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SHADOWS HAVE SHADOWS A publication by The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art Propaganda Department — #0002
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YOU ARE HERE
CROSSTOWN STATIC
by Marc — Weidenbaum
Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1925-1926) Welcome. Bear with us for a moment while we explain ourselves. The paper you’re holding emerged from another old-fashioned technology, the mailing list. This one is a 70-odd collection of artists, researchers, academics, musicians, designers, bloggers and friends. The group started as a chat about someone’s record label; like many lists it’s since become a virtual social club, home to a surprising number of illuminating, sprawling and unpredictable conversations. Some of us began wondering about other ways to capture the flow of ideas, something physical, personal. Thoughts turned to zines, then to newspapers. We asked like-minded friends to join in. Happily, in another corner of the forest, Newspaper Club were having similar thoughts. Dots were connected. We also needed a focal point. This was easy: the city. It turned out that we were fascinated by certain aspects of urban places: streetlevel urbanism, cinematic visions of the city, impressionistic analysis and psychogeography, flaneurie, technology, cybercities and the production of everyday life. There are many routes into the city. But we think the following are powerful gateways, worth exploring in depth. Mobile technology is finally starting to deliver us a richer urban experience: augmented streetscapes, buildings with personalities, a potentially hackable city. Fiction and cinema help us intuit the city: each of the eight million stories in the Naked City reveals a little more of New York itself. Soundscapes form alternative geographies, or subtle additional contours to the physical city. Benjamin and his disciples show us the power of wandering, image and imagination: walking the road, we wire the city into ourselves from our own resonant memories. Urban landscapes form a geometry of inner space: signs, codes and prompts we can spend a lifetime deciphering. This paper charts those enthusiasms across a variety of urban spaces. For many of us, the city is London, particularly eastern neighbourhoods and along the river. We’ve also ventured away from the urban core, into suburbia, to the Americas, to fictional cities, cities of sound and cities of the future. Now, walk with us...
SOCIETY FOR HERESIARCHS OF AUTONOMOUS ART
Contributors Jeanne Bonnefoi — page 8 Bill Buzzard — page 7 Suki Chan — page 9 Matt Damon — everywhere Boris Karloff — pages 4/5 Max Headroom — pages 4/5 Paul O’Kane — page 3 Thorsten Sideb0ard — pages 6,10,11 Marc Weidenbaum — page 1
This is how the book opens, the final sentence of its first paragraph, characteristically taut: “It was a matter of silence, not words.” This is how the book ends, its last sentence, no less declarative, yet elliptical to a fault: “He is dead inside the crystal of his watch but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to sound.” The book is Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, poet laureate of American English. It was published in 2003, the second of what is now a series of four short novels, novellas really. This series follows DeLillo’s doorstop, the oversize Underworld (1997), and it’s not difficult to read these four slim volumes as placeholders, deadpan divertimento, side trips on his way to his Next Big Novel. They are, in order of arrival, The Body Artist (2001), which preceded Cosmopolis, then Falling Man (2007), and, published earlier this year, Project Omega. Were DeLillo to continue at this rate, the collected novellas could cumulatively outweigh Underworld. And whereas the four books are not directly related — no central characters, no shared setting — they are not unrelated. All four are readable together as the work of a man wrestling with his profession, his calling. Each book cautiously and categorically observes a different form that might supplant the written word as a mode, as perhaps the preeminent mode, of human communication. Thus, The Body Artist is about performance art. Falling Man is about photography. Project Omega is about film. And as for Cosmopolis, it is about sound. Cosmopolis tells the tale of a very wealthy Manhattan entrepreneur making his way across the city in a bright white limousine, and the book is less a novel than it is a road story. Road stories are catalogs of incident, and while this book is not short on incidents, it accumulates a much larger catalog of sound, the sounds that occur during that trip, a glossary of urban ambient noise and of not-incidental plot-related audio, from that opening silence to the final, resounding “sound” (the final word of the book, and not without authorial intention). DeLillo has stated in the past that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria,” and so here is an initial list, just a handful or two of the numerous incidents in Cosmopolis in which communication is subsumed by, or accomplished wordlessly with, sound. “A cab squeezed in alongside, the driver pressing his horn. This set off a hundred other horns.” “He was having trouble speaking. The words exploded from his face, not loud so much as impulsive, blurted under stress.” “The two men made little snuffling sounds, insipid nasal laughter.”
“The atrium had the tension and suspense of a towering space that requires pious silence in order to be seen.” Characters are “weaving down the avenues, speakers pumping heavy sound.” There is “electric knell of emergency vehicles.” A murder victim is tangled in the cord of a microphone. One woman’s words, her meaning, is telegraphed ahead of time “in the nasal airstream of her vernacular.” That is the cultural hysteria of Cosmopolis. The novel, in DeLillo’s depiction, isn’t dead; it’s moaning — and the moaning may be a sign of death, or it may be a purer form of communication, or it may be a purer form of communication that signals death: “But the word itself was lost in the blowing mist.” Often here sound is significantly more important than is spoken language, so much so that sounds within sounds take on special importance: “He heard the static in her laugh.” And these are not merely matters of microinteraction between individuals. There is one anecdote in which a high-ranking individual making a public statement stops ever so slightly before proceeding, which leads to endless pondering not of what he said, and not of what he didn’t say, but of what the brief, silent moment, the break in language, meant: “They are trying to construe the meaning of the pause. It could be deeper, even, than grammar.” We are warned: “A person rises on a word and falls on a syllable.” This is a novel in which sound is imprinted on place and on object. The story’s main character, its wealthy financial-market figure, has not one but two elevators to his private apartment, each with its own specific soundtrack. “I have two private elevators now,” he explains. “One is programmed to play Satie’s piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I’m in a certain, let’s say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole.” The elevator’s pace matches that of the trip across the city, which is why the novel is as unsettling as it is; the novel slows our pace so we pay attention, and when we pay attention, we listen. Then there is the gun that plays a fulcrum-like role in the story — a gun that requires a voice imprint to function properly. And as if there were any doubt, this is the novel that has as a central set piece a visit to “the last technorave,” which is written out in all caps in the book, marking its centrality. This is DeLillo on how sound at the rave subsumes music much in the manner that outside the rave sound subsumes language: “Music devoured the air around them.” As for those rhetorical koans for which DeLillo is famous, they do appear in Cosmopolis — early on: “The yen rose overnight against expectations” — though with far less frequency
than in the novels that preceded it. Mostly, such verbal clarity fails in the face of sound. This is a book about that failure, about sound, the pressure of sound on the novelist, the suffocating sound, the claustrophobic sound, the sound that blanks out language: the sound that communicates more directly than language and that yet can’t be explained with language, not even the language of someone as accomplished as, say, Don DeLillo. Words are questioned in Cosmopolis directly, words as common as “phone,” and “computer,” and “ambulance.” (DeLillo is happy to propose the occasional word, too, as when someone “prousts” the lining of an automobile, which is to say cork it for silence, which is to say remind us of the cork-lined room in which Marcel Proust wrote, attempting to protect himself, his writing, from the noise of the world.) “It was the tone of some fundamental ache,” DeLillo writes, describing the sound and effect of traffic. “Buses rumbled up the avenue in pairs, hacking and panting.” If our human meaning is, truly, in our sounds, then these buses aren’t merely being anthropomorphized — DeLillo’s is a kind of urban animism, one in which everything resounds, everything communicates. So this is Cosmopolis, a novel that sprawls across a city, crawls across the city, a novel that spends more time listening to that city than observing it through any other of our five (or six) senses. It’s a novel that shortly after opening has a man staring at a blank page, unable to read (“Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his head, the mind in time”), and it ends with a gunshot that is heard more than it is felt. It’s arguably also a book about the financial markets, but that information repeatedly is served up as data, a natural force that is barely comprehensible, certainly not as an economic barometer, only as a power unto itself (“In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process”), another animistic spirit. At one point, the man stalking the novel’s protagonist says of another person he had murdered, “There was a brief sound in his throat that I could spend weeks trying to describe. But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.” When a writer of DeLillo’s stature commits to the page that sort of concern about the limits of language, we must take him at his word.
Marc Weidenbaum (disquiet.com) lives, writes, and edits in San Francisco.
Image by Tim Bartel Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license
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First, a plaster figure, not a Madonna but a gymnast in a cream leotard and a matching mask. The dragon of the city, bronze and still fiery, the Disney-esque law courts, lists and lists of lawyers in the courts and yards, the Old Bank of England in which I don’t belong, all that is new seems only surface, shop-fittings, all the old is substantial, of course, for it has lasted.
can also see in here a pelican ripping blood and flesh from its own breast to feed its young; it is the martyr mother. Missing and forgetting so much, picking out –for some reasons- these events and not every event, not other events. I am drawn up Ludgate Hill admiring again the magnificence of the Cathedral, St Paul’s (which I’ve only begun to do very recently after 26 years of living and walking in London), noting the way Wren planted it on top of a significant hill (hills we barely notice until we start cycling the city) but also on a lovely axis, kicked around at an angle to face West in a way unlike any other building
nast mounted in that high window. Art is so popular - since the opening of Tate modern directly opposite the cathedral - that the bridge is teeming with amateur aesthetes glad to finally know where art is and also what it is all about. They squeeze around the woman in the lilac coat as if she is an island, a rock in their stream. Inspired by her calm devotion to looking, I stop and watch the river too, trying to see perhaps what she sees. There are gulls and garbage flowing out of the city downstream to the estuary and the sea, and I’m reminded that the monochrome, olive brown river is an even greater historical substance than the bronzes and white
IN AND OUT OF THE CITY:
St Paul’s keeps looming, a jaw-dropping enormity in ghostly stone, all the old and grand appears in monochromes of bronze and stone, the new is colourfully weak. Dr Johnson’s house, it’s too expensive to visit today, I must try to spend less every day (an axiom for every Londoner), ‘The Cheshire Cheese’ public house in which Dickens sat and drank and thought and wrote perhaps, aaah! All the extraordinariness that I’ve forgotten …a traffic island, an island in the sea of Ludgate circus …something significant, but, it’s gone … small church interiors - St Clements’ is draped around with morbid RAF flags, deathly, militarily, religious, at the altar a woman with her back turned shows as an incongruously vivid cerise skirt down to which falls a delta of thick black wiry hair. Standing, she talks or prays strangely loudly, and directly to the carved Christ as if he were the man she loved and lost. And as I exit the church’s blown stone skin illuminated with coloured glass, a small brass plaque to the left sings, again incongruously ‘oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clements’ (sung in a child’s voice). Outside, I appreciate another island on which this church huddles amid the rush of cars. Then at St Martin Ludgate’s, a big rambling, bearded man who looks - as they say - ‘homeless’, jams on the grand piano, roughly representing memories of Bach perhaps. Against a back wall, you can find - again incongruously- fake loaves of bread arranged on a special shelf. Apparently this shelf once stood at the door on Sunday and the rich left bread in it for the poor - but the loaves here copy very modern types. You
A WALK FROM ALDWYCH TO MILLENNIUM
BRIDGE VIA ST PAUL’S TUESDAY 17TH OCTOBER 2006 in London, as if to catch every possible drop of the setting sun, as if desperately afraid of the coming of darkness. At dusk, in Spring and summer the face and columns sometimes become a huge cinema screen of white stone on which the orange and pink of failing sunlight plays. Today, a breeze catches around the space cleared by the cathedral and I allow it to blow me around and beyond it to cross the river by Millennium Bridge. Here, a lady stands-out simply by sitting down on her own little portable stool which she has brought today, apparently to be able to watch the river through the bridge’s aluminium bars. She wears a lilac coat which also stands out, perhaps as unfashionable or untimely. Is she mourning? If so why here and now when the bridge is filled with passing people? Has someone - a son perhaps - drowned? Is this a sad anniversary? This is no place for solitude (the bridge leads to Tate Modern, one of London’s leading tourist attractions). Her turned back echoes that woman in St Clements, and also the little plaster gym-
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by — Paul O’Kane
stones that I’d witnessed earlier. I begin to play a kind of ‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’ game in which river-water or sunsets compete for supremacy against bronze and stone and flimsy shop fittings. The river is likely to win, until of course, the sun turns it to stone by evaporating its flow with a breath of fire, the sun is becoming a dragon. But today, the sun is hiding, leaving us grey and chilled. I feel a certain aging in a loss of my younger, constantly allegorical mind which used to burn-off paranoid poetics daily, filling notebooks with inspired images, back when everything seemed to mean too much and seemed to multiply the meaning of everything else until I even made myself sick of meaning, suffering from meaning-sickness. Walter Benjamin died young, though his precociously ripe mind too may have begun to mellow. Today I’m able to reflect on my young self, as if I’m someone else now, as if I’m my own father and mother now looking down at the
youth that I was looking up. Looking up I saw the little plaster figure, of a girl gymnast, like a little madonna but in a cream leotard and incongruously- a matching cream mask. Why would you wear a mask to perform gymnastics? She appeared in a framing window cut deep in old stone and rounded Romanesque - perhaps this frame is what suggested the Madonna. Perhaps she, and not the dragon at all is the real gateway to the city; for me at least, it was she who led me in despite the dragon. Why not? We choose our own entrances, our own gates are moments, and there are more, throughout the city, choices of what we wish to serve as a way. We give the city’s places our own names, make places where there were none, and so, for me, this little plaster gymnast, high in an arched window, becomes the way in to the city today, just past the massive gateway to the high courts of justice (which, I have noticed, glow red like hell at night time). And the exit from the city? Another woman of course, as in Kafka’s stories where women always provide the connections from one event to another, from one space to another. Or as in Nietzsche, who suggested that
truth might be a woman whom male philosophers have chased and seduced in vain. There was one woman, praying somehow profanely in a party-coloured skirt, but she had her back to me so I discount her as the possible exit from the city. So, that other woman then. Yes! The exit from the city lies across the river, but first you must pass through the strangely watching woman in the lilac coat, the one who never crosses herself but merely watches the river’s own journey, in and out of the city like its eternal gurgling breath. The lady with the stool, who liked to stop where everyone was rushing, becoming herself an island, thereby turning everyone else into a river. And perhaps it is wise for me to stop here too, to never pass beyond the woman in the lilac coat, to never leave the city, because, on the South side of the river everything is art, and there our own imagination is stolen from us by our admiration for the imaginations of others.
Paul O’Kane highlights and exploits failed or fading image technologies while celebrating images which, upon being made seem to discover that, though they have arrived their time perhaps has not. His work is not loyal to a particular medium and purposefully blurs its relation to ‘the contemporary’. Working in film, photography and writing he explores time’s impact on the value of the image. While uncomfortable pursuing prescribed rewards or expectations he is fascinated by the tension between the semi-conscious production of images and the self-conscious psychology of the 21st century artist. For this reason he sees the most rewarding way to progress is by looking back, as his work mines a personal archive of latent works and images made over 30 years. He has a keen interest in cities and recently completed a PhD titled ‘A Hesitation Of Things’. Paul O’Kane also teaches in London art schools. www.okpaul.com
All photographs by Paul O’Kane
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2 — J. G. Ballard, author, lived in the same semi-detached house in Shepperton for over fifty years until his death in 2009.
THE SECRET LIFE OF SHEPPERTON 1 — Shepperton is a town in the borough of Spelthorne, Surrey, England. The name is derived from ‘Sheperd’s Town’ and the name of one of the older streets, Sheep Walk, still reflects that origin.
6 — There’s something missing from the world we all inhabit. A world filled with dreams that money can buy. For all its complexity, contemporary society is an artificial construct.
5 — In what little free time he has, local MP David Wilshire (Cons) is a very keen gardener. Probably because of his West Country roots, he is also an amateur cider maker.
Reality is just a stage set that can be moved aside.
10 — Already I had begun to realise that Shepperton had trapped me.
9 — It seemed to me that the whole world outside, the tree and the meadow, the quiet streets with their sedate houses, formed an immense transparent image exposed on the screen of the world, through which rays of a more searching reality were now pouring in an unbroken fountain.
14 — The sky is a gateway to infinite possibilities
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3 — In Ballard’s novel The Unlimited Dream Company, a man named Blake crashes a stolen aircraft into the River Thames outside Shepperton.
4 — An artist should be a bourgeois in his life, a revolutionary in his dreams
8 — I lay in a house of glass, sinking through the endless floors of descending water. Above me was an illuminated vault, an inverted gallery of transparent walls suspended from the surface of the river.
7 — The death of my wife provided me with a renewed impetus to make sense of the arbitrary cruelty of the world.
12 — Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and always has been. At times, it grasps entire nations in its grip and sends them through vast therpeutic spasms. No drug in the world is that powerful.
11 — I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.
13 — I think I’m assembling a kind of mythology for myself
15 — I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chessgames, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.
16 — I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.
With apologies to Patrick Keiller, Chris Marker, Iain Sinclair, Paul Schütze, Wikipedia, Shepperton Village Information Portal, British History Online, The Conservative Party, Hard-Fi and, of course, J.G. Ballard.
Photography by Max Headroom & Boris Karloff
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Space-Time and The Technological Sublime
by Thorsten — Sideb0ard
“Space and time are the fundamental, material dimensions of human life” 1
We tend to think of our relationship with the material world, with geography and time, as something immutable and definite, yet technology has been mediating our interaction and conceptions of space-time since pretty much forever. Beginning with the manufacture of papyrus (Egyptians) and the invention of the alphabet (Greeks), we could extend our thoughts in space and preserve them temporally, it “meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance” 2. The printing press in the fifteenth century, the first technological revolution, allowed the spatial dissemination of knowledge beyond the narrow confines of the rich and ecclesial, and the reprinting of ancient texts allowed ordinary citizens access to the knowledge and thoughts of the past.
In pre-industrial society our experience of space-time was very different, our bodies and minds completely localized, captive to the physical surroundings, where news and interaction of people and events in distant lands was experienced only through oral storytelling, rare correspondence or gruelling travel. Our world revolved around our immediate sense of place, living rhythmically in line with the cycles of nature, from our biological clock to the repetition of the seasons. The industrial revolution then brought a strict regimentation of space-time as society began to organise around the man-made rhythms of manufacturing and production cycles. The dominant
geography of life began to be the urban environment as employment became concentrated in factories and mills across the land, strictly architected to ensure maximum efficiency. Time and space were captured, measured, segmented, and put to work, enforced with the introduction of clock time and the necessity of urban complexity. Modernity brought with it a move from the open spaces of nature to engineered man-made structures, from cyclical time to linear time. Everyday experience for more and more people was now located in the accelerated pace and flow of vastly expanding cities, dense with innovation and industry. The growth of two intertwined industrial technologies in particular, played a large part in the new space-time paradigm: the steam locomotive and the telegraph. By speeding up travel, the locomotive made long distance travel common-place, and broke down our perceptions of distance, expanding our horizons of experience. Time was standardized across Britain for the first time in 1847, brought about by the railways utilizing the telegraph lines laid along the lines, synchronizing station clocks with Greenwich Observatory 3. Communication networks were transformed, both through the emergence of a post-office system relying on the train network, and, due to the telegraph, for the first time in human history the delivery of information did not require the spatial transportation of physical media, which “thus resulted in the uncoupling of space and time, in the sense that spatial distanciation no longer required temporal distanciation” 4. Much of the revolutionary traits and technological potential we associate with the internet - the mass alteration of our spatial and temporal boundaries, global interconnection and the inevitable change in society, began in the late nineteenth century with telegraphy and the birth of telecommunications, the “nervous system of the Empire”.
Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist, provides an elegant and comprehensive framework for viewing the implications of our current transition, for understanding the ways in which the networked technological medium is reshaping our social structure, and in doing so, altering our perceptions of time and space.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, society was again showing tectonic shifts in technological progress: the rapidly expanding field of computer processing was overhauling business, government, education, employment and culture; the Internet connecting these computers in real-time synchronous communication; cheap and expansive airlines flying throughout the world; breakthroughs in genetic engineering and biotechnology. Now we use the Internet daily we think nothing of routinely communicating with people on the other side of the world; geographic distance and time differences have become historical artefacts in a digital world, where we work with people and firms all over the world, consume and interact with news, music and media irrespective of its origin, or rediscover the wealth of the cultural past. Budget and long distance airlines have opened easy and fast access to almost all corners of the earth, ensuring an analogue corollary to digital communication and allowing synergies of physical/digital collaboration and socialising.
something Castells calls ‘Timeless Time’, an effect brought about through several factors, from the time compression effect of near instantaneous speed of transmissions and global transactions, to the de-sequencing of temporality we experience in online hypertext activities, where we can retrieve or refer to any information from the past, read material out of sequence based on personal taste, join in message board conversations that have been carried on for years, or listen to the very first recorded conversation. (Added to these digital perceptions, he also notes the increasing blur between the private space-time of home and our working life, and indeed, science’s extension of biological time such as longer life expectancies, and advanced fertility treatments). With the prevalence of laptops, wi-fi, and now increasingly smart-phones, we are entering the space of flows more frequently, unhindered by our geographic surroundings (within reason). The more time we spent in the space of flows the more our lived experience of space-time is affected, and the less importance we place upon them, seeing them as more fluid concepts/experiences.
A central theme to Castells’ ‘Network Society’ is the emergent social forms of time and space, which co-exist with currently existing forms. By this, Castells means that much contemporary activity, be it cultural, political or economic, now takes place within this digital flow, existing neither geographically nor temporally. We are placing more and more importance on a mediated reality with no basis in the physical world, yet where the events happening within the digitized network, ‘The Space Of Flows’ have an effect on the physical world, ‘The Space Of Places’. The geography of The Space Of Flows is flat; distance is irrelevant between nodes on the network. Time has become relational rather than absolute,
The Space Of Flows is merging with The Space Of Places. Smart-phone usage is the first step in what I believe will be a complete revolution in our relationship with our physical surroundings. With smart phones no longer are we lost in a new city, finding easy mobile access to abundant cultural listings, happenings, reviews, pictures; all with rich meta-information, geo-tagged and organised by proximity and user-reviews. No more writing notes or printing maps before we leave for a destination: simply open Google Maps when we arrive. And these aren’t simply digitized facsimiles of existing information either; these are ‘ultramaps’, truly interactive, maps that know where we are. “This one development subtly but decisively removes the locative artifacts we use from the order of abstraction. By finding ourselves situated on the plane of a given map, we’re being presented with the implication that this document is less a diagram and more a direct representation of reality — and, what’s more, one with a certain degree of fidelity, one that can be verified empirically by the simple act of walking around. How is that not epochal?” 5 Added to this ultramap, is the personalised ambient-information we subscribe to - Twitter feeds, RSS news, Flickr uploads, scrobbling, Foursquare, Facebook updates - all increasingly being geotagged and updating our spatial awareness of the activity of friends and events, our online presence affecting real world flows of activity. The next step in this evolution seems to invariably point to a more immersive experience than a handheld device. Already there are many firms at work on augmented reality mounted headsets, whether goggles, glasses or contacts, and somewhat inevitably if you believe science-fiction, leading towards implants. A Shoreditch based company called Inition manufacture ‘Trivisio AR-vision Goggles/HMD’ which features a list of commercial applications such as “visualising in 3D new designs (cars, buildings, boats etc), augmented video see-through holograms, paleontology, reconstruction of ancient ruins and monuments, design and visualisation of architectural projects.” 6 Paleontology? Reconstruction of ancient ruins? It’s straight out of Wiliam Gibson’s 2007 novel ‘Spook Country’ which begins with an AR locational recreation of a dead River Phoenix lying outside the Viper Room in LA. The gaming world and the military are also heavily pushing the uses of AR goggles, with Google’s Android operating system in particular seeing heavy usage, such as in a head mounted unit used by the Marine mechanics backed by a wrist mounted G1 phone, which “replaces technical manuals on a bulky laptop with floating instructions, labels and oh yes, 3D models of tools right in front of the mechanic.” 7 Search youtube for ‘augmented reality goggles’ and you’ll find loads of examples.
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ALONG ANY RIVER
The next step in this evolution seems to invariably point to a more immersive experience than a handheld device
With all the commercial development of AR already going on, how long till we start seeing consumer versions, Apple branded Ray-Ban’s, or optical headsets from any of the leading phone manufacturers? How long till we can start experiencing a new form of geographic and temporal information interpolation, such as in Charles Stross’ ‘Halting State’, where the lead character Jack Reed’s goggles allow him to see/know that his bus is still 5 minutes away over several hills? Lost your keys or misplaced something? Search through your recent history to see exactly where you left them. Bored of the same old walk home? Switch on a graphical overlay and walk home through a CGI Victorian recreation of your street, or perhaps a graphical merge of sunset over a city on the other side of the world. With such rich Flows/ Spaces integration, teleconferencing would no longer be this narrow two dimensional exchange locked to a screen: what you would experience wearing AR goggles would combine the spaces you see around you with an almost indistinguishable mixed feed of video and processing, except for touch – virtual meetings and/or simply visiting friends could become so easy as to become completely normalised. I’m in no way advocating a replacement of the real world, rather the opposite, the potentials of virtual geography and information mediating the physicality of our everyday existence completely changes our experience of the world, leading to all sorts of new possibilities. Fanciful as this may sound, the essential components already exist, and the tempo of our society’s technological adoption and integration seem to being following Moore’s Law as much as the speed of technological progress does. From looking at the vast potentials ahead, it seems the changes we have witnessed so far are only the beginning. Until now the boundaries between the geography of physical and virtual spaces have been narrow and closed
specific, however with the progressive integration of this virtual network to all aspects of society, and the evolution of our interface to this space through augmented reality, the Space of Flows begins to look exceedingly inseparable from The Space Of Places, blurring all our previously held notions of space and time.
REFERENCES 1: Castells, 1996 (http://amzn.to/djumha) 2: McLuhan, 1964 (http://amzn.to/8ZGHh8) 3: Black and Macraild, 2003 (http://amzn.to/d28T3E) 4: Thompson, 1995 (http://amzn.to/bHM5EV) 5: Greenfield, 2010 (http://bit.ly/bEcbl9) 6: Inition Trivisio AR-vision Goggles (http://bit.ly/bRQ1uU) 7: Buchanan, 2009 (http://bit.ly/9b9hI)
Thorsten Sideb0ard lives, writes and reads in Hackney, London.
Illustrations by Thorsten Sideb0ard
I set off on a walk. Having recently bought a map, I ventured to explore its contents. As I left the centre of the town I began to notice how warm it was. I took off my jumper, put it in my bag, and then re-checked the map. I was heading for a very small village along the River Taw, one of the half-sibling waterways that are re-united in the estuary, a mile or three from the sea. The Torridge has travelled from land due south west, whilst this river was born due east. Perhaps their father wasn’t that bothered about distancing his two progenies when he moved on to new climbs. Got his leg over the adjacent undulated landmass and thus began their story together. The metaphoric function of this brief tale is obviously ill conceived, but I thought it might help illustrate the difficulty in writing about what essentially seems like an empty landscape. Empty in the sense that it doesn’t have any stories to tell without first knowing the local history, and I’m new here. Everything that isn’t connotatively abject, or natural postcard pornography, is quickly gobbled up by its affiliation with somewhere other. I follow the river for a while, sometimes pretending that I am sloping through a rural idyll in France, sometimes accepting the far more familiar reality. The long row of trees, poplar aside willow, on the opposite bank reminds me of a painting that my Nan and Grandpa had in their house. It had pride of place in their dining room. I always assumed that it was by a French artist, perhaps only because the scenery held elements of the topography I had encountered on a school trip to Arras, in north east France. We travelled around in a minibus with a history teacher and a patriotic technology teacher, visiting the war memorials and battlefields of World War One. The intermediate time was spent driving on long roads, surrounded by flat earth and green expanses that were scribbled over with ditches. The imagined place that this painting conceived, was later augmented with multiple car wrecks and populated by debased gangs of cannibals thanks to Jean Luc Godard’s movie, ‘Weekend’. Perhaps the view in front of me, as I stand next to the bank of the River Taw, is the soundless acousmatic zone to that flattened spectacle, occurring just possibly, beyond the line of trees before me. If this mental scenery were required for an establishing shot I imagine it could easily be replicated by a cut-out diorama of card and felt, slid together, with Subbuteo figures acting out the endeavours of farm hands and leisure centre enthusiasts. Beyond the trees, I discover,
by Bill — Buzzard
is in fact the local swimming pool. Perhaps inside there are scenes of squash partners engorging on one another’s flesh; swimmers discoursing in fluent French, making witty asides and smoking thin cigars at the poolside, tapping ash into the overflow. Subtitles are projected onto the matted walkways so that the lifeguards resting upon their vantage points can understand the foreign dialogue. Still, as I stand watching a seagull landing on the muddy flats, this scene and its re-imagining inside my brain are unsurprisingly, entirely apart. The landscape remains physically the same and the rest is a series of thoughts triggered by segments of magnified geography. If the thoughts are written down, as they are now, their sum will be a re-engineered representation. Then again, the difference between the well acquainted and the invented is not so wide. More of a stream’s width than a river’s. All seemingly well-chartered scenery is made up of more inventions, some more entrenched and less transparent than others. I continue walking on in the same manner. There is nothing to engage with in the ways I have let become habitual. Nothing to impress or appease. There is nothing obvious to create or make to then be filed or recorded. I assume in a crude fashion that the overall exercise is akin to surrogacy. Time spent with no lasting product. The frustration doesn’t really lie in the manufacture. Transposing foreign fields into my visual plain, an empty bridge metamorphosed into a ‘bridge too far’. The problem is that it is all fleetingly pleasing, and the most enjoyable misperceptions do not last long enough to be re-experienced or shared. I am quite pleased though as I stand atop the hill outside the village. The fresh air is nice and I am getting some good exercise. Perhaps next time I will walk to Germany.
Bill Buzzard exists somewhere in England, to be found only when he wishes.
8 SHADOWS HAVE SHADOWS
The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art
CARACAS UNDISCOVERED “Cities & Signs 1 However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it”. 1
To enter into an unknown city is to attempt to grasp the continually shifting and transient nature of the meaning of urban spatial relations. A Londoner, I lived in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital city for six months. Talking about them now, drawing upon memory, is an act akin to reassembling Benjamin’s splinters of messianic time, which I can but attempt to render ‘recognisable, like shards, as fragments of a vessel, fragments of a larger landscape’ 2. These glimpses of the city, I think, can grasp aspects of urban life that other, ‘official’ readings of the city may not …
Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) Declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 2000, ‘an outstanding example of the coherent realization of the urban, architectural, and artistic ideals of the early 20th century,’ the UCV campus in the west of Caracas is set apart from the rest of the city, a self-governed city within a city, and supposedly apolitical safe haven of thought. There are guards at the road entrance, checking cars that enter, but individuals can infiltrate the campus with ease from the French-designed metro. On weekend visits I found a quiet place, free from the cacophony of smells, sounds and dusty textures of my neighbourhood, with only small groups of people exercising, reading, dancing or napping amongst the scattering of concrete buildings, countless palm trees or dappled passageways (fig. 1). The campus is very closely monitored, as UCV’s historical role as a hotbed of student-led opposition movements continues, and has been prey to controversial attacks from Chávez supporters in recent years (figs. 2 and 3). While Carlos Raúl Villanueva’s architectural design is venerated internationally, the buildings themselves are visibly deteriorating, with the undulating concrete verandas oozing and crystallising green liquids. While the TV news reported firecrackers sent into political meetings and violent conflict between police and students, on the weekend the UCV was a privileged site of solitude and reflection in the city, where I could walk down shaded patterned corridors, marvel at the interweaving of the tropical and the concrete (fig. 4), cool myself against a Hans Arp sculpture and go home with a pirate copy of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. At once a site of high-culture, mass-culture, political activism and aesthetics of an alternative modernity 3 the UCV is deeply embedded in local traditions of knowledge production and dissemination, and nationally symbolises both the best university, and a site of middleclass opposition. Whereas the Haussmanisation of Avenida Central was lambasted for its ambivalence between monumentality and modernity and failure to solve traffic problems despite being a “modern road” 4, the UCV isn’t derided as a failed mimic; its function as a hive of intellectual activity and genealogy as a site of political activism remains intact.
Parque Central, san Agustín and the Metro Cable The 225 metre tall Parque Central towers were the tallest buildings in Latin America until 2003, when Mexico’s Torre Mayor eclipsed Caracas’ triumphant symbol of economic virility, at 230 metres. Surrounding them are five thin slabs of fume-streaked concrete housing (fig. 5). I first visited the labyrinthine ground level of shops during a signage trail across the city (fig. 6) and with a friend went to the
top floor; only possible as we pretended to the lift’s security guard that we lived there. From that height, you can see the top of San Agustín (fig. 7), a barrio I’d been to several times to document a project my office was working on, and Metro Cable, a 5-station gondola system connecting San Agustín residents to the metro line at Parque Central. From the San Agustín station at the top (fig. 8), I could look back down into the top floor of Parque Central. Both are privileged positions that I could never have briefly inhabited without permission, and sites whose imaginary relationship has become a literal inscription of the threads in Calvino’s Ersilia, which are stretched from the corners of houses, to ‘establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life’ 5. Metro Cable is a government-funded project, a simulacrum of socially-oriented design, simulating Medellín’s cable car system, yet lacking the libraries or indeed any other social function that has enriched the Colombian case. While Metro Cable has been uncritically reproduced in countless global architecture magazines as a fetishised example of selfless, participatory arquitectura buhonera (street vendor architecture) the project’s meaning for San Agustín residents is slippery to grasp, perhaps because those magazines haven’t deigned to ask them. Along with many Caraqueños, I was doubtful that it would even be finished, with the government erratically pausing the payments of the construction workers for unbound periods of time. Some claimed the project to be yet another a signifier of the Chávez administration’s ineptitude in connecting rhetoric and reality. The gondolas going up and down the hill loudly proclaim “AMOR” or “Bolívar” on the sides of the carriages – Austrian technology relocated from the Alps to the barrio (fig. 9). Undeniably bound up in the language of Bolívarianismo and Chávismo, this is a revolutionised transport system (fig. 10). However, there seem to be no plans to replicate the Metro Cable in other notoriously disconnected areas, such as Petare, which competes for largest “slum” in Latin America. I am left wondering whether the future will see these threads of infrastructure examined as abandoned relics, ‘spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form,’ 6 and for how long the saturated bird’s eye view images taken by a famous photographer will continue to win architecture awards in Europe.
Sabana Grande This long boulevard, which stretches from Plaza Venezuela to Chacaito, is popularly imagined as marking the boundary between poorer West and rich East, and is the ‘area, geographical and imaginary, where many young people live out their youths,’ 7. At weekends I would “tour” the boulevard with the crowds: observing pavement-merchants, the typology of malls and signage, to a soundtrack of incessant ice cream cart bells and the current Daddy Yankee hit blaring out from every possible speaker. The smell of litter, car fumes and cooking meat, the heat bearing down and children chasing blown bubbles was a multisensorality of ineffable symbols 8. The boulevard is a highly contested, politicised territory, where I had to remember to carry my photocopied passport or risk a bribing encounter with one of the three overlapping police forces. It bears the stamp of both Chávez and the opposition, where the smell of tear gas lingered after weekly protests against the enmienda, and processions of brand new 4x4s parading Chávez flags provided an equally aggressive performance. Sí and NO ES NO graffiti is rhythmically applied to walls, signs which become internalised and interchangeable. Even the face of Chávez is unavoidable, and there promotional tattoos, should you wish his mark literally made on your body.
— by Jeanne Bonnefoi 1
Restricted public space Caraqueños have mapped fear onto public space, informing me of social boundaries that couldn’t be crossed 9; secuestro express, rape and robbery. Márquez traces such self-imposed restriction to El Caracazo, an 1989 uprising whereby ‘the dangerous areas of the urban imaginary were no longer confined to the barrios … urban topography becomes a single “bad area” where nothing and nobody appears safe’ 10. An historical discourse of violence seems to have become a naturalised myth for popular consumption. This unresolved tension between bodies and imaginings, restricted geographies and ambiguous ‘true’ reality 11 is reflected in the work of Jefferson Quintana Cabrena, an artist who documents the world from his window ‘cause it’s the only place where I feel really safe, to look at Caracas from afar, just a spectator, not interacting’ (interview, 2010). His artwork graphically illustrates the grids on the doors of his apartment block and is annotated with anecdotes regarding the limited interaction he has with his neighbours. It is reminiscent of Perec’s Life, a User’s Manual, except that there is no alternative cartography of the city: mapping simply stops at the entrance to the apartment block 12.
Leaving Caracas Situating my encounters as one of many ‘diversity of universals’ 13 and recognising the limitations of a personal account is a necessity. I left the city with a reinforced understanding and respect of the impenetrability of Caracas; meanings are continually in a state of flux, and obscured. However, this personal performance does enable the contestation of dominant representations of urban imaginaries, and thus allows for a plurality of urban narratives. Indeed, the signifieds of urban encounters are ‘like mythical creatures, extremely imprecise, and at a certain point they always become the signifiers of something else,’ 14 and only a multiplicity of positions could ever hope to capture them.
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REFERENCES 1: Calvino, 1971 (http://amzn.to/csKy3l) 2: Wohlfarth, 2005 in Osborne (ed) (http://amzn.to/aCxKVB) 3: Huyssen, 2003 (http://bit.ly/d9rpG0) 4: Almandoz, 1999 (http://bit.ly/d1sWBt) 5: Calvino, 1971 (http://amzn.to/csKy3l) 6: Calvino, 1971 (http://amzn.to/csKy3l) 7: Márquez, 1999 (http://amzn.to/caTqWG) 8: Howes, 2003 (http://amzn.to/cD12C0) 9: Caldeira, 2000 (http://amzn.to/anGRYs) 10: Márquez, 1999 (http://amzn.to/caTqWG) 11: Keith, 2009 (http://bit.ly/clvBuH) 12: Perec, 1978 (http://amzn.to/bVd1OQ) 13: Nuttall and Mbembe, 2005 (http://bit.ly/bfhPOI) 14: Barthes, 1969, in Storey (ed) 2005 (http://amzn.to/aNnb2K)
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9 Jeanne Bonnefoi lives, breathes, studies and writes in London
Images by Jeanne Bonnefoi
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9 SHADOWS HAVE SHADOWS
The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art
Suki Chan:
SLEEP WALK, SLEEp TALK
‘Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk’ came about from a feeling I often have as I walk through the city. Although on one level I might be venturing somewhere new, exploring the city on foot, I often feel that my every step has already been anticipated. On a personal level, I feel I can go anywhere I want to in London; but there’s always this feeling that something governs or directs my movements. On a micro-level. it feels like there is freedom but on a macro-level, when you zoom out, there is order, pattern and systems which sometimes are repetitive, restrictive and predictable.
Bode
Chan
The piece instinctively references films like Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi where you see the pulses and flows of people as they move across the road. When you look at large cities with large populations, and you observe them from a distance, people look like atoms, there’s an incredible order in the way they congregate, move and flow. I was interested in looking at what drives people to certain places. Why is it that they walk down a certain side of the road when the other side is totally clear? What are the motivating factors that direct people spatially and temporally? It’s interesting you mention Koyaanisqatsi, and the way its use of timelapse footage shows the city in a very different light. Sometimes when you speed things up, or slow them down, it reveals a more organic process in which order appears out of chaos. I’m intrigued also about the twofold nature of your title, ‘Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk’, and the interplay between those two elements. Tell me a bit more about that. Bode
At the time I was looking at surveillance cameras. The UK has the largest number of surveillance cameras of anywhere in the world. There’s a lot of discussion about whether we feel safer with them or without them. Richard Thomas, the information commissioner warned that ‘we are in danger of sleepwalking into a surveillance society’. I was interested in this idea of not being aware or in control, where your brain isn’t actively engaged in physical action and also of sleepwalking through life. How awake are we? When we’re meant to be awake, are we actually sleepwalking? I was questioning what is reality. There is a quote from a Chinese philosopher, called Zhuang Zi, who had a dream one night that he was a butterfly. In the dream he was happy and was not aware that Chan
Superficially, it seems to carry an echo of the imaginative remapping of the city proposed by the Situationists. But it’s true that as soon as you get a large group of people participating in an activity it presupposes a need for planning and consensus. There is a constant modulation and negotiation at work that lets people both enjoy their freedom and not have their freedom trespassed upon … That seems to me a microcosm of how we rub along in the city: one person’s freedom may be an intrusion on someone else’s, and needs to take that into account. Freedom isn’t a fixed and transcendent commodity; it’s a series of exchanges.
—interview by Steven Bode
he was a man. When he woke he didn’t know if he was then a human dreaming he was a butterfly or now a butterfly dreaming he is human. I became interested in the intermediate states between sleeping and waking and to explore the distinctions between them. This led me to consider meditation and other states of consciousness. Often, our experience of a city turns us into quite passive receivers of information; or we can become so overloaded with sights and sensations that we switch off. Living in a city can free our minds, can stimulate us creatively, and bring a heightened state of receptivity, but it can also overwhelm us and inhibit us. It’s noticeable, in your piece, that the passive, hazy quality of sleepwalking shifts towards something more like a state of trance – a more active, heightened perception. In a way, it’s another kind of ‘pull-back’, in which the camera lens pans out and lends a different perspective to the object; a moment of reflection. There is an echo of this in the work in the example of people who meditate, who we see towards the end of the piece. But there are other examples of people whose relationship to the city around them is characterised by a similar kind of drift between different states of engagement. Can you talk about the other people that are featured in the work? Bode
The most active group are the skaters as they’re physically asserting their presence in the streets that are normally dominated by traffic; they take over the space. They actually do it in total cooperation with the police – it’s a highly organised phenomenon, it’s highly regulated. There are certain rules: you have to keep within the front and end marshals and meet at a particular time and place. The skaters seem to be exercising their individual freedom of expression but what they’re doing is in fact very controlled.
I think by joining the group and by conforming to its rules of conduct the individual gets lost. Temporarily, they give over their individuality in exchange for group cohesion. As you watch them skate you can sense their exhilaration – of achieving something greater beyond that of any one single individual. What’s interesting is that they gain this by submitting their individuality to a larger collective. I was drawn to the skaters because of this swarming, something that was important in my earlier work, ‘Interval II’ – the enigmatic murmerations of the starlings over a Victorian pier. Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of difference and repetition offer an interesting frame of reference, in particular the notion of ‘swarms of difference’ where plurality becomes a unity in space and time. Chan
Chan
In addition to the skaters, who appear at regular intervals in ‘Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk’, we get lots of glimpses of people going about their everyday lives – people on buses and on tubes; lost to the world, switched off, dozing even. This is the ‘sleep walk’ that we talked about, in which people are revealed to be very much creatures of habit or routine. I’m interested in ‘sleep talk’. ‘Sleeptalking’ isn’t a phrase we use very often. How are you articulating this in your work? Bode
‘Sleeptalking’ for me is a form of expression that implies getting closer towards the truth: the individual muttering something that in normal everyday life is suppressed; evading some process of self-censorship that happens when we’re awake. A bit like when, in a state of hypnosis, one blurts out something that is a truer expression of what he or she really feels. Chan
This is an extract from an interview by Steven Bode, director of Film and Video Umbrella, originally published in the A Foundation newsletter, 2009.
Suki Chan combines light, moving image, electronics and sound within mixed-media installations to explore our physical and psychological experience of space. Using simple, repetitive and sometimes painstaking processes, abstracting familiar materials and objects, creating imaginary and uncanny narratives. Chan explores boundaries between private and public space and the relationship between an individual to the collective. A grain of rice, a house and a bird are recurring motifs and subject matter in the work. Working at several scales, from micro to macro, Chan’s installations are loaded with symbolic references to time and place, questioning the nature of our inhabitation in the world. www.sukichan.co.uk
All film stills on this page taken from ‘Sleep Walk, Sleep Talk’ and ‘Interval II’
10 SHADOWS HAVE SHADOWS
The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art
The City As Palimpsest — by Thorsten Sideb0ard
11 SHADOWS HAVE SHADOWS
The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art
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.murmer, 12k, 147, 1977, 2046, 2600, 3009 Harrison, 51° 50’ 76” N — 0° 00’ 84” E, :Node, :zoviet*france:, AAA, Adam Curtis, Adam SHADOWS HAVE SHADOWS The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art
Thorpe, Adbusters, Agnes Martin, Akira Kurosawa, Akira Rabelais, Alan Moore, Albert Camus, Alfred Marshall, Allen Scott, Andre Carol, Andreas Gefeller, Andreas Gursky, Andrei Tarkovsky, Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Warhol, Anish Kapoor, Anna Kavan, Archigram, Armando Iannucci, Armistead Maupin, Artangel, Bad Wisdom, Bangkok, Barbara Hepworth, Beastie Boys, Ben Roberts, Berney Arms, Bertrand Russell, Bill Drummond, Black And White Photos Of The Sea, Blue Note, Boards Of Canada, Boris Karloff, Boyle Family, Brian Eno, Bridget Riley, Bruce Chatwin, Bruce Sterling, Buckminster Fuller, Carcass, Carsten Nicolai ,CCRU, Charles Bukowski, Charles Burnett, Charles Stross, Chemikal Underground, Chris Corsano, Chris Douglas, Chris Marker, Chris Morris, Chris Mowatt, Chris Ofili, Chris Watson, Chris Wilson, Christian Marclay, Cinema 051, City of Sound, Club Moustachio, Clyfford Still, Constantin Brancusi, Cormac McCarthy, Culture Machine, Damien Hirst, Dan Flavin, Dan Holdsworth, Dan Shahin, Daniel Kahnemann, David Cronenberg, David Farmer, David Harvey, David Lynch, David Mitchell, David Simon, David Toop, Delia Derbyshire, Dia:Beacon, Digital Hardcore, Duel, Disengage, Disinformation, Don Delillo, Donald Judd, Doreen Massey, Dryden Goodwin, Dudley Dexter Watkins, Ed Brubaker, EFF, Elaine Blythe, Elba Horta, Electric Chair, Eliane Radigue, Erik Satie, Espacio, Experimental Audio Research, EXTRA, FACT, Farley Jackmaster Funk, FatCat, Fischli & Weiss, Fisk Industries, Florian Hecker, Flying Saucer Attack, FM3, Foucault, Francis Alÿs, Francis Bacon, Fulsom Street and Furgina, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gail Collette and Greg, Gal Costa, Gary Kurtz, General Magic, Georg Simmel, George Chen, George Lucas, Gerhard Richter, Gordon Hamilton, Grant Morrison, Groucho Marx, Guy Debord, Hammer House Of Horror, Heath Robinson, Henri Lefebvre, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Goldwire, Hermann Hesse, Highpoint Lowlife, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Homeland Security, Howard Hodgkin, Iain Sinclair, Irwin Kershner, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Italo Calvino, Ivor Cutler, J.G. 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MANIFESTO Confronted with the information-overload of an ideologically tainted world of art, music and culture, we, the members of the sfhaa, have decided to fight back against the interpassivity forced upon us by the media. What was counter-culture is now mainstream and what was mainstream is now hyperstream. What was art is now art-vaudeville; institution art-amusement. By intercepting, reinterpreting and appropriating content for our own agendas, we aim to take back the frontline of sociocultural production for our own enjoyment. The society will establish unprofessional, decommercialised, non-commodified, disposable, self-sufficient ideas, projects and works of free thought and creativity. We wish to channel a vein which runs deeper beneath that facade: an underground societal movement,
ALL TEXT AND IMAGES © 2010 THE AUTHORS EXCEPT WHERE STATED
progressive, esoteric. An alternative history. The Society For Heresiarchs Of Autonomous Art functions as a collective which enables and encourages the realisation of members’ artistic visions, be they grand installations, late-night scribblings, or simply the enjoyment of a comic-book. It is a place for attentive reception of works discussed, considered, planned and/or created. The definition of those projects shall be anything considered worthy of consideration by the artists themselves. Creativity, artistic practice and an open mind can forge paths.
THE SOCIETY FOR HERESIARCHS OF AUTONOMOUS ART email: karloff@sfhaa.org
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