Palimpsest
These are critical times. Time to be time critical.
I intend to do this by piecing together a patchwork, fusing existing ideas from three thinkers and three artists that, in their mix, hopefully contribute to a sense of a re-writing of our current conditions and problematics. And as such, it is a call to inhabit the inhabitable, that which is beyond the conservation or preservation of the habit.
Living the cultural canon
Given the recent rise of the problematisation of our ‘contemporary condition’, what can be noted in the field of the arts is the recurrent unease in the realm of artistic and curatorial responses to the experience of cultural archives as their operative memory with which their own historical consciousness is constructed.
Despite the vast potentiality of digital and physical storage and expanded conservational techniques, and even considering all the necessary leeway given by the dominant institutional policies of the investment in, and the conservation and safeguarding of, cultural heritage, there is still a perceived lack in historical consciousness and knowledge. This is not exclusive to, but is especially characteristic of, the tradition of digital art, software-based art, net art, or even what is dubbed post-internet art. This apparent gap has functioned as the catalyst of a critical questioning of the strategies issued by institutions, artists, curators, critics, educators, and museums. This symposium is just one of the examples of this scripted urgency.
One of the most favoured remedies against such a lack of historical knowledgeability is the invention of a cultural canon. Driven by the fear of losing the historical ground of its identity and being run over by the barbaric forces of our contemporary condition, the canon is installed as the brace that prevents such catastrophes. Like all abstract social concepts, the canon is also a concept of power.
But rather than preserving anything, isn’t any cultural canon instead bombarding away any sense of the heterogeneity of historical time, and thus producing an ultimate cultural shell hole by reducing history and time as abstracted, essentialist monumentality? The canon as the parody of safeguarding cultural values then becomes a representation of destruction, as it monumentally demonstrates its incapacity to represent, or it marks even the destruction of representation altogether. For as much as the canon is a monument, it is a monument in ruins.
This assumed cultural void or gap that rocket launched the desire for the canonical seems to be the Janus-faced Godhead of a hidden power politics, based on less defensive but somewhat offensive abstractions that caters to a quasi neutralised identity politics. On the one hand, it is the purposely-fabricated gap of its own operative power politics, and on the other hand, it is the gap that is inherent to the concept of any canon: that what it excludes! Since a canon is always meant to belong to a someone, a people, a group, a horde, or an ‘identity’, it thus, by definition, ignores, negates, renders invisible, and leaves unidentified its negative: that which it does not want to be or even actively denies to exist. As a technique of invisibilization, the canon foregrounds its monuments as the deceptive concrete incarnations of its discrete qualifications. The operative abstractions that produce this fallacy of misplaced historical concreteness remain hidden in its tautological machinations of self-evidency.
The protective ideology that fabricates this abstracted superimposition onto the past seems increasingly facilitated and instructed by present-day medial conditions. What this means is that the conception of the archive has to be identified as a dynamic entity, an operative memory, that is immediately accessible, and being constantly written, read and re-written. If the present finally has arrived to become the active negotiation and operability of the conservation of its past, how can we re-address any past by a re-writing of that present?
The practice of artists, art historians, and curators alike are set in a contemporary condition of an industrialisation of memory, which is primarily an exteriorisation of memory: dealing with anything memorable implies dealing with what the industrial formats dictate as to what to remember and in what context of reference. This deluge, this overflowing of memory as a mere informational, bureaucratic, conservational, and, above all, surveilling practice is superseding the necessary cultural work of negotiating and weighing editorial, philosophical, and media critical choices that deal with the questions of how to remember and what is there to remember. In the dynamics and operability of digital memory and storage, the representational frames of archival time have massively invaded the present.
The Contemporary Condition is a research project, initiated by Jacob Lund and Geoff Cox at Aarhus University, that investigates contemporaneity as the defining condition of our historical present. On the project’s website, they describe their idea of contemporaneity as follows:
‘Contemporaneity refers to the temporal complexity that follows from the coming together in the same cultural space of heterogeneous cultural clusters generated along different historical trajectories, across different scales, and in different localities. […] The project will primarily concentrate on contemporary art and experimental artistic practice as its material with a particular interest in the role of contemporary media and computational technologies.’
In the context of this project, media archaeologist Wolfgang Ernst was invited to contribute with an essay. Ernst invests in the description of how media temporalities affect and disrupt the traditional human sense of time and questions the conventional position of media time within cultural history.
In the mentioned essay, he focused on the unfolding of a drama in the theatre of contemporary culture, that has possible traumatic, not to say catastrophic consequences. His analysis boils down to this:
‘The symbolic ordering of time into past, present and future is ever more compressed into one dense time window of the extended present. The current condition is literally con-temporary, an interlacing of temporalizing gestures: on the one hand there is an instant archiving the present in digital data processing, while on the other hand the past is immediately coupled with the actual present in online communication: re-presencing the archive.’
Given the notion that the future is already pre-calculated in real-time: futurum exactum. The past is residually enduring within the present. The future is not simply what is to come, but that which pre-emptively can be anticipated, the future has become a ‘future of the past’. In communication engineering this is formulated as the ‘delayed present’.
While the human sense of ‘the present’ is challenged by the immediacy of analogue signal transmission and the delays of digital data processing, a different (non) sense of time unfolds within technologies themselves. At that moment, human-related phenomenological analysis clashes with the media-archaeological close reading of the technological event, in an impossible effort to let the tempor(e)al articulate itself. ‘In technologies, there is no present at all – rather differential tempor(e)alities’.
In the concluding part of the essay ‘II Digital Culture: A Micro-Archival Present’, he refers to Bergson’s critique on chronophotography, as the historical example that already, in a medial way, paved the way to our understanding of the paradox of the present. Ernst writes:
‘Bergson criticized the ‘mathematical’ sequencing of movement in chronophotography. The proverbial photographic snap-shot [sic] has always been a paradox: In the moment of the photographic recording (which, in itself, at close reading, is never punctual but a shrinking interval), this present is transformed into endurance. Such instant recording is nowadays matched by the ‘thickening of the present moment’ in digital systems – a kind of micro-archival bubble. This present-as-archive is familiar from analog broadcast media as well, since most of the radio and television programs received have been playbacks from recordings (especially the musical interplays). With its instant digital recording, the present becomes almost immediately addressable and thus a sublime archival structure. In real-time, the present loses its logocentric uniqueness. The present no longer has time to take place.’
Of course, Ernst’s analysis is a somewhat dry technical diagnosis of the disappearance of the present, but its possible media sociological ramifications can be found in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s 2016 publication Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. Her book starts with connecting this sense of the disappearance of the present with the question of how our technologies and networks ground and foster habits of use. As soon as behaviour becomes habit, it seems to disappear from consciousness, revealing the creepier, slower, more unnerving time of ‘new media’ under neo-liberal conditions, an epoch that emphasises individual empowerment and difference. Since our ‘new media’ reality exists at the edge of obsolescence, we are forever trying to catch up. As Chun argues: ‘in response to this rapidly cycling and possibly depressive time scale “Habits + Crisis = update”. Being caught in this habituality, updating equals to remain the same.’ As we are constantly anticipating or even creating the future, the next big thing, the new invention, or algorithm that predicts the future with even greater accuracy, through habits users become their machines, and by fusing with them, we are equally dismissing the present as already past. The vital point Chun makes in her book is that we have become unaware, unconscious of our medial habits and the consequences of complying with the cycles of their updated reproduction. The ‘new’ of our media has become the unconscious habitual. Chun argues that media matter most when they seem not to matter at all.
In the late eighties – an era marked by the collapse of the grand meta narratives and fuelled with a post-modern frightful anticipation of a society brimming with the massive digitisation of culture and set in the nascent state of globalisation – sociologist Henri-Pierre Jeudy, in his Parodies de l’Auto-destruction, in the chapter entitled ‘Le Musee du Monde’ [The Museum of the World], he diagnosed the obsession with conservation and what he called the museographic delirium, pointing to the perverse interplay between preservation and the annulment of memory. Museums as the monuments of the conservation of the destroyed do not only fill any possible gap, the blanks of memory, but also aim to exorcise in an abstracted fashion the threats of the world’s destruction. ‘If the movements of destruction strike a blow at the very representations of the world by introducing figures of chaos and non-sense, their aestheticising conservation seems to give them back a finality by relating them to historical acts and moments.’
Culture seems to be founded on this abstracted, lifeless negation of death and chaos, playing down all that happens by inscribing it into a previous narrative. Non-sense designated and named captured in rationalising effects instantly becomes sense, just as how anti-art, in the end, turns out to be just art.
So we have here three lenses to look at the effort of a re-writing of the present: a media archaeology of a micro-archival bubble of the present; a media-theoretical, unconscious-habitual present; and an art-historical mummification of the present, whereby museography fixes the past in the cultural codes of amnesic reference and transforms memory into the dictionary of conservation. Is this the logic behind the desire for a tidying up of inherent chaos and unpredictability: the didactic purge of dissent, heterogeneity, complexity, and the signs of life that defy the abstractions with which the archive masks it arbitrariness?
Again the same question arises: If the present finally has arrived to become the active negotiation and operability of the conservation of its past, how can we re-address any past by a re-writing of that present? I would like to finish by referencing two art works that offer some ideas on how to do that re-writing.
A few years ago, I was struck by the parodic dystopian future sketched in the 2016 video ‘Institute for Southern contemporary Art (|SCA)’ by Joao Enxuto and Erica Love and commissioned by Rhizome. Like other work by this duo, it is a speculation about the future of art, or maybe rather its extinction in the face of climate disaster. The video is a promotional piece for the ISCA, a proposed artist platform that is tailored to optimise the creation of art for market consumption. It imagines a model for contemporary art that pushed certain probabilities toward logical, possible outcomes. It is based on the prediction of the likelihood of climate disaster and an algorithmic analysis of the art market. The automated narrator explains: ISCA is an experiment, partly think-tank, partly experimental program to promote new terms for art. Fellows of this programme make art geared toward maximum market favourability, while a supercomputer captures data on their behaviours and creativity, in turn feeding a larger algorithmic system that shapes the production, reception, and sale of art.
It makes the plea: ‘emancipate the art through a good use of the art market, or differently put: automating contemporary art is to become emancipated from it.’
The video, in all its tongue-in-cheek-ness, breathes a similar logic as the disruptive abandonment that etoy.CORPORATION once set to work, to seize the very moment in which values are created in the micro-archival bubble of a picosecond of the present. The re-writing of the present should preferably be done in such a vortex.
The other example is not to comply with the miniaturisation of our sense of the present that our current capitalist condition forces us to accept, especially as we are forced to accept the melting of the Arctic ice, because it allows for the creation of a trading benefit of .047 seconds. Instead, we should opt for the stretching of the present, like Jem Finer’s ‘Longplayer’ instructs us to do as a centuries-long anti-teleological commitment, actualising the limits of the digital, announcing its death in the future.
This re-writing would be an effort, as Chun suggests in her book, to ‘inhabit the inhabitable: a present that cannot be housed permanently; it is a temporary inhabitation, not imbued by forced constraints, but by will of an emancipatory design. A sense of a homeless present, that deepens the experience of the event, cleansing the palimpsest of our contemporary condition, and which allows us to re-write any present with a dissensual meaning of the clinamen: ‘time today’. Where to go now? That’s where I would like to be!
Transformation Digital Art 2019 | International Symposium on the Preservation of Software-Based Art. LIMA, 21 & 22 March 2019