CARGO

-

The WARUM 2.0 arena closed down, before yesterday night, in Artefact Festival/Stuk/Leuven/Belgium. The installation hardware (lots of it, mostly wires & connections that is) is packed. Cargo is now just cargo. Heavy. Slowly on the move, in search for a new destination.. No more tickering data however; no more neuronal activity in the machines, in the human bodies nor in-between. Of course we tried hard to put this event on tape, and we will edit it. & soon, new little films will be posted on this blog.

Why is no crime. Come and see again this blog, from time to time. Cargo is a cargo lost, ah indeed, but not so the people it carries (makers and co-travellers alike), as they don’t stop engaging and questioning.

DEDICATION

Johan Blaeke was the person, of whom I wished he was my father. Together we started to develop Warum 2.0 last August, the physical part of it that is, the materials that would catch the images in the space of the installation arena. Johan died unexpectedly, soon after this week of very intense discussion, joy and testing. I never succeeded in replacing him with somebody else. I miss him. And I miss him so much. Out of the open space of his absence, an energy started to grow, that became the case of Warum 2.0.

It was my son Oszkár who showed me the way to connect to the visitors in Warum 2.0.. He, a very special boy of 10, and my great love, caring that is, being his father, was the reference, all the time. The openness of Oszkár, being a new fresh individual human to the world, as it is given, was conditional, yes, but without warning of accident, of hurt feelings, of possible and to be anticipated wrongdoing by others of any kind. Why, for Oszkár, has never been the question.

IN OUR HAND

The intermedia space of Warum 2.0 may be understood as an arena of struggle, far from impact. As long as we question the logic of war (the war of media and technology) we succeed in keepng that certain critical distance. Impact then, as an issue of prime interest in how war, men and technology are interrelated.

Paul Virilio says: whereas before the visible, there is the domain of the possible, after the visible, what is left then, is the unpredictable, the unexpected, plus the revelation of the accident in knowing, in understanding.

‘What is here to see? Is there anything visible?’ That could well be the ‘warum’ question some visitors might put forward. In the end, with Warum 2.0, what I would like them to see, is a way out of doom. As a maker (of documentaries), what was not possible anymore for me to do the last 10 years, could well be possible again now. Not exactly making documentaries that is, but having the tools and the posse force ready to start up processes of ‘seeing’ and ‘making visible’ out of the logic of the ‘war of images’, far from impact that is, outside the global revolving panorama in closed circuit of the audiovisual scene. WARUM 2.0 may be a practical version of that ‘delirious networked worktable’ so needed for making my (your, our) views visible.

(Paul Virilio in ‘Art as far as the eye can see’ (published by Berg, 2007). Sound on the clouds by Edwin Uytenbroek for Warum 2.0. The ‘delirious networked worktable’ concept, in This Is As If It , by Stefaan Decostere for CARGO, 2007).

“Which parts of society are exploiting this symbolic capital? Which kinds of collective memory and imaginary are at stake? Who are to benefit most (from these pictures)? Who is giving them marks of distiction? Capital value that is for the competitive market? Whose collective memory, whose aesthetics, and who benefits?”

As “capitalism is not a mode of production, but a production of modes and worlds” (engineered by corporations and sold to the people), the “planetary economic war is an aesthetic war between different worlds”.

Matteo Pasquinelli, in ICW – Immaterial Civil War (My creativity reader, edited by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, published by the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2007)

http://www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity

Daniel Demoustier told me that when he was filming the war victims he talked to them and they to him. These conversations however were not recorded. We then, we see the faces, but we don’t hear them speaking to us. So then, why not go back to them? Anybody interested? Support? Suggestions?

Moving image with a comment by cameraman Daniel Demoustier (such will be rarely the case in this blog, in contrast to the daily practice of it on television). Original shooting treated for WARUM 2.0. Obviously, this image is far too layered for a blog… (anyways)

The questioning in the quote here under, by Hans Ulrich Obrist (on page 107, as published by Sternberg New York/Berlin, 2006), can easily be transported from the context of the museum space towards the context of media. This is a stimulating exercise for us of creative reading, maybe also for you.

“How can we actually introduce, reintroduce, or re-inject the notion of smallness into ‘bigger’ conditions? And that leads to the question of complexity, which I would like to address here. After having long discussions about the exterior aspects of museums, which were all about the façade, I think it is also relevant to talk about interior complexity, a new Merzbau condition, which will bring up urgent questions in the next few years about the future of museums. The situation of museums of obviously complex and I think, when we try to work out how to deal with this complexity, it is important not to reduce our reflections to a single model of museum space, but to study several different ones, both historical models and contemporary models, and to take an experimental approach with regard to this complexity.

One of the problems of globalization is the spatial and temporal homogenization of the world of museums, and it is urgent to actually generate a situation which is receptive to a kind of interlocking of spaces, or bridges between the old and new - as exemplified by Rem Koolhaas’s work on the Guggenheim Hermitage in Las Vegas - while also keeping in mind the notions of acceleration and deceleration, moments of speed and moments of slowness, where there should be zones of noise and zones of silence, where there are also negotiations between private and public space”.

PAUL VIRILIO: “We are now moving from the politically correct of the written, writing, the oratorical and the speaker, from the tribune, from politically correct to optically correct for the screen”.

WARUM 2.0 takes the form of a dream, of hallucination even, but without the loss of control normally involved in dreaming and hallucinating. It is not so much based on speed, as it is on suspension. Repetition and suspension that is, of what could have been live, alive, testimony, archive and memory. This space has nothing to do anymore with confusion, neither between fiction and reality, nor between the real and the artifice. It manages and produces illusion.

Warum 2.0, as 2.0, takes the pictures of Daniel Demoustier, the pictures he originally took from war victims, and projects them on transparant screens. The pictures are then repeated, enlarged, doubled and enhanced, until they fill a studio and form a stage, in which hosts and visitors perform as actors. Users and victims, pictures and positions start to double, repeat and mirror each other endlessly through media, until they form a world that becomes real as event, which in turn can be filmed again, even as a newsevent. Of course this event is a pseudo-event. It is an illusion. Like the real in reality tv, it is a non-reality. It is a tv reality, without tv. In the same way the real is no longer where it once was, television does no longer need that kind of real reality. It needs mediareality (no problem, television produces it itself), and it needs ‘us’ in it, to make the event come true.

Reality itself is becoming the medium. An extreme kind of becoming that is, accessible all over the world, as it is being produced on a daily basis by so many news channels on tv, on mobiles and on the Web. Warum 2.0, in fact, adds a demonstration to this becoming. It makes it transparant and explicit. It stages the apparatus itself. It makes visible the instant imaging it produces. And literally, by means of a group of hosts, it enacts and performs the physical actions of the users. Together they will handle the tools on the arena and mimick each others body positions and gestures. As a stage then for  ‘reality as medium’, Warum 2.0 illuminates previous grand fantasies such as the ‘world as theatre’, the ‘book as mirror’, ‘nature as creation’.

HUMAN TETRIS

One of the four stations of entry and enactment to the Warum 2.0 arena is based on a research experiment Stefaan Decostere conducted together with a group of TU Delft/Architecture students. The experiment was called ‘Space out of E-presence’ (the letter ‘E’ stands for ‘extreme’). Starting from a selection of pictures of extreme human body positions, the students were asked to think of specific spaces and environments which could generate exactly these positions.

One of the ideas they came up with was based on a Japanase tv-show, called Human Tetris. On the Warum 2.0 arena floor then, they built a series of tetris models with cutouts of falling and shooting human figures, in which hosts and visitors could be invited to position themselves. Sensors were added to the modules, generating effects of ‘massage’ of shots Daniel Demoustier recorded of American soldies shooting and  jumping in and out a landing helicopter in the Iraq desert.

Thanks to Rene Kroondijk, Aydin Koyuk, Ayhan Aygun and Rik de Ruiter.