ephemerex

“Larry Miller, a long time fluxus and performance artist made these certificates well in advance of the decoding of the human genome—and good thing, too. In a time when knowledge, concepts, and even our biological identities are being served up to the realm of the commodity, these certificates claim their bearers’ resistance against these dehumanizing and frightening effects of capitalism in overdrive. Designed diploma style, the certificates come in a plastic slipcase in eight different languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Danish, Polish, Japanese. Choose which language for each single certificate you order, or buy the complete set.”

https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/10188/

http://www.onlyonelarrymiller.com/copyright.htm

Sometimes it feels unprecedented, but...

I came across a print out of this article by colleague Randall Packer in the ephemerex. I suppose I printed it out to read it. Remember when....

I thought this was  a succinct paragraph to an event I have never been able to thoughtfully articulate.

But with the new millennium the tides would turn: Natalie Bookchin announced the death of Net.Art, the tech boom was a bust, and both David Ross and Steve Dietz were ousted from their museum jobs for harboring visionary aspirations in an economic downturn. [hyperlinks added]

This isn’t exactly a manifesto, but there is something in the word “permeate” that captures some of the essence of ZeroOne and, more recently, Northern Spark.

There was good art and there was bad art, but everywhere you turned there was art or something like art permeating the physical spaces of downtown San Jose (including the mobile light rail cars and the dome of City Hall), as well as the invisible ether of the airwaves, from bluetooth networks to cellular tours (the latest rage).  [hyperlinks added]

Is this remark ever not applicable?

In Bill Viola's keynote address, he made the prescient remark, "artists are jumping into a train for a high speed ride while they're still laying the tracks ahead."

Randall’s conclusion seems both accurate and optimistic.

Borys Groys, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri, Christiane Paul, Peter Sloterdijk, Slovak Zizek, page from printed program Foro: Internacional De Expertos en Arte Contemporaneo, ARCO, February 2005

Really, what more is there to say? I had been working recently on web-based projects for the Making Things Public exhibition at ZKM with Peter Weibel, Bruno Latour, and Sabine Himmelsbach, and Peter invited me to be on this panel at the ARCO fair in 2005. 

This makes me want to dig up my notes from the panel, but I suspect I read or talked about my project for the exhibition, Fair Assembly, which was “an experiment not just on exhibit but in exhibiting. It is an online fair at a very large scale, which is, as Bruno Latour suggested in early discussions about Making Things Public:”

accessible to all the institutions, activists, teachers, political parties, artists who would have a wish to present, not so much their views on contested topics but the practical mechanisms to try to solve them.

Undoubtedly the ideas behind Fair Assembly will surface in future posts, but what I remember about the panel most is that I was pretty much speechless, especially listening to Zizek expound extemporaneously without seeming to pause or even breathe.

There Must Be an Alternative

Exhibition program, Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria, October 9 - November 28, 2004

I was not involved in this exhibition. I think this program is material that Oliver Ressler sent when Sarah Cook and I were working on the exhibition that became The Art Formerly Known As New Media. TAFKANM will undoubtedly crop up multiple times in ephemerex, but broadly and crudely speaking - sorry Sarah - it was a more formalist show about the unformalist boundaries of so-called new media art.

This show of work by Bernadette Corporation, bureau d’etudes, Etcetera, Aeronout Mik, Ressler, and The Yes Men takes its title from a quote by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “There is no alternative,” and its inspiration from the Anti-Globalization Movement. 

In the age of Trumpism, it will be important to understand and monitor any implementation-in-practice  of his own anti-globalism and critique and resist its racist, mysogynist, islamophopic, nativist appeals.

Californian Ideology

Cover, Wired (14.05), May 2006

I found this climate crisis!-themed Wired in my ephemerex, and my initial reaction was #nothinghaschanged.

I still vividly remember the first time I read Wired magazine. Or at least I remember a visceral reaction to it. I was outside the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. Perhaps there was some kind of Apple conference going on. A young woman was handing out copies of this candy-colored bombshell, and I took one. I was hooked from the opening layout. It was a manifesto.

Interior spread, Wired (1.01) April 1993

“Because the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon - while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button. And because the computer ‘press’ is too busy churning out the latest PCInfoComputingCorporateWorld iteration of its add sales formula cum parts catalog to discuss the meaning or context of social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.”

It was 1993, and I was just launching one of the first dedicated museum-based new media programs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Despite or perhaps because of the hyperbole, Wired felt like an anthem. 

I stopped reading Wired when Conde Nast took over, and the Al Gore issue reminds me why. They layout was hardly distinguishable from Vogue. 7/8 of the issue was printed clickbait screaming New! New! New! like some PCInfoComputingCorporateWorldWired ad copy.

Andy yet, there it was. A Climate Crisis! cover story in 2006. So this was a year before IPCC/Gore received the Nobel Peace Prize but 15 years after the First IPCC Assessment Report and 5 years after the Third. 

Going back and reading the issue, there was definitely an element of deja vu all over again. Opening paragraph of the cover story:

“For decades, environmentalists have warned of a coming climate crisis. Their alarms went unheeded, and last year we reaped an early harvest: a singularly ferocious hurricane season, record snowfall in New England, the worst-ever wildfires in Alaska, arctic glaciers at their lowest ebb in millennia, catastrophic drought in Brazil, devastating floods in India - portents of global warming’s destructive potential.”

I suppose there is some comfort that this is now the oft-repeated lead for even the local broadcast news. But not much. 

And more to the point, the article’s real focus is on the derogation of “tree huggers” represented by resistant organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, and the elevation of technological solutions in particular and capitalism in general to solve climate change. There is nothing in the article to allow one to differentiate between fracking and solar power, for example. And regardless of one’s pov on the importance of the market to mitigate climate change, there is not any hint at a social justice dimension to the Climate Crisis!, global or local.