While I’ll admit that the proliferation of xtranormal’s animation platforms and templates are reaching epidemic proportions, I still find myself shocked at times by the stories these creatures end up tale-ing. In this one, assembled by a dear friend in Seattle, I am arrested not only by the utterly chilling dialogue exchanged between the two critters, but by the fact that I happen to know this story to be true. This version represents the <4-minute take on a specific incident of stunning neglect and apathy, and is a virtuoso condensing of that event, which I discovered in a re-telling that unfolded over the better part of an afternoon.

My own imagined versions of the event are variegated and have since played over and over again in my head, re-running each time via any number of fathomable courses, angles, and aspect ratios. While these private, personal screenings are multiple and repeat, each showing is distinct, offering up a nuance here and an overlooked detail there for chewing and stewing on in quiet contemplation. Despite all this versioning, however, common points are forming around the spaces where these visions are tallied and entered into my ledger book of memories.

Besides a preliminary horror, response to the story, for me anyhow, quickly moves from feeling dumbfounded to feeling a sense of déjà vu. Could we anticipate such a pedestrian and predictable slogan as…Behind every good tragedy, there is a sturdy apathy? Sure. Of course. But this apathy is just but one small piece belonging to a massive constellation of dark matter. Perhaps that call makes a categorical judgment I’ll regret later, but what I am trying to get at is that collectives of people, whether they are members of a co-op or members of society, can be a dangerous assortment, especially when voluntarily generating and accepting a state of constant deferral, which presumes that something will be taken care of by someone sometime in the future somewhere.  I am reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s epitaph in Rouen: “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent” or “Besides, it’s always other people who die.” It takes on a whole new significance for me now.

The possibility and opportunity of the collective, which can be a positive, empowering social formation, can turn very easily into the negligence and apathy of a passive horde, which does not exteriorize its power much like a fire wielding mob might, but internalizes its lack of power by behaving like a timid, bullied schoolboy quivering in a lonely corner, which makes no sense at all since we occupy that corner together as if alone.  Well, I suspect that we feel alone in any case. Some of the thoughts I have here went into a piece I did last year called Structure of Relief. I don’t know if it explores these ideas enough, but certainly it attempts to address some of these concerns. It was very directly inspired by a project by Althea Thauberger called Carrall Street, which, among other things, effectively confronted the local arts community with the paralysis of our own positions, especially around issues of gentrification in one of the most highly contested neighborhoods in Vancouver in the lead up to the 2010 Olympic Games. I actually discuss the project in more detail in Joseph del Pesco’s Anecdote Archive.

The animation revives a long standing series of questions I have about the role of autonomy and responsibility in our individual and collective life worlds. I am not sure whatsoever about what those roles should be, and do not want to act as some sort of authority by posing these questions, but it certainly strikes me that when one literally smells the growing stench of putrefying flesh and chooses not to deal with it, then where are we, and where can we go from there?

I don’t know, but I will borrow some words of wisdom from Avalanche magazine’s Spring 1972 issue. It comes from an ad for a Steve Reich project at Galleria Sperone, Torino. It reads:

IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING

ART IS STILL

A REAL MYSTERIOUS COMFORTING

HARD DREAM

I hope so.

Carrall Street. Image courtesy of Althea Thauberger.

Way back in May, we stumbled upon the grand, public opening of Vancouver’s Olympic Village (redubbed Millennium Water) built to house athletes and officials during the 2010 Winter Games. There, masses lined up at a few small apertures in the “village’s” perimeter fence, its uniformed private security guards holding positions throughout the development’s grounds.  The price of entry was a brochure with an attached and schlocky 2010 Games pin, which the folks at Millennium dressed in a suspiciously artsy “limited edition” label. The brochure and line-ups set up a kind of a “celebratory” preamble to what was an unusual and rather telling event symbolizing the festivalization of architecture.

Inside, a number of canopied and manned booths were visible, lining a main plaza space that aped a public square, whose centre had a makeshift bandstand to present live music performed by the city’s Fire Department band. The booths’ occupants were a motley lot unified under the eerie umbrella term “community marketplace.” Consisting of city departments, utility companies (BC Hydro), a national drug store chain (London Drugs), a local gourmet grocery (Urban Fare), national bank (Canada Trust), newspaper (Vancouver Sun) and broadcast media (CKNW radio) outlets, high end athletic gear retailers, ecotour companies (Ziptrek), and Starbucks and McDonald’s, among others, the booths showcased existing and specific organizations, but in reality represented a more generic trend, namely strategic public/private partnerships set up between government, finance, retail, media, and other industries to build, communicate, and circulate consensus values.

Besides music and food, balloons, Olympic medals, and prizes (including a “prizehome”) were available, contributing further to a festival atmosphere. Apparently, over the course of the day more than 12,000 visitors circulated through the development many of whom stood waiting sometimes over an hour to see the condo suites on display. Billed both as a waterfront condo community and Vancouver’s last waterfront property, it was striking to see how marketing for this development extended beyond this contradictory sales lingo and into strategies of spatialization and festivalization, as well as “sustainability” discourse.

For instance, the central plaza, masked as public space in this festival, gave the appearance of a friendly and accessible zone, where one’s civic and consumer needs and desires might be met and perhaps even exceeded. In this zone, one could imagine music providing the soundtrack to gourmet afternoon picnics taken in artfully landscaped patches of native flora. Close by public art, park benches, and, the waterfront might allow for the experience to coalesce into a short-term serenity.  Moreover, residents of the development might feel further at ease because “sustainable” building practices were used to construct their homes.

I am not at all opposed to green building and personally support methods of reducing waste and energy in construction and other processes, but it is revealing that the development’s architectural designs were not marketed at the grand opening so much as its other features, including its sustainability practices, Olympic heritage, so-called last waterfront property, and, of course, its “community” and “marketplace.”  I am, thanks to a rather profound article by Jeff Derksen for Fillip 12, extremely suspicious of the term sustainability and ask what it can possibly mean if it does not take into account social equality as a pre-requisite for sustainability? How can we be sustainable if our society is built upon inequalities?  For whom are we sustainable? Given that Vancouver has a notorious and visible homeless population, the exclusionary basis of this development and the celebration of its exclusivity is troubling at minimum. The fact is is that a perimeter fence kept people out of simply walking into the village grounds and the purchase price of housing in this development will continue to keep people from getting in. By way of example, starting sales prices for 600 sq. ft. condos were $595 k while the larger units ranged from $1 to $4 million.

In this sense, the title of this post is a bit off because the grand opening was not a festivalization of architecture per se, but rather a festivalization of real estate. This is not to say that the architecture here is irrelevant. And, there might be a building or two within the development that is interesting on a design level, but the entire project as a whole privileges real estate over architecture and as such can never make the site itself more than property, a cladding of concrete, glass, and other materials formed around a hollow centre. While the buildings attempt to break away from the monotony of the blue-green glass skyline that dominates Vancouver’s tourist literature, the “architectural diversity” here feels forced, thin, and synthetic. It is a simulation of vitality and organic urbanism, the kind that makes a place feel metropolitan or cosmopolitan. Alain de Botton has, I think, lodged one of the most succint and insightful criticisms against Vancouver’s architecturescape, calling it a “plague of condos.”

In thinking about my experience at the Olympic Village grand opening, I was reminded of Streamside Day Follies a work by Pierre Huyghe from 2003. Here is a description taken from the Dia website:

After opening with scenes from an Edenic landscape, Huyghe’s film traces the formation of a burgeoning community hypothetically located in the Hudson Valley. A young family is seen relocating to the new housing development. The first of two sections limns a mythic kernel that is then instantiated in scenes from a typical inaugural celebration devised to forge communal identity. Orchestrated by the artist for the nascent residential development that served as the prototype for his fictional construct, the celebration boasted a costume parade, a feast, music and other activities. Huyghe’s multifaceted project employs a diverse range of cultural representations garnered from a myriad of references including nineteenth-century utopian social projects, Hollywood films, Disney animation, contemporary fiction writing, and romantic landscape painting.

When I saw the video component of this work at Dia I have to admit I did not care for it much. I found the placement of a faux community festival in a suburban development to be not so interesting considering the context – suburban developments never pretend to be communities. Their developers do not hide the identical and formatted nature of these properties nor do they build community centres to try and pass off these sprawling tracts as tight-knit neighbourhoods. And, everyone knows that this lack of community in the suburbs has alienated countless families and individuals. This is the stuff of great American poetry, literature, music, and film.  So, it seemed odd to me to set the festival in the ‘burbs because it is so kick-you-in-the-head obvious that it is a site of alienation that no festival could soothe. The tension created in Huyghe’s piece was one placed between the innocence and purity of an Edenic landscape shown in the beginning of his video and the forced, dirty-capitalistic festivalization of the housing development, which exploits our yearning for togetherness, community, and home to legitimize the destruction of nature.

Looking back, I can appreciate what Huyghe anticipated – the festivalization of real estate. I think he only misplaced his exploration of social alienation in the suburbs when it should have been the city, or the urban village, in particular.  Also, for all the problems and ugliness of the suburbs, they have in fact offered affordable housing to middle and working class families.  The Millennium development offers no such thing and yet receives subsidies from a city that is made up of these constituents, among others. To pass it off as a kind of public square/amusement park at the grand opening felt obscene and Disneyesque.

I will admit that the  park along the development, which extends the South False Creek Seawall, offers something to the general public that is used and appreciated. In this sense, public funds were spent on something for the actual public. Of course, we must then ask at what cost and distance? Does this project create an opportunity for the city’s maximum enjoyment?

I do not know. All I do know is that there is something rotten in Denmark.

In Horvitz’s talk, which was informal and conversational, we received an overview of recent and upcoming projects, including The Wikipedia Reader, [which Fillip participated in], Kiosk, [to which, in the interests of full disclosure, I contributed], the Drugstore Beetle project, and a work he is developing for Rhizome in the No Soul for Sale exhibition at Tate Modern. During the talk the audience shared a number of insightful observations on the work especially regarding his consistent engagement with systems of distribution and circulation [Holly Ward pointed this out early on in the discussion]. I personally think this is a rather significant feature of the work, which underscores the power of selection and framing in the online universe both in terms of its abilities to open up authorship and data networks, but also in closing down, or authorizing a limited network or set of networks. Part of my thinking derives from the scholarship of Matteo Pasquinelli, whose text on Google PageRank breaks down this phenomena into concrete terms through an analysis of the technology and political implications behind these masters of the (digital information) universe.

A common thread running through Horvitz’s projects is curatorial-type use of selection and framing, often involving the creation of some framework or armature on which to hang works of some kind. The manifestation of these structures is multiple; a set of instructions that become an archive of photographs that anyone can print at a local pharmacy photo kiosk, an invitation to create 30 works for 30 art libraries, a request for a set of links furnished by participants who collect them as they engage in their own meandering and often unwieldy wiki research. In looking at this work I cannot help but think of an ongoing question that artists have taken on over the centuries, which is what authority does the artist have, and what mediums are available to artistic expression? To some degree, these projects demonstrate how the artist has a new kind of authority to create a network that resembles Fluxus and Mail Art, but is distinct from these precursors. [By the way, I have taken this position as an artist and solicited others' participation for my own projects.] In my discussions on participation with Markus Miessen, David Goldenberg, and Patricia Reed, it has become clear that participation presents both an opportunity to co-create, or collaboratively author, a work, and yet, at the same time, it further invests in the authority of the artist, who sculpts, frames, welds that particular participatory framework, thereby suggesting the limitations of any concept of co-authorship.

What interests me immensely about Horvitz’s projects is that he is not simply investing in his own authority, which is something that Tonik Wojtyra, I think, was trying to say in the Q and A, but is actually using the network to bring visibility to his participating artists and their specific expressions. And, this is key because, on the one hand, Horvitz has the power to put together and present a networked “inquiry”, but, on the other hand, he is showing us that this is a highly endowed power. It’s exactly this power that Google possesses and achieves by renting the “common intellect” as Pasquinelli puts it. It’s exactly this ability that the curator possesses for the gallery is, all romance aside, in a brutally simple sense a container for pre-selected ideas, objects, etc…Horvitz, I think, seems to get at this material fact and takes that into contemporary experience and our, or at least my, understanding of this communications paradigm we inhabit and have not yet named.

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In Welchman’s talk, we were presented with a wealth of effort and articulations. To McCarthy’s excesses and repetitions, perhaps, we find a quantitative corollary in Welchman’s verbosity. And, this is not a bad thing. It’s at the level of language that Welchman provides the audience a feast undoubtedly.

I cannot in any fairness accurately represent the talk he gave, but I will say that it did engage not only with McCarthy’s Pirate Project in great detail, but it also addressed the artist’s recurrent interest in the image and space of the studio. Much of this information is perhaps well known to McCarthy’s fans, which include myself, but I have not heard it put together before with as much passion as Welchman clearly has for the artist and his work.

Afterward, I had a number of thoughts and questions that I think arose in relation to Horvitz’s talk, which I attended the night before.

For instance, one larger question I had was what does McCarthy’s work mean in an era of even more intense simulation and mediation of the body where communications increasingly take place online and prosthetic limbs outfit soldiers who engage in wars I experience through online newspapers and blogs exclusively? Welchman, at one point, mentioned that McCarthy’s use of violence is not well discussed in the critical literature concerning his work. It made me think that it is important to especially consider that McCarthy’s violence is undeniably mediated violence because the body, in as much as it is put forward as a spotlighted site, is always represented in a hybrid sense-a real body amplified by prostheses [noses, ears, bellies], masks, wigs, and fake blood, shit, etc… [i.e. condiments intended for consumption that are alien or invading synthetic foodstuffs, or condiments, more precisely, designed to make consumption more palatable]. This violence is, of course, also mediated in another sense-because the way we, as viewers, experience it is through video, photography, etc… While McCarthy’s work used to be based on live performance, it is not now experienced as documentation of a live performance event. The effect is that the violence is removed. This is much the same way that I both thankfully and peculiarly experience violence in my own life – always online [e.g. news articles, youtube clips] or in a film. It is something that takes place somewhere, but not in my here. I know it exists, but I cannot verify it. Moreover, corporeal life is further becoming more indirect, more mediated–i.e. I check the weather online to layer appropriately before leaving home, I monitor ingredient labels to see what I am going to eat, or look up restaurants for a place to go, and so forth. In these examples, I access my body through information that talks to me – of course not all of the time, but definitely more often than not.

I guess, with all of this in mind, I am wondering, from my own place in the world, and my experience of it, which is deeply hybridized [public/private, mediated/real, virtual/physical, global/local] what I am thinking about and wondering is perhaps why this particular aspect of mediation not entering into Pirate Project? I tried to ask Welchman about this during the q and a, but failed to articulate what I really meant, so here is a re-articulation. McCarthy’s choices in showing bodies and violence in the ways that he consistently has relies upon mediations and hybridizations that involve costume, prostheses, and the entertainment industry [by which I mean film, TV, and Disney]. It just seems like a really important space or opportunity to consider further given that the digital domain is not separate from all the other hemispheres we traverse in daily life. Moreover, I might say that the immaterial aspect of the digital domain lends itself to thinking about the highly abstract nature of financial markets that have concrete, corporeal consequences…what I call magical financial realism. And, of course, it is precisely the highly specious work of financial institutions during the Bush years and today that makes a legitimate case for inaugurating a pirate insurgency, or at least imagining and imaging one. How else can we give voice and body to something we have no seemingly tangible hope of accessing or redressing?

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In looking back over these two talks I get the sense that perhaps due to generational variances there are corresponding differences in interests. I have the great fortune of having lived before the Internet and remembered what it felt like. I am now very much attached to it as a communications and information prosthetic of my own, so in one way I feel a technological-chronological hybridity as much as I feel other kinds. This situation has only slowly and partially channeled itself into a discernible figure-ground.