collaboration

Also, the point about anger as impetus for aesthetic production reflects the visual boldness and creativity of the recent marches.

The presentation is a part of, and a reflection on, the thought processes and critical encounters that lab 109, a group of individuals with very varied histories, has involved itself with for five months. Initially there was common ground in a deep questioning of, if not skepticism and resistance to, the possible purpose or value of an enforced group activity. This lead to the offering of individual interests and concerns for general contemplation, without them ever having to become a group activity.

‘We’ do not think, each has thoughts independently; each unit functions with selfish desires and aims yet the group thrives. We are the idiot savants of culture yet the hive mind achieves in spite of itself. This coalition exists through unity; each function is reliant upon a complex interplay of separate processors, each piece to play its part ignorant of any overview. The entity of the group functions never the less, assured on the condition that something of each unit will remain in tact. As we leave the whole is dismantled, each unit altered in some way and something of that sculpt will reappear in the creation of the future.

We are not a swarm who lie dormant upon each other as a mass but still we flap our wings, dance our dances to pass the scent down the trail, to indicate the location of divisible nectar, at intervals pinching each other and passing ripples of disruption down the communal body, always verging on collapse, dispersion.

Both propagating and contaminating, we are each others’ tools whilst to wrestle with responsibilities becomes negotiation. Not ‘knowing’ the other but being open to the possibility of unpredictable pollutions and pollinations.

The more one nears to truth, the more it retreats and the greater the rage to unveil the secret. We learn and unlearn, building and collapsing over and over again. Possibility only comes through illegible, arbitrary, fortuitous signs. Ransack the vulnerable points, soak up the surplus and sail on, fly further.

Like busy little bees we built. Like busy little bees we collected. Like busy little bees we lived and died for industry. Like busy little bees we worshipped one, then killed her off when she grew too strong. Like busy little bees we flew leading others to the glorious new. Like busy little bees we started to slow.

To observe, to watch others taking part is to witness the shape and form of the swarm, to hear its drone. Not from above or below, but from within. From that peculiar nothingness between each bee, each buzz. It is to take part by not taking part, by reflecting and offering a kind of gaze.

My goal, or rather my aim, was to survive. Fear ruled the early exchanges; I wanted to be a part, but to be a part on my terms. I have my limits and my limitations and wanted to find my role within the group. I wanted to do my shift, I didn’t want to shirk my responsibility.
There but in the background.
I am not a leader, I am a technician.
I am not the queen bee, I am a worker.

***

Ephemeral ideas have material consequence, just as the bee represents intersubjectivity, a pure relation or dynamic vector of cross-fertilisation in our social ecology.

This open enquiry became the modus operandi, retaining difference while sharing experience. The disinclination to narrow the field of enquiry resulted in a rhizomatic propagation of knowledge, expertise and experience. The fragile and inchoate connectivity of the community was recognized and embraced, and the analogy to the beehive always had colony collapse alongside.

By acknowledging, allowing, and embracing the fact that we are individuals thrown together to create a “group project” we have learned to maneuver through a collective of ideas that miraculously come together despite (or as a result of) our differences. We have had to function strategically in order to arrive at something cohesive without lulling ourselves into a false sense of harmony that can often result in rupture (rapture) in the face of excessive and forced compromise.

***

“This is not a love song” as this is not a final presentation. There is no beginning and an ending. Bees become human and become bees. It is neverending, always becoming.

Like busy little bees we ignored what was shown. Like busy little bees we started to slow. Like busy little bees we started to slow. Like busy little bees we tried for home but like busy little bees we had already thrown the dice eager to get ahead, get ahead, get ahead, get ahead and leave the rest for dead.

***

Project statement presented 28 March, 2009 at 15:00 to 17:00.

Here is a link to Mikey Tomkins (pictured right) beehive on top of the Royal Festival Hall: Royal Festival Hive

Please feel free to submit me any questions you’d like me to ask him next week, when I will be interviewing him. Mikey is interested in Guattari, subjectivity,  social ecology, architecture and bee-keeping, so he could be a very useful source of information. He was also recommending this book: The Beehive Metaphor: From Guadi to Le Corbusier by Juan Antonio Ramírez

Mikey’s friend, Rob Mullender, made a binaural recording of bees at an observational hive in South London.  Apparently, it is very effective through headphones.

Divine Inspiration

The Hermeneutic Circle

Bridging the Gap (of understanding)

[550] [Apollo to Hermes] “But I will tell you another thing, Son of all-glorious Maia and Zeus who holds the aegis, Luck-bringing genius of the gods. There are certain holy ones, sisters born — three virgins gifted with wings: their heads are besprinkled with white meal, and they dwell under a ridge of Parnassus. These are teachers of divination apart from me, the art which I practised while yet a boy following herds, though my father paid no heed to it. From their home they fly now here, now there, feeding on honey-comb and bringing all things to pass. And when they are inspired through eating yellow honey, they are willing to speak truth; but if they be deprived of the gods’ sweet food, then they speak falsely, as they swarm in and out together. These, then, I give you; enquire of them strictly and delight your heart: and if you should teach any mortal so to do, often will he hear your response — if he have good fortune. Take these, Son of Maia, and tend the wild roving, horned oxen and horses and patient mules.”

(Homeric Hymn IV to Hermes, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White. http://www.theoi.com/Text/HomericHymns2.html)

We’ll make marks on paper instead.
Verse and Chapter are lies.
We need a martyr. We need a death to rally our cry. We need a censor to cross out words/reinforce our rhetoric.
The following dictation was muffled and cannot be made out;

…………………………sunlight hurts our eyes……………pledge of allegiance…………………get me out of this fucking boat……………..I took her and will not let her out until she learns…………….

The following transcript was smattered with the blood from the artery that runs up the back of my ankle and was rendered mostly unintelligible.

……………..redundancy……………..encroaching wrath of nationalism…………Soap [sap?] in my eyes…..my lung has collapsed I’m out of breath……….[indecipherable]

What to do with the dunken sailor? Out drink the salty bastard.
…I am building a new world, who is with me?
……You’ll need honey-bees….
No colonization without pollen[iz]ation….

This is a redundant/futile prayer for a productive unity to arise out of multiplicity/no format/content has been decided an we fall to heterogeneity/labyrinth.

I am a headless totalitarian
i) I abhor logic
ii) I demand Order.

Think your telescope is broken as all I can see is behind my eye.

Kenneth Goldsmith at Street Poets and Visionaries Mercer Union. Toronto, 2009

UNCREATIVITY AS A CREATIVE PRACTICE
Kenneth Goldsmith

I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity.
On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day’s New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page. Today, November 10, 2000, I am approximately half way through the project. I intend to finish by New Year’s Day.
The object of the project is to be as uncreative in the process as possible. It’s one of the hardest constraints an artist can muster, particularly on a project of this scale; with every keystroke comes the temptation to “fudge,” “cut-and-paste,” and “skew” the mundane language. But to do so would be to foil the exercise.
I’ve long been an advocate of extreme process writing–recording every move my body has made in a day, recording every word I spoke over the course of a week, recording every sound I heard ending in the sound of “r” for almost four years–but never have I faced a writing process this dry, this extreme, this boring.
John Cage said “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
I’m interested in a valueless practice. Nothing has less value than yesterday’s news (in this case yesterday’s newspaper–what could be of less value, say, than stock quotes from September 1, 2000?). I’m interested in quantifying and concretizing the vast amount of “nutritionless” language; I’m also interested in the process itself being equally nutritionless.
When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity.

(I guess thats impossible!)

He is also an expert on boring as well as boring boring, unboring boring, modified boredom, and boredom with all the boring parts cut out of it. If you are sufficiently interested (or should that be bored) check out link!

I came across this article in the Washington Post about an exhibition on kintsugi, and though I highly doubt anybody could make it, I thought it would be interesting to share conceptually.

Kintsugi is a method of repairing ceramics (usually those used in tea ceremonies) which uses a lacquer resin that is meant to look like solid gold:

The story of kintsugi may have begun in the late 15th century, when the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl back to China to be fixed. It returned held together with ugly metal staples, launching Japanese craftsmen on a quest for a new form of repair that could make a broken piece look as good as new, or better. Japanese collectors developed such a taste for kintsugi that some were accused of deliberately breaking prized ceramics, just to have them mended in gold.

I find it relates a lot to our own group obsession with destruction, collapse, failure, &c. and ultimately some form of rebirth. In this case, the old and broken is not replaced or discarded, but mended into something new and perhaps even more beautiful. So much so, that destruction will take place – that an object will be sacrificed – in order to achieve this state.

Empty? It depends what you mean. The earliest case was not a room but a piece of music – John Cage’s 4’33″, where the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds without playing a key. Many say there’s plenty to hear in the silence.
These works follow a typical trajectory of modern art. Step by step, from reduction to reduction, we make a clean sweep, from figuration to abstraction, to a uniform canvas, to a blank canvas, and then to a blank wall.
Having arrived at emptiness, fill her up again – with meanings. Sometimes the emphasis is on absence, on contemplating nothingness. Sometimes it’s on noticing what you might have overlooked.
Perhaps you should notice all the gallery background noises you ignore. Perhaps you should see that art has its environment, which crucially conditions our experience of it. Or perhaps you should be looking at the only exhibits that remain in your empty gallery – yourselves.
The empties are always going to be full of something. The art consists of working out what.
Tom Lubbock (article in Independent)