Letters to Robin Kinross

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future captured

In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels write a passage called the ‘Critical Utopian Socialists’ which I think maybe every designer should read. They write that “to realise all these castles in the air, they [the utopian socialists] are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois” and only create these fantasmatic images of the future which have no material effect. For me that is the perfect indictment of Dunne & Raby’s work and others that uphold the speculative banner. They do interesting thought experiments that try to make us think differently, to invoke conversations around what the future will look like. Post-fossil fuels, etcetera. But what is the actual effect of that beyond conversations that are probably already happening elsewhere in less nicely designed contexts? That’s the future captured and constrained in a very capitalistic way. I don’t know. It’s very difficult to talk about the future and the present when we’re discussing things that are on the cutting edge of the present. What I find really frustrating is when people cast an idea out into the future and make potentially interesting work ineffective. Recently, a bot trading on a currency platform saw the headline “If Theresa May wants a hard Brexit she’ll get one”. The bot missed the nuance of that, started selling loads of sterling and tanked the price by six percent. That does have an effect on us. That happened a year ago. If we’re always in this context of technological breakthroughs looking to the future, and thinking about disasters that could happen in the future, we miss out on the ones that are already happening right now.

source: http://content-free.net/articles/distributed

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The section of the installation entitled ‘Funeral’ contains a mounted photograph of the boy in a simple wooden coffin, with four adult figures clothed in black and standing behind. The scene is rural. The artists have drawn a frame around this photograph. Beneath is a wooden frame, suspended from which are five pieces of fabric that containing some kind of material. Four are white, and one is black, and they are tied up with string. There are labels above these makeshift containers, though they are illegible in the available documentation.

Il’ia Artamonov explained:

A photograph lay face down underneath the windowsill. We turned it over, and realized it was a photograph of a young boy who was lying in his grave. At that moment, the energy stopped, because we suddenly saw how life had brought tragedy. Very quietly, we put the photograph back and hurried to the cars. We took everything to the studio and the corridor was drowning in all this stuff. In the evening we told the artistic director and tutors and how we found the family album and photograph … The next day Mark Aleksandrovich (Konik) came up to us and said … that it may be unethical, but we should go back and get the photograph. We went over and took the photograph, and were quietly pleased by the theme of this seminar – to narrate the lives of the people who lived in this house.

from: Soviet Critical Design: Senezh Studio and the Communist Surround by Tom Cubbin

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Interfinity mark

An interfinity question is a question that has both an infinite number of answers and no answer at all. Interfinity allows opposites to coexist. It can be said that the “an interfinity question is always more interesting than its response” and that the “response to an interfinity question is always more interesting that the question itself.”

In written conversation the interfinity mark* indicates that the question should be understood on a secondary level in which interrogative and infinite expressions are combined. The interfinity mark differs from the short-lived percontation point, invented in the late sixteenth century to indicate rhetorical questions, in that it denotes ever-lasting and ever-occurring questions: Is there life beyond planet Earth? Does god exist? Am I awake or am I dreaming? Is there life after death? What is the meaning of life? Was this article helpful to you? Where do you find your inspiration? What is your dream project? What are you unrealized projects? Are you happy? But why?

In a typographic sense the interfinity mark can be described as an interrogative punctuation mark formed by superimposing a vertical infinity mark (∞) with a question mark (?).

– Source: https://radimpesko.com/news/18

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Artist David Millidge in a waiter’s uniform, during the Employment Project, and his financial report. St Martins' School of Art, London, 1971

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'A' Course Mask Project reconstruction for Omnibus: A Question of Feeling. Christopher Burstall. Excerpt. First broadcast BBC, September 9th, 1973. Student: Tim Jones.

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https://projectnativeinformant.com/exhibition/philippe-thomas-with-interventions-by-bernadette-corporation-dis-and-emily-segal/

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http://primaryinformation.org/files/allan-kaprow-how-to-make-a-happening.pdf

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seeing with your own ears

‘…Then there 's this whole thing I was reading by Michel Chion. Chion is a really interesting guy, this student of Pierre Schaeffer who started by composing musique concrete, who then became a theorist. So he’s the best person on film and sound ever. Part of my relation to sound is that Chion talks about sound in film, and I’m only just realising now that a lot of my favourite samples are from sound in film.

<…> By extinguishing the visual output, the music is switching it on elsewhere. It’s as if the eyes start to have ears, as Chion would say. Your ears have had their optical capacity switched on. In a strange way, your ear starts to see. Chion is saying that each of the senses have the full capacity of all the others. It’s simply that hearing happens to go through the ear, but all the other senses can go through the ear as well. The ear is meant to hear, but it can do all the other things as well, if it was switched on to the right capacity.’

From More Brilliant Than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun

Still from:  Mall Grab – Catching Feelings (Official Video) 

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finding the universe in a grain of sound

“Part of what happens with sampladelia is that you’ve got a lot of music based on sampler memory, so that a lot of the hooks, a lot of the music that abducts you, will have to be 4 seconds or 9 seconds. So there 's this huge psychedelia based upon disguising these seconds; it 's like Mark Sinker says, finding the universe in a grain of sound – and that’s what the sampler does. There’s this huge psychedelia grown up in which you’re able to fall into a universe of sound and it’s granular, microphonemes of sound.”

From More Brilliant Than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun

Stills from: ZOMBY 'WHERE WERE YOU IN 92' 2008 PROMO VIDEO

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If he could have been, Grandmaster Flash would have been a computer designer; if he'd been an animator, he'd be doing motion capturing. He's just doing it on vinyl first.

Kodwo Eshun More Brilliant Than the Sun

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Different parts of your body are actually at different states of evolution . Your head may well be lagging quite far behind the rest of your body. In Drum'n'Bass, there's obviously quite a lot of attention, through dub, to the stepper. There's the idea that the feet may well be more evolved, and hands obviously, feet and hands. Terminator X spoke with his hands. Other djs yelled with their hands. I've got this brilliant skratchadelia album called Return of the DJ, put out by The Bomb magazine in Frisco, and it 's all done by djs, it's a brilliant album. One guy's done a track called Terrorwrist, so his wrist is a terror, his wrist sends out terrifying bombs. The idea of a terroristic wrist action is fantastic. That's a predatory wrist. So you can see in that the dj has really evolved the hand that sends terror by a flick by the way it touches vinyl. So I often think that the actual body is at different stages of evolution. There's a constant war on.

From More Brilliant Than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun Still from video: Mall Grab – I’ve Always Liked Grime

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unknown form of seduction

“The idea was to use Reena for a fashion shoot, a last-minute brainstorm on Maris's part, and she was more than willing to break her contract with Women because she was so sure that Reena's gawky, asymetrical physique, day-old-bread skin (blemishes included), and somewhat lost-looking face would really make the underwear come alive this season. This campaign would be their best ever, and would speak to a generation long numbed by swollen breasts and lips, jutting hips, machine-flattened tummies and picture-perfect hair. The fallwinter line would hit the market with a poetic-realist slant, and the bras and panties would come off even sexier if the body wearing them wasn't so over-determined in advance by the product it modeled. It would have the energy of an encounter, and would therefore involve people and produce a more exciting, even catastrophic relationship between the skin and eye. The images would reinvent Reena as a knockout, in her own way, the kind that nobody saw coming. But most exciting of all, we would be making that once-in-a-generation leap into a seemingly unknown form of seduction. We will use very little make-up and flat, natural lighting. It will be photographed by that upstart son of a gun dealer, Bjarne Mayhem. If his naked party polaroids no longer wowed the art world, his almost-naked billboards might still cause a car crash or a crush or whatever.”

— From Reena Spaulings by Bernadette Corporation image: Untitled by Bernadette Corporation, 2000–2015

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“In the months since we announced our theme, the phrase “the new normal” has trended in popular discourse. It is often used in concert with declarations that certain new things should never be considered “normal” and should not bend the frame of acceptability to include them. <...> Among our trending themes is the demeaning of the real by conspiracy, fake intrigue, superstitious populism, clickbait science, causality/correlation fallacies, and motivated inference. Exemplifying these tendencies in spades is Adam Curtis, whose cut-and-paste political documentary, Hypernormalization, spins a good yarn about the deep history of this iniquity, supergluing it to the rise of Neoliberalism and all his pet peeves (including a longstanding refusal to grasp how technological systems operate with effects that exceed political representation.) When Curtis announces that now “no one has any vision for a different or better kind of future,” he speaks only for himself.”

— From The New Normal by Benjamin H. Bratton

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John Latham, speaking before the time-based theories took a firmer grip on him, referred to knowledge as being for experts and as that which renders thought unnecessary (16). In many ways this encapsulates the success and failure of the APG endeavour in that Latham was prepared to uproot himself, almost make himself blank, and enter a situation knowing nothing about it at all. As a blueprint for the incidental person it may not have been realistic but as a means of operating in a manner akin to Kafka's researcher in Investigations Of A Dog it was a means of charging a situation with inquisitiveness: "They certainly had no wish to listen to my questions, but it was precisely because I asked these questions that they had no wish to drive me away"

http://infopool.antipool.org/APG.htm

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Inside Outside: A History of the Artist Placement Group. A film by Toby Honest

Barbara Steveni: ‘I mean, we were told that we'd opened a can of worms. As a matter of fact we opened a great new area of opportunity for exchange, and the can of worms was the Arts Council, who interpreted it in the way they did. And I think that the care has to be from artists, of protecting their creative initiatives, from the erosion of administrations.’

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http://khole.net/issues/youth-mode/