The New Normal

THEY ARE BUSHY, THEY ARE DARK, AND THEY ARE CLUMPS

December 2020 the New Normal artistic research book has been co-published by Strelka Press and Park Books. The New Normal publication encompasses the breadth, diversity, and intensity of activity that has taken place throughout the three-year project. From 2017–2019, The New Normal think-tank at Strelka Institute investigated the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities in Russia, and globally.
The work was conducted by ninety interdisciplinary researchers from thirty different countries and over forty faculty members, drawn not only from the field of architecture but also from the areas of computer science, philosophy, art, cinema, economics, and more. Projects ranged from short-form cinema and software design to proposals for new political systems and economic models. At stake for the work is not only what the urban future looks like, but also how it works; how it circulates ideas, value, and power. The twenty-two interlinked projects which were developed show how speculative urban design can move upstream in the decision-making processes.

Coined by Carl Schmitt and expanded by Giorgio Agamben, a “state of exception”—the exhibition’s Chinese title—refers to a political situation in which the normal laws and regulations of a society are abruptly suspended, replaced by temporary conditions that in turn become a new status quo. States of exception have been imposed at moments of crisis throughout modern history. Crisis today is constant, as ideals of freedom, equality, and openness, once held by some as universal values, give way to mass shootings, aborted ceasefires, violated norms, and tainted elections. In 2015, the Chinese leadership introduced “the new normal,” a way of talking about economic growth rates that, while lower than during the exuberant years of the early 2000s, continue to trump those of most other major economies. China’s assertively capitalist, internationalist response to these increasingly acute dynamics—recently typified by President Xi Jinping’s address to the World Economic Forum in Davos—might also be considered a “state of exception,” one that runs parallel to the new patterns of globalization that inform artistic cosmopolitanism today.

start of fellowship

We started the PML fellowship with meeting sessions during the Transmediale resource006 event: Overflow.

Talked about theories, praxis, & administration (media utopianism of the 90s being trashed by web 2.0 / political, collective, social).

Jonathan Kempp and Martin Howse discussed christal worlds, drill corez, segmentation of the mind, stack/frame/heap, bio leaching…

Fabian Giraud presented several projects, burning the chip of a camera in the focus point of a particle accelerator underneath the louvre.

We also discussed the January 2014 event titled ‘Taking care of Things’

some more notes:
Howard Slater on Post Media
Claus Pias on Cybernetics
Mark B Hensen on human agency & social life
Forian Cramer on Anti-Media
Graswurzel.TV  Susa Neubronner
Conrad Atkinson on Dreams of Permanence: Dreams of Transience
Fassbinder’s film Welt am Draht
Kate Rich on bureau of inverse technology
Friedrich Kittler on time based media
Wolfgang Welsch on Ästhetisches Denken
Robin Mackay editor collapse journal

Anti-political Aesthetics

The Anti-political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond (Svenja Bromberg)

quotes:
“Since dOCUMENTA there has been a real explosion in art exhibitions that explicitly centre around objects and articulate a relation to the philosophical strand of Object-Oriented Ontolgy (OOO)
“…”
As Diedrich Diederichsen outlines in a recent e-flux article, it is precisely what was still antithetical to the Fordist assembly line – different modes of dreaming ‘dangerously’ or living authentic or alternative lives – that seems to have become part of the post-Fordist ‘imperative to produce a perfect self as a perfect thing’.
“…”
Harman’s ‘Object-Oriented Aesthetics’
“…”
Interaction, relationship, causation, linkage are finally the names for a complex process that can be initiated between two real objects or two sensual objects only by a third intentional agent of the opposite type (in the first case sensual, in the second case real). Because, while real objects cannot touch each other, ‘sensual objects always touch real ones’, as they only exist for real objects.
“…”
There is no way in which Harman could account for the accumulation of powers and forces within specific objects or object constellations that violate certain relations or even deny access to them; there is no way in which objects might be distributed unequally in different networks of relations or in which relations might bind objects to conditions of extreme suffering, of suffocation, of death – and we could here speak of relations between people and their means of subsistence as much as of the relation between a company that emits toxic fumes and its surrounding biosphere.
“…”
Philosophy and simultaneously aesthetics have thus become extremely impoverished, as they have lost any concepts that could allow judgements that go beyond the question if a ‘new’ relation has been forged or not. With respect to the spectator, Harman seems to remain extremely Kantian, in the sense that for him art is fundamentally about the encounter between the artwork and the spectator and the emerging aesthetic reaction or ‘judgement’.
“…”
Meillassoux’s ‘Inaesthetics’
“…”
[P]hilosophy is concerned with a real and dense possible which I call the ‘may-be’ [peut-être]. This peut-être […] is very close to the final peut-être of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés…
“…”
Against his master Alain Badiou, Meillassoux sees these questions not resolved in Coup de dès in relation to an evental configuration of the poem towards a newly emerging truth, but as precisely eternalised in a hypothetical ‘perhaps’, by means of a metre that simultaneously exists and in-exists: the activity of ‘fixer l’infini’. Meillassoux argues this on the grounds of the ‘unique Number’ that we can find alluded to but finally suspended in the line of the poem ‘it was the number – were it to have existed’, but that nevertheless has an, albeit questionable, hidden existence via a code within the poem.
“…”
At the same time the aesthetics of hope Meillassoux’s philosophy offers us is not a Blochian ‘not-yet-being’ that, in its utopian sense, is nevertheless directed in a very concrete way against the oppressive material conditions of existence under capitalism, and which is itself only generated by the participation in that very same struggle. Meillassoux’s real of superchaos, which art might help us to access is, whilst radically contingent, also absolute, containing in itself ‘the equal contingency of order and disorder, of becoming and sempiternity’.

 

Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing

Reading: Boris Arvatov, Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (1925)

The relation of the individual and the collective to the Thing is the most fundamental and important, the most defining of social relations. […] If the significance of the human relation to the Thing has not been understood, or has only been partially understood as a relation to the means of production, this is because until now Marxists have known only the bourgeois word of things. This world is disorganized and divided into two sharply delimited domains, those of technical and everyday things. The latter fell completely outside of scientific consideration, as static and secondary forms. […] The present notes try to shed light on several questions of everyday life in relation to questions of the culture of the Thing, from the perspective of precisely these urgent needs of proletarian cultural construction.

Brainstorming notes:
– Every day life [byt]
– [byt] = bit (play of words)
– bytie =  “existence”
– Style-ism & fashion
– Technological intelligensia “…” becoming an integral organiser of the world of things
– Today the thing becomes a mobile phone
– See also translaters essay  (christina kiaer)