#publicness

[sygamsung]

[multitude-square-blog]

The general intellect, or public intellect, if it does not become a republic, a public sphere, a political community, drastically increases forms of submission... The sharing of linguistic and cognitive habits is the constituent element of the post-Fordist process of labor. All the workers enter into production in as much as they are speaking-thinking... The publicness of the intellect, when it does not take place in a public sphere, translates into an unchecked proliferation of hierarchiesas groundless as they are thriving.

A Grammar of the Multitude by Paulo Virno

[ozgeersoy]

On Public Mindedness: In Conversation with Vasıf Kortun

Being public is not a given, it has to be earned. Vasıf Kortun and Özge Ersoy discuss art institutions, publics, and institutional alliances. The below conversation was published on Ideas, Asia Art Archive’s online publishing platform on September 12, 2018.

Vasıf Kortun, curator, writer, and educator in the field of contemporary art, speaks with Özge Ersoy, AAA Public Programmes Lead. Kortun is the former Programs and Research Director of SALT, a non-profit research institution located in Turkey, which has a collection of almost two million archival documents on recent art, architecture, design, urbanism, and social and economic histories. SALT uses exhibitions, public programmes, and publications to make these resources available for research and public use.

This conversation is part of Who Owns It?, a series that considers users as active participants with the agency to change institutions. How do people build a sense of ownership or community around a common aspiration? What unites a seed collector and museum curator, or a refugee camp and an impermanent shrine? AAA asks artists, architects, farmers, and scholars to reflect on users that produce, collect, build, and destroy.

Image: Upper Rhenish Master, Garden of Paradise, c. 1410. Courtesy of the Städel Museum Collection.

Özge Ersoy: In your farewell talk at SALT in March 2017, “Questions on Institutions,” you mentioned that the “most amazing contributions to public thinking were fermented, tested, and negotiated away from the threatening gaze of the order, philistines, shared half-truths, and populists.” I like the fermentation metaphor, because it refers to a closed environment—to a change or transformation that happens in the absence of oxygen. We often think about art institutions as spaces of presentation, offering a sense of openness, but you emphasise that they can and should also act as a retreat or safe space for critical practices.

Vasıf Kortun: I used to employ the term “monastery” until my wife Defne, who makes everything from pickles and vegan cheese to ginger soda, suggested that fermentation was a better metaphor. Monastery is actually not a metaphor but a generic term for an incredibly resourceful and diverse history. It can allude to sects, secret societies, and messianic orders, none of which are useful to our discussion here. Associated concepts, such as gauging opacity and transparency in institutions—which colleagues like Nina Möntmann had discussed in the context of a second wave of institutional critique—were in the back of my mind. I was hoping to identify a practice that already existed at SALT but not only at SALT, and to underscore a crucial role of the museum that gets overlooked by its exhibitionary output.

A great miso takes a number of years to make, pickled cucumber can be ready in a couple of days—things demand their own time. Even if the notion of fermentation has an urgency in this post-liberal toxic environment, the concept has always been essential. You establish a safe space where discourse and research flourishes, even if such a space is not invulnerable. Vilém Flusser wrote years ago that a roof protected you from the elements, the door was a threshold, and the window was a place to watch the world from; but with the antennas, television, and telephone cables, a house was no longer a shelter. We are all the more exposed now.

Second, as an institution, when your safety is at risk for financial, political, or legal reasons, it may affect your capacity of taking care. Nevertheless, as we know from discussions on the public sphere, while change is actualised and/or manifested in the streets, it is fermented in a sphere that carries aspects of a hortus conclusus—in the middle of which sits a public table.

I do not want this discussion purloined by a simple causality. It is not as if something happens “outside” to which one responds by gauging degrees of openness. What we have to understand is that the dual aspect of an institution—its openness and closure—is neither in opposition nor disconnected from each other.

ÖE: In the arts, we often speak about what should be privately owned and what should be publicly shared. In Istanbul, we talk about this a lot because private families, banks, and corporations have been at the fore of supporting major cultural institutions, while the state is barely involved in supporting the production, presentation, and circulation of artworks by living artists. In Hong Kong, despite the considerable amount of public funding for the arts, most of the non-profit arts organisations, including AAA, still heavily depend on private support. For me, this type of infrastructure pushes us to think much more creatively about how we define publicness. I believe that access, transparency, accountability, or public funding are not enough for an institution to identify as public. And, as you write, both public and private funding “are in effect privatised interests of a representational system.”

You ran privately supported institutions for twenty-five years. Can you talk about how you have chosen to interpret the term “publicness” through the institutions you have developed so far?

VK: Imagine the absence of an institution that creates a tangible paucity, a deficit in the lives of the people whom you care for. We have these kinds of feelings all the time. I still cannot overcome the passing away of my friend, artist Hüseyin Alptekin, eleven years ago. I am less because he is gone.

At Taksim Square in Istanbul, a gargantuan mosque goes up as the Atatürk Cultural Center is demolished. The Center was arguably the most significant civic purpose building of Turkey’s twentieth century. The savage displacement of the physical traces and spatial memory of the secular past produces a kind of deficit in our lives, and for those who were too young to experience the Atatürk Cultural Center, they have no such deficit to experience. What constitutes public mindedness for me was SALT’s project on the Center in 2012. This is how an institution occupies a place in you. The Performance of Modernity: Atatürk Kültür Merkezi, 1946–1977 stood witness to Turkey’s transformation. Imagined in 1946, opened in 1969, burnt down in 1970, reopened in 1977, closed for renovations in 2009, and demolished in 2018, it becomes obvious that it was conditioned by power that kept changing hands. To study the Center means not only to study Taksim Square, but also to understand an incredibly robust international modernism in the form of architecture. It underscored the importance of the arts and culture in the public sphere.

I was following a different track of thought between 2008 and 2011, as we were building SALT. In 2013, after the Gezi Park protests, we had to rethink the place of the institution and the meaning of “institution in context,” and again at the end of 2015—a profoundly violent year—we could not go back to our old ways, old programmes, and act as if nothing had happened. There were two elections, the first of which was not to the satisfaction of the President, and he did not hesitate in annulling it until he got what he wanted. It felt like we were unable to see beyond the horizon, then SALT Beyoğlu closed down—and a few months later a suicide bomber took the lives of a number of people 300 feet away from the building.

There is no single interpretation for what constitutes “public mindedness.” We were having a discussion recently with our colleague Benjamin Seroussi from Casa de Povo in São Paulo. Benjamin said something to the effect of “an independent institution cannot be independent of its context.” That stayed with me.

What matters is the potential of art to offer diverse ways of connecting societies and thinking about the world. Providing a space that allows it to flourish would be a good start. To provide the context you have to have integrity, you have to know when and what to compromise and not to compromise, you cannot act on impulses of dumb heroism nor play three-monkeys. You also have to gain the trust of the users and constituents, which happens slowly but can be lost in a second—especially if you are privately funded, many people are suspicious of you from the start.

A sense of ownership and critical engagement with the institution makes it public, but this relationship is contingent upon the institution’s performance. Being public is not a given, it has to be earned. The way I look at it, at the historical juncture we are at, it is all the more important to enlist the support of liberal businesses. We should all be worried of the ascendant global fascism and make tactical pacts with each other. Wealthy individuals and businesses had helped build the cultural world as much as the public sector. We need them more than ever now, and institutions can tell stories in ways that allow for making more informed decisions.

Image: Main entrance hall of the Istanbul Cultural Palace, 1969. SALT Research, Hayati Tabanlıoğlu Archive. 

ÖE: There is a group of institutions, including SALT, that uses the terms “user” and “constituent” when talking about their publics and working models, which suggests they consider themselves as sites of collaborative knowledge production. Stephen Wright’s definition of usership is helpful in thinking about this notion as a tool to challenge spectatorship, expert culture, and the traditional understanding of ownership.

When did the understanding of publics begin shifting for you, and how did you start shaping the institutions you led in this direction?

VK:  We have been engaging with these concepts for almost a decade in ways that were institutive. One of the threads before the founding of SALT was rethinking notions of the customer, audience, public, community, and user. I was doing my homework on feedback loops, radical trust, and stigmergic systems (processes by which ants and similar insects create complex social, physical, and communication structures without central organisation). I was dreaming of ways of “gifting” those who, on their own accord, enter a relationship with the institution. The original idea comes from Bazon Brock, as early as documenta 4 (1968). As he would say, “Listening and watching is also work.”

Our relationship with friends like Lara Fresko or Ahmet Dönmez (Baron von Plastik) developed over time through their responses to SALT when they assumed agency through blogs and other venues. They were assessing our projects not as “hired pens” or paid critics, but out of personal curiosity with no interest in press packages. We had to take their reactions seriously and eventually worked with them. SALT cares for constituents more than constituencies, whereas our colleagues from other institutions use this concept to refer to a space of political representation. For them, it is more about identifying representational clusters such as a refugee organisation. This runs the risk of coloniality.

It occurs to me that North–West–European institutions are inclined to self-produce a crisis, and their response to the crisis is then presented to the rest of the world as the solution. The far-right does the same. It invents crisis in order to manipulate fear and uncertainty. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán barks about the threat of refugees, but there are almost no refugees in that country. Ceaseless “issue invention” skirts the fundamental issue. Museums often address their colonial legacy by decolonising with a colonialist attitude. They speak a different language now, but how they speak is harder to change. Whereas I am concerned with the manner of speaking.

SALT chose not to speak about these things or brand them and has been more interested in particular individuals as constituents. I always had the belief that institutions are not by default essential. If you do not meet the challenge of becoming pertinent you may as well quit, and we should never forget that only when a constituency and a museum see each other eye to eye during a condition of exception is when stuff really happens. It could be a severe crisis, a revolutionary instance when you understand with all the cells in your body that what you know does not work and you feel the urge to reorganise life all over again.

ÖE: There is an ongoing effort, both in theory and practice, to rethink citizenship beyond fixed identities or a status that can be granted, put on hold, or cancelled. What role do you think art institutions play to affect public debates about citizenship? In other words, how do they go beyond “powerless socialisation”—when publicness is reduced to an experience of gathering—to use your term?

VK: One my role models, Kathy Halbreich, said to me eighteen years ago that institutions are the context of bringing people together and not dividing them further in a divided society. At that time, she was at the Walker Art Center and instituted a policy of distributing membership cards to people living on welfare.

First, you have to create an environment for people who do not normally come across each other to meet—stop profiling and “targeting” audiences. (I learned from Kathy early on how to reverse rotate security so that people do not have the impression that they are followed.) People of different classes, beliefs, and backgrounds do not cross each other normally—some will watch the world from the tinted glasses of their SUVs. They will have never seen a public hospital in their lives. They also do not cross each others’ neighbourhoods and places and homes. A cultural institution is possibly one of the few places that confrontation really and metaphorically takes place. An institution is not for the privileged to view “other people’s miseries.” To navigate this contextual environment needs utmost care and attention. Everybody has to feel at home just enough, and no particular group can claim ownership over another.

If that’s in place, and people are feeling welcome, you can begin to have layered programmes that take the user seriously. You do not want to infantilise people. I have always said SALT likes to create programmes for people who are more intelligent than the institution—as the “outside” is always more intelligent and knowledgeable. Ideally, what we do as institutions is stir the latent knowledge that often stands dormant and perhaps needs further exploration. This is when a discussion begins to shape itself, has its own life, and is no longer owned by an institution. The fundamental goal is to institute a culture where people understand you are serious and diligent: they may not agree with you, but they will still be engaged and take it elsewhere. Other than programmes, in terms of hospitality, collaborations, and partnerships, there may be another level of discussion taking place.

Finally, there is the aspect of serving multiple patrons, on which Manolo Borja-Villel, the director of Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, said in a discussion, “We had the Royal Queen downstairs and drag queens upstairs. Snipers on the rooftop and stilettos on the backstage. The two events occurred in a kind of parallel universe—each with their own communities and probably blissfully unaware of each other.” I understood in the long run that people do not have to be cognizant of each other’s presence.

Image: Futurefarmers, Seed Journey, 2016, detail. The Uses of Art: Final Exhibition, SALT Galata, 2017. Photo: Mustafa Hazneci.

ÖE: The democratic project you allude to depends on the principle of participation. Who do you think was excluded before? For an agonistic democratic framework, do you only work with the convinced? If not, how do you convince those who are not convinced that this framework is in their best interests?

VK: It is not required to participate right there, and right away is not a requirement. Some may prefer to take the discussion to their workplace, to their friends, or to their home or social media. Originally, only the included had their values, aspirations, and visions translated to the masses. I was more interested in the changes after the 1960s in cultural institutions, and to what happened after these great experiments in the democratisation of museums, where no one would be excluded. From the 1980s onwards, inclusivity turned into a massive dumbing down in institutions—remember the blockbusters? The public imploded and got superseded by populism. I am not trying to say everything was fine before, and I don’t have a problem with good visitor numbers. The question is how to retain an agonistic framework where different positions are entertained. There will always be people who remain with the institution, even if they disagree with it. That is the strength of SALT; it has shown that capacity to be taken seriously, and it will not merely speak to a “captive audience,” or for their view only. İt is a very tough position to maintain. As my colleague Charles Esche used to say, “Art is not for everyone but it could be for anyone.” If that anyone becomes someone, we have done our job.

ÖE: In your talk last year, you said you used to believe that museums don’t have to take a side but only offer propositions to help people make better informed decisions. You also mentioned that you are not so sure about this anymore. What changed your mind?

VK: In the talk, I was referring to the idea of the institution taking a position on a public matter. I am still torn between the urgent and the long term, between the reactive and the well-researched. The choice between taking an implied stance—a minimum moral imperative—and making an open declaration is still unresolved for me. You see, in the conditions we are facing, we are supposed to draw the line between what can and cannot be said without throwing the institution in harm’s way. We go through these kinds of editorial decisions all the time because we do not like to find ourselves in a position of censorship later. However, the line itself is not a given, and the lonelier you are when you are drawing that line, the more conservative you will be. It is the ambiguity and arbitrariness produced by power that is profoundly disturbing.

A colleague and a friend, Osman Kavala, was detained and then jailed in the fall of 2017. He is a civic leader and the founder of Anadolu Kültür—a non-profit organisation advocating for cultural rights—and its Istanbul-based initiative Depo, which is a space for exhibitions, public programmes, and a publisher for politically and socially informed cultural projects. Osman has been accused of having links with the organisers of the Gezi Protests in 2013 and the coup attempt in 2016. The charges are baseless and we have been waiting for an indictment for more than 300 days. In this instance, the best way of supporting Osman is to constantly find ways of keeping his legacy as strong as ever. To make a statement against Osman’s incarceration at a major institutional level would have been great, but I have not seen institutions getting together and co-authoring a text.

ÖE: Speaking about institutional solidarities, I also want to ask you about SALT’s main alliance, L’Internationale, which is a confederation of seven art institutions that seek ways to share collections, expertise, research, and public access among partners. [1] What does it mean to work transnationally and trans-institutionally in this particular time shaped by neo-nationalism, and how has it changed the way SALT thinks about its publics? Finally, how do you think L’Internationale is different from other historical and contemporary international networks and institutional alliances?

VK: It started with the L'Internationale. Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 and 1986 project in 2011. SALT joined in 2014 as the confederation was being created. None of this would be possible without European Union support, which is quite telling, because it underscores the value of a post-bilateral society. UN-style international organisations such as AICA, CIMAM, and others have not been effective for a myriad of reasons. Manuel Borja-Villel and Zdenka Badovinac had served as presidents of CIMAM. Charles Esche, Bart de Baere, and I have also served on the board over the years. The establishment of L'Internationale carries all of the disappointments we had with CIMAM. This is not a plea to get rid of AICA or CIMAM but to institute, next to those, more agile, intimate “networks” with different sorts of perimeters. L’Internationale is a powerful body of institutions that sees the world from a different lens than its peers in the power corridors of London, New York, or Paris.

The alliance works, firstly on a programme level. We understood in the past that putting teams together without a content-driven agenda is not the way to go. The confederation creates the possibility of different teams from different museums to work together on parallel projects with a core conviction. I cannot overestimate the value of the confederation and it was a privilege to share a table with some of the most thoughtful and inspirational curators and museum people in the world today. There is little agreement but a lot of respect.

There is a consensus that we are facing similar conditions to those in the late 1930s but we have already lived through that, and the “never again” institutions put in place to avert another disaster have not been effective. This is a new situation, and in the new culture wars, we need new kinds of internationalisms. We need to take care of each other.

Vasıf Kortun is a curator, writer, and educator based in Ayvalık, Turkey. He was the Founding Director of the Museum of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annadale-on-Hudson (1993–97); Proje4L Istanbul Museum of Contemporary Art (2001–04); Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul (2001–10); and SALT, Istanbul and Ankara (2011–17).

[1] The L’Internationale partners include Moderna galerija, Ljubljana; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp; SALT, Istanbul and Ankara; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

[kateayoung-blog]

Our Public Private Lives

It seems our days of prolific brunch documentation and oversharing shan’t be behind us anytime soon. A 2015 survey found that the average online individual actively uses 2.82 social media platforms – 5.54 accounts per person and rising (Mander 2015). Collectively, we share 95 million photos and videos on Instagram every day (Osman 2018), creating a never-ending feed of selfies, puppies, meals, and sunsets. Social media has become an essential tool of social self-formation (McCosker & Wilken 2014, p. 292), serving our longing to connect with others, whilst fuelling our relentless need to share every detail of our lives.

Perhaps the greatest affordance of the reign of social media is our ability to customise our lives. Producing our own content means that we are in control of how our profiles, or our lives as seen by cyberspace, appear (Siapera 2012, p. 198). All aspects of our online existence are malleable, from our friendship circles to our interests and affiliations, where this data can then be used to track down other individuals of similar circumstance, wherever they may be. This “networked individualism” removes us from geographical constraints, allowing us to form “communities of choice”, and extending the reach of our content to a global audience (Siapera 2012, p. 199). Our levels of openness, as well as our negotiated online appearances, can be altered to fit our audiences (van der Nagel 2013), raising the question of whether there is a clear distinction in this modern world between what is public and what is private.

As social media usage continues to climb, so do our levels of public exposure and self-disclosure (McCosker & Wilken 2014, p. 292). Feeling the pressures of the constant drive to produce content, many seem to believe that broadcasting everything from the traffic they’ve encountered to their workout schedules is appropriate in the social media sphere. But are we engaging in this behaviour to feel connected to others or for fear of ceasing to exist if we fail to participate (Siapera 2012, p.  205)? The term “Facebook official” has become part of our vernacular, implying that if it has not been posted to social media, and thus broadcast to the world, then it isn’t real. Disagreements and grievances are being taken online, whether it be for convenience or to share our experiences with the masses. An entire generation of social media influencers have been born, encouraging people to participate in real-world activities just “for the gram”, and the perceived social validation that comes with an influx of likes and followers. In this strange new world of publicness, it seems that the more you are perceived to share with the world, perhaps the more private you can be as your audience assumes transparency (boyd 2012, p. 76).

Issues of online privacy have been brought to the forefront recently, as our personal data is increasingly harvested, sold, and then thrown back at us for manipulation. Our incessant desire to share products we like, political affiliations, and our locations with our social networks has meant that not only can our online shopping experiences and advertisements be personalised and targeted, but so can the news and political dialogue we are exposed to. Social media platforms are perhaps the biggest offenders in the undisclosed sharing of data, to the extent that this past week, Mark Zuckerberg has been giving congressional testimony. But isn’t it ironic that we are so horrified by the concept of our personal data being breached when, really, it’s only available for corporate use due to our own willingness to broadcast it?

References

boyd, d 2012, 'Participating in the Always-On Lifestyle', in M Mandiberg (ed.) The Social Media Reader,  NYU Press, New York, pp. 71-76.

College Humour, Look at this Instagram (Nickelback Parody), 10 December 2012, viewed 13 April 2018, <https://youtu.be/Nn-dD-QKYN4>.

Mander, J 2015, Chart of the Day: Internet Users Have Average of 5.54 Social Media Accounts, Global Web Index, viewed 15 April 2018, <https://blog.globalwebindex.com/chart-of-the-day/internet-users-have-average-of-5-54-social-media-accounts/>.

McCosker, A & Wilken, R 2014, 'Social Selves', in S Cunningham and S Turnbull (eds), The media & communications in Australia,  Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 291-295.

Osman, M 2018, 18 Instagram Stats Every Marketer Should Know for 2018, Sprout Social, viewed 15 April 2018, <https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-stats/>.

Siapera, E 2012, 'Socialities and social media', in Understanding new media,  SAGE, London, pp. 191-208.

Images

'Daily Cartoon: Thursday, November 9th' 2017 [image], Farley Katz, New Yorker, viewed 15 April 2018, <https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/daily-cartoon/thursday-november-9th-marathon-forest>.

'I can’t believe there are so many...' [image], Someecards, viewed 15 April 2018, <https://www.someecards.com/cry-for-help-cards/i-cant-believe-there-are-so-many-privacy-risks-involved-in-broadcasting-my-entire-life-on-facebook/>.

[curatingpublicspace]

part 7 the end...

#Skärmavbild 2017-04-22 kl. 22.29.17

#quote, is the way we acnkowledge  the “other”, by an interaction in public debate. There are not many other ways to do so. #quote is thus to acknowledge “otherness” as a source of ones own creativity, partly constituting the self, may it be from inspiration or critique, both creative practices that from of publicness.

[curatingpublicspace]

part 5

#Communication and #publicness is a never-ending process, well as long as there are subjects dwelling not so freely in this space which we share, in the public. Our “nessness” (creation of the shared self, through communication) in the public is the “ourness”. (Two new hermeneutical concepts created just because we can. Although language is controlled, it is ultimately the only free form of expression. it can be written in the sand and no commodities are needed for its realisation. If read before the waves pull it in to the ocean and understanding is reached, it develops freely, conditioned only by “ourness”, our “sharedness” or so institutionally put “publicness”). This the battleground for creation, where subjects are forged in the name of values expressed by public funding, the politics of the self in the realm of art. Lets be frank, knowledge, that mysterious shaper of subjects is not without directed agency, it is not incorporating all and ever present shared values. No, it’s the opposite of that, a constant moving of subjectivities in different directions, driven by different contesting values, steered by underlying agendas. Lets change the subject and in our minds for a moment, travel far away or just around the corner if your are so lucky. We are siting with our hands buried in the sand looking at the star, that warms us in the day and in the night, as it slowly greets us with its beauty for a last time this day. This moment we share with the one subject of our choice, whom we preferably are all alone in the universe with for that moment. (Well there is always a lonely sorry ass bastard that would say. - I don’t like to be on a dreamy beach, and I don’t find sunsets or sharing a moment of peace with someone I cherish more than myself, at least in some moments in life, desirable. These persons are estimably 1% of the population, and thus have no democratic power in this discussion, so lets leave them out). Why this trip, you might ask. We now carry memories of shared values that most would understand as good and desirable. And isn’t that knowledge, does that creates “publicness”? 

Lets leave the romance and return to our discussion, about  “public space” (abstract in general), ”public place” (concrete and mapped), battled in the realm of communication. Well its is because it is not a topic of publicness, as there is no battle, its already won, 99% of us have decided for the same value. Many of Olafur Eliasson art projects would possibly move in the realm of this non-publicness. I.e. his artistic expressions are already valued as core common understandings in our “nessness” or “ourness”, even if his sunsets are artificial, sunsets still (more people have made decent against this creation, than against the real experienced phenomenon). But there are so many other and more complex desires in our reality, creating the human condition. So we can sediment that desire, is a core condition for understanding communication and its further creation of “publicness”. We desire and we are driven by ever contested opposing values. These are most often hidden (primarily in the creation of an artistic space, as the semiotics of expressed creativity are driven by elitist hermeneutics, even though its epistemological origins is banal and common. Sorry we correct ourselves, the true elite that govern this planet do not understand these semiotics more than the working class, so the issue of distinction is hermeneutical or one of cultural and social capital and to some extent symbolic capital) only decoded in active communication. Thus Habermas has uncovered a crucial character in the creation of public space, that it is an active process of decoding and recoding. The published needs to create movement, we could call an object that measures this creation of the public, a movement meter. Thus we can clearly see that the other movement meter that one by Olafur Eliassson is far from the simple romanticisms of nature or science, but expresses underlying meanings that are not shared. But hidden and only brought to light if one decodes the ether of that particular “public place” of expression, redefining “publicness”. Shared, the decodification of the public is created by communication and language, it has an epistemological and hermeneutical “immaterial body” (discourse) and a “material body”, space/place (object/commodity), it is “publishedness”, it is the “public space”, it is “ourness” and the “nessness”, (when reading this text humour is an essential hermeneutical tool for decoding). 

#letsnotcommunicate #sunset #inthelandoftheblindtheoneeyedisking 

 #futurepublications #enlightenment #philosophyofthepublic

[pulkitmogha]

Public to be realized vis-à-vis private. Carmona, M 2003, Public places, urban spaces: the dimensions of urban design, Architectural Press, Oxford.