2.0 ALREADY TOOK PLACE. It started months before the opening, as a whole team of artists developed the project, from its conception, in and out of the mode of 2.0. During the public phase of the exhibition, they will hand over their initial use, expertise and tools to a group of hosts, dedicated to welcome the visitors. They will demonstrate to the visitors how it can be done, 2.0 that is. This overall approach points to the in-progress potential of the Warum 2.0, as well as to its call for continuity. Is there any organization interested?
Warum 2.0 calls for 2.0 involvement, while at the same time staging it. Of course, visitors will be encouraged by the hosts to operate the tools themselves, but primarily, they are invited to observe the hosts themselves, enacting 2.0. as well as to get insights in the ‘black box’ of the whole impressive technological apparatus of Warum itself. The main motivation for including distance and positioning in this installation – calling itself an ‘arena’, precisely for this reason – , lies in the core intention of Warum 2.0, as is formulated by ‘far from impact’.
In Warum 2.0 the visitor is a walker. With reference to Hans Ulrich we state that a walker is someone who accepts the idea that the spectacle has always already begun. Expressions you find here in this blog, such as ‘far from impact’ and ‘we are done with the idea of spectacle’ do not eliminate these issues. They ask for relating to them, and questioning what is at stake today in the field of media.
WARUM 2.0 under construction, general view from surveillance cam.
WARUM 2.0 under construction, projected images of war victims.
WARUM 2.0 in Second Life, under construction.
SOME INTENTIONS. In the WARUM 2.O installation project, we try to install distances. We try to create a possible but concrete context ‘far from impact’.
We want to get away from the daily ‘dressage’, that ‘training’ (by media, by programs, by gadgets and by technology expertise) that constantly imposes, educates and breaks-in onto us, but that in effect is based on the military model (again a military model) once instituted by Roman traditions.
Because in the end, they who wish for, refine and execute this ‘training’ are not concerned with us (users, makers, who want to express works and opinions of their own). They are mostly operating from a specific strategy and a certain desire for power – call it: populist circumstantial interventionism; a certain cult of a scientific-military messianism; a cult of the arsenal; a lust for unheard of strategic possibilities of social, environmental and psychological management; a kind of extermination of the personal expression on a daily basis, bypassing arenas, open public forums, even institutions of justice.
So then, again, far from impact, with some distance to impact. Can we exist, if not without impact, then at least, can we find ways to act, make and think from a certain distance (a critical distance that is) from impact? That is what we try to explore with WARUM 2.0. A real challenge. It is possible to ‘be’ as we are, pro-creators that is, far from impact? – and intervene?
(the formulation of this question I have only discovered during and after years of discussions I had with makers, programmers, critics and artists, during many workshops and developments. The ‘university of disaster’ Virilio calls for, is indeed a ‘fact’ since a long time… There are indeed many who look for, or are already engaged in this kind of research.)
Is this a situation then of ‘this as if it’? (‘This is as if it’ was the title of a little book CARGO published last year http://www.cargoweb.org/, subtitled ‘Weak Media’ http://dit.weakmedia.becoming.be/page.php?label=dit ). If not a universal (‘university’) then at least, it can become a situation of meetings of individuals, groups and organizations, who are willing to ask questions, if not to find some answers.
Far from impact. My feeling today is: it will never be that far from it. Especially if we want to intervene as well. And what if we phrase it as: far from war?
What I suggest here, with IMPACTOLOGY, is not so much a radical critique that is itself impact, but a tool for analysis that may add that extra critical investigating rhythm to the world as it is.
I guess we are done with the idea of the spectacle, for a while. So far from impact, so far from war, at least from the logic of it.
HOWEVER it could also well be that YouTube, just like TV and ‘corporate science’ before it, as such also offers a way out, because as it is, it definitely triggers all the violence and excess there is, and it puts it in the open and onto the public stage. Let’s always be aware of individuals and organizations (of ‘us’ that is) who offer their unique alternative, especially so if they are as arrogant to say: this is for your own good.
Stefaan Decostere, January 2008.
VILEM FLUSSER & HENRI LEFEBVRE. In 1983 Vilem Flusser published his book ‘Für eine Philosophie der Photographie’ (Towards a philosophy of photography). In it we may find some helping tools for analysing the technics of impact. Talking about photography and pictures and visual media in general, he offers a model of investigation based on four basic concepts: the image – the apparatus – the program – and the information. And what is important, I think, is that he defines ‘information’, not as information as data, but as the unique expression of the critical ‘handling’ of this trinity of image/machine/program.
http://www.claudia-klinger.de/flusser/
Coincidence or not (and very probably not), also in the eighties, Henri Lefebvre started to publish work developing his notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’. He introduces the ‘rhythmanalist’, a person he describes not as a user, but as an observer who intervenes, in a situation of ‘mediatised everyday’, an everyday that is simultaneously fashioned and ignored by these (technological) means that make the apparatuses. Just like Virilio after him, he proposes to study the disasters we live in (futurism, impact, the synchronization of instantaneous emotions – what Virilio calls ‘the communism of affects’) – and to intervene.
http://www.notbored.org/space.html
http://hjem.get2net.dk/gronlund/Lefebvre_Rhythmanaslyses.html
FAR FROM IMPACT – EVENT 5 : 1984. ‘1984’ is not only Orwell, it is also the year Paul Virilio published his book ‘The negative horizon’. As I interviewed Paul Virilio again a few months ago, for the installation project Warum 2.0 (after the first interview we did together nearly 25 years ago), I read the book again. I had read it at the time, of course, but now reading it again (in the wonderful translation by Arjen Mulder and Patrice Riemens), it was as if I read a new book. Obviously because I had changed, my understanding had changed, but also because the times have changed. Today the book reads like a prophecy that came true.
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=566
In the book I even found descriptions which were like literal descriptions of the main element of the physical installation-arena Warum 2.0. At one point he describes the ‘dromosphere’ (the sphere of speed) as a ‘centrifuge’, a stadion for one person, in which one is witness of the anamorphosis of the speeded up reality, a with technology driven environment in which one experiences the grotesk deformations of what we once called ‘reality’.
In the interview (of which excerpts are posted here, and of which a dvd is on offer), Paul Virilio again and again repeats a quote by Octavio Paz, and keeps on expanding on it: ‘The impact of the moment is as uninhabitable as the future’. ‘L’impact de l’instant est aussi inhabitable que le futur’.
And he goes on saying that life in the impact means futurism. When we say that an artist is an impact-maker, we actually are saying he is a futurist. And remember, he says, futurists inspired fascism. Futurism leads to fascism, to new kinds of fascism which have nothing to do with pantzers, Mussolini or Hitler, but to Fascism linked to technical achievements.
“Why do men love that much technology? If you would ask me that question again”, Virilio says, “I would answer: because they think they are God! They have gone beyond the mastery of knowledge, towards an illusion of divinity. They create accidents of knowledge.”
That is the reason, after having introduced before the ‘musée des accidents’ (the museum of the accident), Virilio now calls for a university of the accident (une université du désastre), a contra arsenal.
PAUL VIRILIO: “When a person from the right or left says this, there is a life in the moment, a life in the impact. When we say that an artist is in impact-maker, I want to say this is Futurism. Remember that Marinetti inspired Fascism. Don’t forget that the Blitzkrieg emerged from Fascist Italian Futurism. I’m half Italian & it’s not by chance that I am sensitive to this futurisation phenomenon. We are faced here with a Futurism of the moment. I cite Paz’s extraordinary phrase, “The moment is as uninhabitable as the future.” Therefore the moment today is a masked Futurism leading to Fascism, new Fascisms which have nothing to do with pantzers, goose stepping, Mussolini or Hitler, but Fascisms linked to technical achievements, to this accident which I spoke of earlier. And this is a great threat to democracy and collective thought.”
FAR FROM IMPACT – EVENT 4 : WARUM 2.0. At this very moment, together with a group of friends, I am preparing a new installation for the media Artefact festival in Leuven, Belgium (it opens on February 12, 2008).
The installation is called Warum 2.0 because it refers to a tape I made in 1985 which was titled ‘Warum Wir Männer die Technik so Lieben’ (Why we men love that much technology).
That tape was a reflection on war and technology, together with some artists and Paul Virilio. At that time Virilio had written a very interesting book on the relation between cinema and war.
The installation Warum 2.0 will focus on our relation to the documentary image. Essentially, because that is the major change which happened between 1985 (the year the original tape was made) and today. As for war and technology, between then and now, nothing really changed in essence. One could say, there is just more war, more technology and there are more victims. But what changed really, because of technology, is the way we relate to war and to pictures of victims, and to the documentary image as such. New media changed all that.
The installation is called Warum 2.0 because in the form of an installation arena, it wants to reflect on and challenge the notion of 2.0. Over the years it became clear to me that 2.0 is kind of a fraud, at least if one understands it as I did until recently, as a situation of ‘user made content’, instead of what it is: ‘user driven impact’.
WARUM 2.0 is a research installation project that hopes to bring together critical reflection and media. More precisely, it wants to find ways of investigation in the phenomenon of impact. I see the version in Leuven as the first instalment of what could become a project-in-progress, indicating the possibility of further development in this research on the techniques of impact.
The arena creates an in-between situation between technology and users, between war and news gathering, between television and the networked media, between two ways of understanding 2.0 – as ‘content made by users’, and as ‘user driven impact’. In this sense, WARUM 2.0 is a public experiment.
The question is: can Warum 2.0 – as an apparatus par excellence to produce impact – also serve as a tool for resisting further blind engagement with the techniques of impact?
FAR FROM IMPACT – EVENT 2
Amsterdam, January 2008, the Video Vortex international symposium part 2, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration the Netherlands Media Arts Institute.
http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex/programme/
Impactology. It was great to announce and propose this new science to the fine assembly of the Amsterdam Vortex Symposium.
The aim of Impactology is to study ‘impact’, to take impact as a concept, to turn in into a new science, a new field of knowledge, and to analyse impact, chart and define it, and study its practical consequences.
So then, with Impactology, to take, put forward and invest impact as a mode of analysis, as a tool of analysis, rather than just as an object of it.
Impactology proposed as a science on the technics of impact, such as ‘storytelling’, such as ‘visible marketing’. In this field of study, YouTube is essentially seen as a new kind of technique of impact.
FAR FROM IMPACT – EVENT 3
In 1985 another artist created a great impact: Elim Klimov with his film ‘Come and see’, a film on war, and more specifically on Nazi army troops burning down hundreds of villages in Belarus and killing everybody living there. Klimov however turned the film itself into a form of impact, making it as powerful, as similar as possible to the Nazi impact. He had decided to double the original horror on the screen. The effects on the viewers of his impact were nearly as disastrous as the original massacre was on the victims in Russia. The effects on Klimov himself were also terminal: he never made another film again afterward. And the staged effects on the main character in the picture were also extremely significant. The only option the director left for his character to evolve, to deal with the event, was to make him shoot on the picture itself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_and_See
So then, Klimov, the film, the main character, the audience: they were all trapped in the logic of war, in the logic of the technique of impact.
DANIEL DEMOSTIER: The reason why the army always looks like ‘Hollywood’, is because it is fucking Hollywood. It’s what they do, that’s what they show, and they love it. They want to show off, to show how big they are, their technology, what they can do. And obviously, it would be very nice…. I try, sometimes, to find a suffering face of a soldier, but that’s a picture they don’t like very much. That’s the picture you try to get. But most of the time it’s a show-off. And all these pictures you make with the army, it’s only with the understanding of the army. It’s what they call an embedded situation. You get embedded with the army. They want to control everything. They actually control the picture.
FAR FROM IMPACT – EVENT 1: Brussels, October 2007, the Video Vortex international symposium part 1, organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, in collaboration with Argos Brussels. Video Vortex. One of the speakers present was media artist Keith Sanborn. Program by Keith Sanborn.
At one point Sanborn described an installation project he produced in Antwerp, where, in one and the same room, he showed a collection of very extreme videoclips, all equally loud and simultaneously visible on multiple screens of all sizes. Sanborn definitely created an impact there. Visitors, he said, could stay no longer in the installation environment for more than 5 minutes.
But then he said something very strange : ‘I want to understand what the impact is of all these surrrounding pictures’ / ‘I want to understand the impact’ / ‘I wanted to discover new ways of relating to these images’
These remarks made me think about the notion of impact, and its relevance to videomaking, television and more specifically in relation to the situation of video vortex on platforms such as YouTube.
Whenever ‘impact’ happens, so I thought, the only thing one can do and does, is to run away from it, to look for shelter, if not to react to it, responding to it with counter-impact, more impact that is.
When one is confronted with impact – of a bomb, an explosion, a newsbite, a shout (be it by an artist, a guru, a politian, it doesn’t matter by whom), an info bomb – , the only one thing one definitely cannot do, is, to start thinking about it, to reflect on it, to try to understand it, let alone to start searching for new ways of understanding, to discover new ways of expression. Neither can one start then a new kind of development, form an opinion, start up a new creation as a witness, a pro-active visitor, or as a maker. Impact excludes, annihilates creation. It only call for reaction or even intensification.
Only with a certain distance from impact, I started thinking, only ‘far from impact’ indeed, can one reflect, think, investigate and comment, as a person, as a user, as a maker.
