth’s references to structural linguistic theory, Burnham draws parallels between mathematical information theories^[3] and conceptual art. The inherent similarities between conceptual art and mathematical information theory that Burnham sees mean for him a fundamental shift in the focus of art production from the traditional art object to a cultural, social and societally overlapping system of signs, one that eventually undermines the mythical structure of modern art.

Recoding of Information, Knowledge and Technology • M.Corris

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:57:46 +0000

by Michael Corris

The following examines how some Conceptual art recoded, redescribed and ironized the theories that helped to drive and justify the technological revolution of the 1960s.^[1] At the outset, we should note the intense interaction during the 1950s and 1960s between the modernizing discourse of technology and all forms of culture and visual art. Indeed, the emergence during the 1960s of Conceptual art coincided with a tremendous surge in economic activity in North America and Western Europe that “seemed powered by technological revolution”.^[2] John F. Kennedy’s “new frontier” and Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” were images that were intended to denote and exploit the appeal of technological innovation in the mind of the electorate.^[3]

States of Interdependence • R.Catlow, M.Garrett

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 16:13:53 +0000

by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett

There is a Sufi fable in which a group of foreigners sit at breakfast, excitedly discussing their previous night’s exploration. One starts saying “…and what about that great beast we came across in the darkest part of the Jungle? It was like a massive, rough wall”. The others look perplexed. “No it wasn’t!” says one, “It was some kind of python”. “Yeah…” another half-agrees, “…but it also had powerful wings”. The shortest of the group looks bemused – “well, it felt like a tree trunk to me”.

spring_alpha project • S.Yuill

Sun, 05 Feb 2006 16:25:20 +0000

by Simon Yuill

Business Model – The Candida TV Approach • A.Trocchi

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:35:23 +0000

by Agnese Trocchi

CandidaTV is a crew of socially engaged and demented videomakers. At the core of their vision there is the “Make your own TV” motto.

Next on the Left, or: ‘What Good is a Map if you Know the Way?’* • T.Stott

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:38:06 +0000

by Tim Stott

* This is a revised version of an essay first published in Variant, volume 2, number 21, winter 2004.

For the French curator, critic and art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud geography and cartography are now the most appropriate means of exploring the networks, boundaries and socio-economic formations that constitute and circumscribe human relations in the present day.^[1] The complexities of the contemporary world – those of financial markets, information networks, social relations, etc. – are said to be ‘unfigurable’, opaque and unrepresentable. As noted elsewhere, the means of representing the geographical spaces of everyday life are now more akin to the condition of abstract art in the twentieth century: the map cannot confine itself to some putative physical description, or copy, of the territory, as it must account for the speed, fluidity and ephemerality of contemporary means of transport, communication and media technologies: “Physical description is to geography what anatomy is to sexuality. They no longer suffice to realise the complexities of their ‘domains’”.^[2] Nevertheless, these complexities can still be plotted, surveyed and mapped.

The Filmmaker as Symbiont[1] • ambientTV.NET

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:00:57 +0000

by ambientTV.NET

Filmmakers render aspects of nature, human activity and imagination visible. The documentary film continues to be a potent form in all its variety, from the personal video diary to “objective” fly-on-the-wall shoots, to the hybrid fact/fiction (“faction”) film. But the most prolific documentarists are no longer to be found in film schools and TV stations. In some European and American cities, every street corner is under constant surveillance using recording closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras. Such cameras are typically operated by local government, police, private security firms, large corporations, small businesses and private individuals, and may be automatic or controlled (zoomed and panned) from a remote control room. Filmmakers, and in particular documentarists of all flavours, should reflect on this constant gaze. Why bring in additional cameras, when much private and public urban space is already covered from numerous angles?

The Difference Engine • S.Hunt

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 18:12:50 +0000

by Samantha Hunt

Two Theories, One Train
On a train crossing England in the mid1800s Charles Babbage watched as a common house fly traveled into the future. Bumbling from the rear of the carriage to the front, the fly stopped atop a lady’s floral hat and regurgitated. It is what flies do when they aren’t flying. At that very instant when the creature ceased moving forward, Babbage thought that the moments of time the fly had just flown through, like slices of bread, moments that the fly imagined he had left in the past, slammed into the creature yet a second time as the train gained on London and caught up with the fly’s flight. “Wonderful”, Babbage thought even if it wasn’t entirely correct.