Nevolution

Nighthawks

I'm sensing a fine thread connecting a few cafes and bars in Melbourne which take a nuanced approach to the past. Either that or I've taken my love affair with drinking Campari and other italian bitters a little too far. All four – Patricia's, Bar Americano, Belle's Diner, and Bar Paradiso – each take a similar approach to presenting idealised versions of post-war Italy and America.

There's something about the simplicity of it all. they're all very much rooted in the past, but in a slightly different past than what we're used to. They're not over the top reproductions, dripping in garish semiotics. The details are of an otaku level of sophistication. By moving further and further back into the past we hope to gain a more authentic nostalgic response. There's a platonic realm of cafe or bar that they seem to be moving toward.

We're hungering for Edward Hopper's Nighthawks in geo-tagged high definition; instead of the cheap revisionary print with Monroe, Bogart and Dean. Stripped back to it's essentials but remade as a resolution independent 3D point cloud, with cold drip coffee, artisanal pastries, and obscure digestifs.

I wonder what Cayce Pollard would make of all of this. Her allergies would flair up instantly but as a slight itch instead of a searing rash. And then to paraphrase Gibson even further, it's as if these places are creating negative space in the historical record of cafes.

 

Photo's lovingly ripped from Broadsheet:

Bar Paradiso: Kristoffer Paulsen 
Bar Americano: Harvard Wang
Belle's Diner: Eve Wilson 
Patricia: Kristoffer Paulsen 

Failure / Unknown History / System Failures

I've wanted to contribute to Pie Paper since first hearing about it a few years ago. It's a fascinating publication filled with miscellaneum centered around a particular topic that changes with each issue. For this issue it moved away from the large and unweildly newspaper format towards a far more portable pocket sized book. I liked the newspaper layout but I love the smaller format. The design is suburb, each spread is a joy to look at and feels appropriate at every level. Reading the whole publication feels like moving absently through a well curated encyclopedia where all the tangents and links are connected in some unknown manner. I'd highly suggest you head on over and get yourself a copy. It's well worth it. The theme for this issue is on Failure:

Failure is an intrinsic part of experimentation, creativity and inconveniently, life. It’s said if you’re not failing often then you’re not trying hard enough. We celebrate the beautiful screw ups, the happy accidents, the painful flaws and the Epic Fails. For this issue we’ve taken the idea of failure in all its variant forms and looked for the beauty, humour and wisdom gained from these unwanted mishaps.

I wrote two pieces, one on the Phaistos Disk and the other on when the rules of emergence fail to live up to the hype. I put in too much of myself into both of them; as such they sick out and don't really blend in with the whole book. This is a bit of a shame really. Still, I got to play around with the misdirection in the historical record an object such as the Phaistos Disk brings up. 

 

Found in a basement in a Minoan palace in 1908, the Phaistos Disk has remained a stubborn historical anomaly since its discovery. The clay disk – with pictograms placed in a spiral pattern circling towards the centre on both sides – has given us no clues as to its intended original use. Is it a mythical tale, historical record, game board, or something else entirely? That the pictograms don't match up or connect to any other known language or culture from around the world only adds to its frustrating mystique.

A cypher like the Phaistos Disk provides us with an interesting problem. By remaining a puzzle, it acts as a glaring hole in the historical record, opening up the possibility that we don't know the shape of history, not like we thought we did anyway. And if this is so, then what other cracks are waiting to be filled in. How many other civilisations, city states, stories of unknown peoples remain lost forever.

If it is a fake, as many people have argued, then we can set it aside as an interesting prank. An object legitimately out of time that doesn't belong. But if it is an authentic piece of history that signals an unknown culture then it's a glaring omission from the historical record and our collective knowledge. This device exists outside of history, in a different time stream. Without knowing more about it, all potential pasts are possible.

Time moves in one direction with one thing following the next; Space moves out in all directions as different cultures and civilisations inhabit different parts of the world. These two materials of the historical record are connected and by mapping how they interrelate we gain a deeper understanding of our heritage. But an object that doesn't provide clues to a culture that may or may not have existed prompts us to question the grain of our understanding. If we don't fill in the holes caused by objects such as the Phaistos Disk, then history starts to lose its shape.

 

Who doesn't love a spot of emergence from time to time? Let a few simple rules govern behaviour and watch the breathtaking complexity unfold. The problem occurs when an individual makes a simple mistake and the collective facepalm ensues. These two examples of emergence tripping over itself illustrates the problem with an over reliance on simple rules.

Ants, the darling species of bottom-up systems can always be counted on to illustrate the beauty of simple rules and simple behaviours. When foraging for food they will leave behind a trail of pheromones alerting their sisters to the location of food. This system allows a few foragers to explore a large area on behalf of the whole colony. The problem occurs when a few of them get stuck following a circular trail and don't realise that they've been marching the same path for some time. The whole colony can eventually wander into this loop without realising it, strengthening the pheromone trail and making it even harder to break out of it. They'll end up following this circle of doom until everyone dies from exhaustion, leaving behind a thick carpet of dead ants.

Keen to test how traffic jams form, researchers from the Japanese Mathematical Society for Traffic Flow (yes, of course this exists) set up a large circular road and told drivers to maintain a steady speed and even distance between each other. Everything works fine until the inevitability of a traffic jam occurs. One driver speeds up and then slows down too fast, causing the next driver to push on the brakes to prevent an accident. A traffic jam shockwave reverberates backwards through the circle as half are always in gridlock and the other half trying to maintain an even pace until they catch up to the jam. It doesn't matter how simple the rules are, there's always going to be one jackass who makes you late for work or kills everybody.

 

Like I mentioned before, you really should go get yourself a copy. While you're at it, the rest of them.

Sketches of the shape of time

When Heath told me that the December issue of Desktop Magazine was to be on the future and would I be interested in writing the opening essay it took me no time at all to say yes. The article was to be loosely based on how designers and writers think about and visualise the future. After quickly discarding a few thoughts on how science fiction has informed design, I started thinking how the methodolgy of design is linked to thinking about the future; model making and pattern finding results in a little temporal dance to figure out how to work.

This is all via the neat split that Nigel Cross discusses in Designerly Ways of Knowing on the differences between the disciplines: Humanities, Science, and Design. I won't talk much about it here, Ian Bogost and Mark Nelson provide nice summaries. I've wanted to discuss these divisions for some time, it was great to be given the scope to do so in a well known publication. I then had the mandatory romp through the shape of time and atemporality and I've been playing with over at Heterochronia. 

The rest of the issue is thoroughly enjoyable, all the more impressive by who Heath was able to wrangle into writing for it. Even if one doesn't normally get Desktop Magazine, it's worth picking up for this issue. I'm looking forward to see what else Heath can come up with in future issues. 

 

How do we talk about The Future when by most standards we're already living in it? When we've been here for over a decade and we still don't know when we, or It, will arrive. The Now might look and feel different than the future we've been promised, but it's here nonetheless.

So far, the early years of the 21st century has been weirder than any of us imagined, and it's only going to get weirder (especially if any of the ideas presented in this issue have anything to do with it). You can't really look around and articulate the march of progress anymore. Things don't move along in a linear direction like they used to, like they damn well should. There might be pockets of good old fashioned progress and futurity here and there, but on the whole we're bouncing around and we don't really know what's going on. We're not moving forward into a brighter future, we're stumbling around in all directions, pushing and prodding at various strands, giving us the eternal Now, composed of many different futures. It's not that we've lost the will to move forward, it's that we're moving in too many directions to form a cohesive narrative of time and direction. We used to move through time like we do turning the pages of a book, moving from one page to the next. Now we click and tap our way through it, constantly opening up new tabs and moving through divergent streams. I'm here to tell you that not only is that a good thing, but we as designers are well suited to imagining these futures. Thinking about and living in the near future is how we operate on a daily basis.

A report by the Royal College of the Art in 1979 described the central concern of Design as "the conception and realisation of new things" and at it's core is the "language of modelling". It is these two concerns that enable us to always be living in the tomorrow.

Let's just unpack that for a second and explore what it is about those two concerns that make us so adept at seeing into the future. Every time we start a new project we're thinking about something that doesn't exist yet and trying to see if it can work. Every pen stroke of every sketch is an exploration in a future world. We look just past the horizon because we need to see how our ideas will work in the world of tomorrow. To see how it will interact, to see if it will survive. Some of them do, and some of them don't. But we need to create as many possible ideas for as many possible futures for any of them to survive. So we create prototypes to see how they'll operate in a world that is ever so slightly different than the one we're in now. We imagine scenarios and test them out, injecting our work into all manner of possibilities and seeing if need to shift or prod things to make them work.

By working this way we hopefully we nudge the world in a positive direction. This normative way of working – towards the way things ought to be, not how they are – is the whole point of design. It's the reason we question the client, change the brief, work late, or even just kern that text a bit more. Because to us, all of these shifts make the world a slightly better and more readable place.

Alan Kay stated that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it"; each time we set pencil to paper, shift a Bézier curve, tweak some code, we're inventing the future. We're all doing our bit to move ourselves into the future, to create as many possible futures that didn't exist before. To spread the timeline out into as many possible directions as possible. The central concerns of Design suits the world we live in now.

To understand the multiple timelines that we all live in now, we have to go back a bit and look at how we used to understand time. More importantly, we need to look at how progress was tightly coupled to the notion of futurity and why we've collectively lost that correlation.

The March of Progress used to be a super important ideal. It's one of the great things that the Enlightenment era gave us, and that carried over into Modernism. The Future was something to look forward to, that it would be better than the past. We were always moving forward and improving the standard of living for the human race. If we just put one foot in front of the next and keep at it, things would get better. And we kept walking and things did improve. Then Modernism had to shoot itself in the foot and make grand plans that couldn't be carried through. Projects that didn't exactly suit the human and very messy way of living and ideals that only suited a select group of people. So then we go and blow it up and watch brick after brick of glorious Modernism come tumbling down and what we're left with is decades of doubt, pastiche, and way too much self referentiality. Time changed from being a single purposeful line always moving forward to something that could loop back in on itself. A line that looked back on the past, took whatever surface novelty it wanted and slapped style all over the place as if they meant nothing. All of our sketches leaned to heavily on every one else and we retreated into the past as if that was the only thing left.

If the shape of time changed from a single unending line to a looping mess, where does that leave us? Now our line branches out into as many different directions as possible, endlessly and constantly connecting with itself. We're taking small steps to shape our future in as many ways as we know how. We're all working on as many different sketches as possible in the hopes that some of them will survive in the wild and turn into something useful.

There are so many different directions that our future might take that it's impossible to keep track. We've become so accustomed to The Network as our main mode of experiencing the world that it's shaped the manner in which we perceive the possibilities of time. It's that damn nodal diagram that we can all see when we close our eyes after using the internet for too long. This connects to that, which connects to those things over there, and then spreads out to those points in that corner and then the ones near the centre and before you realise it's three in the morning and you've connected 70s disco, nature documentaries, and an assortment of memepuffs and you still don't understand how you got there. But you're here now and you're stuck. And tired.

We can't tell if we're moving about in any discernible direction but we are moving about in some direction, usually a few of them. And this is the problem: we're confusing movement for progress. Not forwards or backwards, just a spreading out as far as possible and we've forgotten what we came here for but we'll open up just one more tab and see what happens. The Network makes it so easy to move around in all directions that we've forgotten what moving about with purpose felt like. And this leaves us with a continuous and constant and infinite Now. It's such a confusing state of temporal affairs that we have to squeeze all of our photos through the nostalgia filter just to remind ourselves that we are genuinely moving through the abstract yet concrete process of time. That we have a past and that we'll have a future. But seriously, enough with the filters; we're already confused about linear time without adding digital reproductions of entropy into the mix.

The beautiful upside to this constant unfolding and branching out off all possible future timelines is that they still all converge into one absolute timeline. But we get all the richness that exploration and sketching brings that you just can't get with a singular approach to progress and timelines. But we tend to forget that we are, by all means, living in the future. It's so easy to get jaded and complain about minutiae and the lack of a future that we were promised but that we don't really want anymore because it wouldn't really suit our current way of living. Instead of throwing back food pills made in a lab we're all hunkering down and growing artisanal heirloom tomatoes. We don't need flying cars or pointless jetpacks because we have little slabs of glass in our pockets that can do all of the travelling for us. We don't need these legacy futures to hold us back from what needs to be done now.

So go out there and be a designer and make as many sketches as possible and inhabit as many different futures as you can. Model the world your sketches will need to inhabit and what they'll have to be in order to survive. But remember we have to follow through into the present and turn those sketches into reality. It's the only way we'll ever get to go to Tomorrow.

Kim Jong Il Communication

The second I found out that Kim Jong Il had died I quickly followed the protocol in a situation such as this and immediately scanned my twitter feed for confirmation. After failing to come up with anything worthy of 140 characters I moved on and waited for others to do what I couldn't be bothered doing.

I've kept North Korea in my partial attention zone for a few years, after @cowbellistan gave me a copy of Dictators Homes for my birthday, followed by Tyrants the following year. Hungover, I would spend the day after reading about horrible people and their horrible ways. Don't know why but North Korea always seemed to stick out. Fascinating, train wreck of a place. Complete and utter nightmare. I could keep on going with the cliched half sentences but I'll leave it at that. Point is, a bad man died. And now we're all supposed to react in some collective way. But how do we react to something this culturally foreign and closed off? Why do we feel the need to react in a certain way?

  

We do it for the Lulz. 

While that video was uploaded in mid September, months before his death, it conveys the point. Especially when the subtitle is Ain't no party like a Pyongyang party, cause a Pyongyang party is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. It's a response to a situation that we don't understand, by the only means through which we're capable of understanding. It's not humour, but not tasteless either. It's a response to everything being available, at all times, for everyone. It all just becomes fodder. I'm surprised that no one has taken apart the chilling video of North Koreans trying to cry their hearts out and replace the sounds with cats meowing. When I first saw it (and I've seen it countless times in the past few days) I remarked on twitter that it felt like one big cultural photoshop. We can clearly see through the whole affair, and I'm sure that they can too, but meh. Whaddya gonna do? Viscerally feel what it would be like to live with such a twisted mindset?

And that was when I realised the depth that the lulz was willing to go. How it acted as our coping mechanism. The contrast between the lulz and the leader couldn't be starker. A man who commanded a country with the most perverse of grips; he went far beyond the jackboot stamping on the face of humanity. North Korea is testament to the failure of centralised command hierarchies.

The lulz, on the other hand, revels in its distributed and decentralised nature. Anyone can do it for the lulz, as long as you're steeped in network culture. The lulz takes your Juche ideology of self reliance and determinism and pisses all over it. The Lulz sees your hermit kingdom, scrapes all the intent out of it and squirts it out onto the web. For all the unknowable horror that he causes, we take it and turn it into a small joke of him looking at things.

It would be remiss of me to not mention Team America and the hilarious song I'm So Ronery by a puppet Kim Jong Il. I'm beginning to see this as the Ur script of all humourous takes on North Korea. It enabled us to see him as a short and angry little man, something able to be mocked. Perhaps we needed that particular angle to view him as in order to make fun of him. But that was before he died, while he still maintained godlike power over a nation of slaves. When all he could do, post-stroke, is look at things and approvingly smile.

Not that we should be surprised at any of this. Lulz has somewhat become the easiest way to cope our world. It's soon on the way to replace irony and sarcasm as our humour coping mechanism. Or, as sarcasm was to the nineties, the lulz is to the early twenty teens. Yet, the lulz seems only possible in our networked world. It doesn't seem to make much sense away from keyboard and mouse. Unless you're Anonymous, then go right ahead and do whatever it is that you please.

I feel as if there needs to be some mediated screen between us and the lulz. The lulz needs to come out of the internet, as a product of it. Either as a cheezeburgeresque macro or as a single serving fuckyeah tumblr. I've been keeping a few tabs on the fuckyeah genre of tumblr; it works really well when there's enthusiasm for the topic. A sadistic yet comical tyrant, not so much. So how, now that he's dead, do we deal with it? Simple, another single serving tumblr, this one with more deft and vulgarity than the previous. Kim Jong Il Dropping the Base.

I'm impressed at how quickly it was put together, let alone coming up with the idea. It's also amazing how many photoshops could be made in one day, all of fairly decent quality. All scraped and spidered off the internet, ready to be spread as fast as possible. Prepackaged and destined for a quick like on the facebook. To re-enter the stream in as many ways as possible just to become more content for our thirsty eyeballs and reward centres.

Much as the trend for vintage posters of soviet memorabillia seemed odd and somewhat offensive to survivors of communism, Kim Jong Il dropping the base would be downright weird if any North Koreans ever get a hold of it. Not because it's offensive to their beloved leader, or because of all the atrocities that they've gone through. No, it's because they simply wouldn't get it. Their pre-networked culture isn't close to the nuance and deft that the lulz can bring. Expecting them to get the joke, pushed through the sieve of the new aesthetic is light years ahead of their aesthetic sensibilities. That's probably the saddest part of all of this. Apart from the torture and starvation and fear of course. That when the Norks do open the border through some way or another and the stream of stunted masses pour through the border that they'll be too far gone to ever catch up to the cynicism of the lulz.

 

The Altermodern Nomad

Apologies for the academic language but I don't have the energy, headspace or the smarts to work through and rewrite it. This essay was written last year, during what I'm calling my Bourriaud phase when I was knee deep in art theory. Thankfully that's over, but he has plenty of worthy ideas as a result of the Tate Triennial Altermodern as well as The Radicant (a companion book he wrote at the same time as curating the show). Which is why I'm posting this essay after all this time. Consider this a conceptual precursor to my other blog – Heterochronia – as it works through some of the ideas I was stumbling my way through in a previous post. Thinking in Tumblr, while fun, is hard to make a comprehensive point. It's more about falling through links as I come across them. It's all too easy to forget about any sense of direction.

Reading through this essay I forgot about one of the key distinctions about the way in which we percieve time and progress. Less teleological direction, more about moving through multiple temporalities, evolving through a network of differing periods and possibilities. Moving through time as if it were space. It's interesting to go through this essay nowand remembering grasping these ideas and spending a few solid weeks with them. That is, instead of throwing up a quick link here and there. That's the beauty of studying: the forced concentration, the singular depth of thought. As I write these words I realise I'm going to have to quote myself and turn this depth into easy bite size links for Heterochronia.

The images aren't connected in anyway to the essay, but should be seen as a visual counterpoint. I came across this project (Nomadic Plants by Gilberto Esparza) on we make money not art at the same time I was writing the essay and I always imagined pairing the two. Regine Debatty

Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and 'drink' water from it. Through a process of microbial fuell cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle. 

They don't really connect with Bourriaud's notion of the vine or creeper as the botanical metaphor for our time, but it's a plant that lives in a robot and moves about a polluted landscape. What more do you need? I'll stop faffing about and let you get on with the essay.

 

The theme of travel is the most dominant of all concepts articulated in the Altermodern Manifesto. Travel is a part of our daily lives, and the effect it has on our way of being affects the way in which we inhabit and view our globalised world. 

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.1 

Considering this emphasis on travel, then we need to explore what forms of travel are implied, and what are their reasons and effects. We can see the beginnings of an answer in the Altermodern catalogue: 

The artist turns cultural nomad... Thus the exhibition brings together three sorts of nomadism: in space, in time, and among the ‘signs’.2 

By constructing the identity of this nomad and how it is suited to Altermodernity, we can look for comparisons to differing identites found in Modernity and Post Modernity. Through this construction we will then articulate how this nomad exists in the parameters set forth by Bourriaud and what journey forms are made and how. 

This essay will not look at the art or artists of the Altermodern exhibition (Tate Triennial 2009), but instead extend the central thesis put forth by the show’s curator and lead theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud. Using his ideas as a base in which to begin the journey, the discussion will wander through other ideas and theorists who share similiarities and correlations in describing the world in which we now inhabit.

 

If we are to discuss the nature of Altermodernism as a third stage of Modernism, then we need a set of tools that others have used to explore the two previous modernities. Bourriaud looks to the world of botany in which to explain the new world.3 In ‘The Radicant’ a book considered as a companion to the Altermodern exhibition, he explores the notion of roots and extends the ideas set forth by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening chapter of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’.4 

Through the use of lexicography, Bourriaud equates the Modern individual with that of the tree root, a Radical.5 While Modernity is predicated on a rupture with the past and a desire for progress, it was also concerned with it’s historical roots. The duality of the sprouting tree encapsulates Modernism and the Radical individual: focused on the future but aware of it’s heritage. 

Not content to view their writing as a mode of binary oppositions, Deleuze and Guattari look to the image of the Rhizome: an underground root system consisting of only horizontal offshoots, such as ginger. This metaphor is one that indulges in it’s plurality: 

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. 6 

The need to create this distinction was to delineate away from Cartesian dualisms, that of the vertical tree and root system, and instead to comprehend the notion of horizontal multiplicities. However, this multiplicity has neither subject nor object. It is only able to reference itself, forever deconstructing the environment amidst a desert of self referentialities. By continuing with the botanical metaphor Bourriaud utilizes the image of the Radicant: a vine or creeper plant that plants it roots constantly as it moves along. 

Unlike the rhizome, which is defined as a multiplicity that brackets out the question of a subject from the beginning, the radicant takes the form of a trajectory or path; the advance of a singular subject. 7 

This is a clear difference than the others. It accepts the need for multiplicities and the need to not be fixed upon one stable point. It articulates not only the need for movement, but the way in which it can be done. The conceptual link between the constant daily travel and the idea of the radicant are unmistakable.

Bourriaud continues by stating that “it [the radicant] exists exclusively in the dynamic form of wandering”.8 This denotes an identity that moves away from a static existence to one in which we are only able to understand our identity through a dynamic process. This notion of existence as only made visible by it’s trajectories echoes sentiments by Emirbayer in discussing the identity of an individual where "a dynamic, unfolding process, become the primary unit of analysis, rather than the constituent elements themselves". 9 

Emirbayer is elaborating on ideas put forth by Dewey and Bentley in the idea of the Trans-Action. In looking at systems of naming and linguistic taxonomies ‘elements’ or ‘entities’ are not in isolation, but are a part of their ‘relations’.10 The act of ‘relating’ overrides the reductionist tendency to look at the subject unto itself. 

Thus, in the context of Altermodernity, the wanderer is inseperable from the act of wandering. By existing only in this nomadic state of constant travel, the act of travel overrides any notion of singular identity. In accord with the nomadic method of wandering through the signs, we see that the process of organising connections between signs is what constitutes a radicant identity. Continuing on with relational and trans-actional linguistics, Brown looks at the difficulty in percieving this dynamic unfolding process in Western languages.11 The issue here is in the ability to hold both noun and verb at the same time. Being a radicant and the act of radicantity as one. 

This ability to nod at syntax and carry on is a result of the re-introduction of pragmatics. When the intent and reception of language is included while considering the fluid process of signifying, there emerges a coherent rambler. 12 

This ability to nod and carry on is central to our need to move past the impotency of Post Modernity and towards our abilities as nomads. 

Having revealed why the Radicant identity is predicated on movement, we now need look at how we’re moving through time, space and the signs. Leading on from the Enlightenment, Modernist notions of time were teleological. Post Modernism saw fault in this linear direction as hegemonic and saught to dismantle the notion of progress through deconstruction: “A levelling of chronological systems by criticizing the Western one.”13 Time was instead seen as a catalogue, something in which all cultures are situated on a horizontal plane of relativism. The result was that ideas and cultures could be mined for their stylistic attributes. 

Through the eyes of the nomad, time is somewhere that can be travelled to and inhabited. For when we travel, are we not also travelling to cultures with a different temporal sequence than our own? Appropriated from biology, heterochrony is the timing of the developmental variation of an organism in a species, leading to differing results. It is with this application of evolutionary understanding of history that the radicant travels through Altermodernity: a multitude of possible worlds, each with their own narrative of events.14 

This notion of history as geographical and “constituted of multiple temporalities”15 is similar to the idea of Atemporality put forth by Bruce Sterling.16 He defines the difference between previous notions of history and our current one as a result of the intrinsic capabilities of the dominant medium of our day. The contrast between moving through a history book understanding the narrative as a linear process as opposed to the result of attempting to search online for an aspect of a historical narrative is a important one. 

A book is a linear piece of text. It has a beginning, an end and an author with intent. To continue along this line into Post Modernity – a period of time punctuated as after the death of history – one could look at Barthes and the Death of the Author as a lack of regard to any historical narrative.17 But the internet has brought a levelling of authoritative knowledge: “A single historical narrative is a paper narrative”.18 We shouldn’t be expecting a new meta narrative while network culture is the dominant framework in which we view the world.19 It is only through network culture that are we able to understand heterochronic multiple narratives. 

It is this network culture that has become the dominant cultural logic of our day, though this is not to say that it defines all systems of logic. The machine as cultural metaphor did not extend into all forms of thought in Modernism, it only acted as a suitable metaphor.20 Instead of an autonomous individual – a result of the Western Enlightenment – we now see ourselves as nodes in a network, as an individual situated and contingent upon other nodes. As Varnelis argues: “affirming one’s identity today means affirming the identity of others”.21 

It is at this point that we need to refer to one of Bourriaud’s previous works, Post Production. In it he comes up with the term seminaut: one able to move through the signs, to create new paths through culture and semiotics. Relying on previous notions of authorship – both Modern and Post Modern – and originality as points of departure is no longer productive as “The seminaut imagines the links, likely relations between disparate sites”.22 For while artists like Duchamp and Burroughs bravely constituted works by blurring the notion of authorship, we have witnessed this logic be appropriated everywhere. The DJ and the idea of the remix has firmly entrenched itself in our society and is now taken as a given, it’s practices no longer informed by a degree of ironic self consciousness.23 The notion of context within a given network is what gives the artist or author an instinctive understanding of use: “exhibiting a work composed as a network of signs”.24 

If the seminaut imagines the links, then the radicant set these forms in motion.25 Perhaps instead of wandering through the ‘signs’ we should be wandering through links. As Bourriaud explains: 

The journey format... goes hand in hand with the generalisation of hypertext as a thought process: one sign directs us to a second, then a third, creating a chain of mutually interconnected forms, mimicking mouse clicks on a computer screen. 26

If this metaphor is to extrapolated, then this is a form of travel with no particular endpoint in mind. This applies to all forms: temporal, spatial or through the ‘signs’. This differs from the teleological direction of Modernism or the looping tendencies of Post Modernism.27 

 

In order to summarise the nomadic facet of Altermodernity, we need to look at one last image: travel. The Modern era was informed by the explosive power and superabundant energy of both the train and automobile.28 The direction and progress implied by these modes allow for the arrangement of events into causally linked sequences, correlating with the teleological notion of history that we have discussed. The 1973 oil crisis as a precursor to the Post Modern condition is an event that Bourriaud places great importance, making us aware of our limited energy reserves.29

The object that neatly sums up the current spirit of our directionless travel today is that of the mobile phone. While both the train and the automobile are objects that create travel, the mobile phone presumes an inherent mobility on the part of the user. It allows us to connect to our roots at any point amidst a state of wandering. Technological progress allows us to carry the network in our pocket, no longer attached to the home. This enables us to situate ourselves within a network of signs while in the act of movement in time and space. Considering worldwide demographic shifts to the city, the mobile phone seems perfectly suited to our new built environment, especially considering the speed at which both the developing and the developed world have made it a central part of this new Altermodernity. 

Whether or not the Altermodern exhibition was a success, the ideas put forth by it’s lead curator can not be discounted. Not just as a consideration on the changing face of art, but in the way in which it has made links and correlations in our contemporary world. Only as nomads are we able to inhabit this new world and must set about doing so.

 

1. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Tate Britain, ‘The Altermodern Manifesto’

2. Bourriaud, Nicolas et al, The Tate Triennial: Altermodern, (London, Tate Publishing, 2009) 13

3. Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant, (New York, Sternberg Press, 2009) 21

4. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 

5. Bourriaud, op. cit., p22

6. Deleuze & Guattari,  op. cit., p6

7. Bourriaud, op. cit., p55

8. ibid

9. Emirbayer, Mustafa. ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 103, No. 2. (Sep., 1997), 287 

10. Bentley, Arthur & Dewey, John. Knowing and the Known. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1949) 108

11. Brown, Colleen. ‘The Relational Meme’ Fillip Vol 1 (Summer 1996) 

12. ibid

13. Morton, Tom & Bourriaud, Nicolas. ‘Looking Forward: Tate Triennial 2009’ Frieze Issue 120 (Jan-Feb 2009) 

14. Bourriaud, op. cit., p13

15. ibid

16. Sterling, Bruce. Beyond the Beyond ‘Atemporality for the Creative Artist’ 

17. Barthes, Roland. ‘The death of the Author’ Aspen No. 5-6 (Fall-Winter 1967) Roaring Fork Press NYC

18. Sterling, op. cit. 

19. ibid

20. Varnelis, Kazys. ‘The Immediated Now: Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality’ Networked: A (networked_book) about (networked_art).  

21. Varnelis, Kazys. ‘On Atemporality’, http://varnelis.net/blog/on_atemporality, accessed 18/03/2010

22. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Post Production: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York, Sternberg Press, 2002) 18

23. Kazys, op. cit.,

24. Bourriaud, loc. cit.

25. Bourriaud, op. cit., 23

26. Bourriaud, op. cit., 20

27. Bourriaud, op. cit., 18

28. Bourriaud, op. cit., 16

29. ibid., 15