notes, quotes, provocations and other fair use 2004

nqpaofu.com by jouke kleerebezem

issue 89
conversational drift
informatic license
exquisite enclaves

88

portal
history
90


REMEMBER THE BIRDS?

birds yellow and white in sun

Remember the shoes I wore?... I wear'm again! Gil advises me to go out and take a walk, to the museum on the river or anywhere. I put the Zizek copies in my bag, take the camera and walk. And indeed I walk straight back into my shoes... At the Bonnefanten Museum I see that Polish bird Pawel Althamer’s drug and hypnosis video’s which leave me rather gigglish, especially the one where he took the mushrooms and raves on about the angels and a dragon and the power of laughter and the ‘structure’ and how much information everything carries. My First Zizek leaves me an instant amateur of his warped reasoning. Critiquing Negri and Hardt’s Empire he puts me firmly in the shoes I wear again. Curious for Thursday.



LONG LOST LIST


I can’t adapt my mood to my presence in Maastricht. As soon as work releases me I feel discomfort, displacement. The JvE is fine, we have some amazing projects nearing their finest hour, smart researchers are all over the place, it’s the best cultural production research institute West of the Chinese wall... but NL doesn't seem to accommodate me.

I overcome the mood after having visited the MetaHaven team studio, table tennis with Adriaan and start working on the anchor long list. Split in two it will load. And screen dump. I recover almost a year and a half in un-indexed anchors. Hell of a job. I continue until 3 am. Now we have ‘dip in’ (issues #1-50, 181k) and ‘more dip in’ (issues #50-89, 112k). In total, to date, you'll find here 394,932 electronic words, with some hidden in the source, like anchors and other tags of course, but also telephone numbers I had to remember when I was writing and found no other place to put them down, some more words hidden in the images, photoshopped flattened never to be cut and pasted.



MAN GOTTA DO WHAT HE GOTTA DO


After more than 5 years I finally achieve what I was called to do at the Moulin. When we anticipated moving, in 1998, upon being asked what I expected from burying myself in la France profonde, I always replied I would take a change from my pathetic problems, like with the next big thing in media mania, for some real problems, like “cluttered gutters”. I always used that quote. It took me long to finally mount the ladder to dig up years of dirt coming off the roofs. I don't exaggerate if I confess that finally doing'm gutters feels like the next landmark in a sustained mood of gettingbetteratmoulin.

I saw the state of the barn’s roof up close. It needs work. The Niquet brothers have been invited a couple of years ago to do that kind of work. We expect them any week now. Meanwhile we invite their competition too. Friends repeat that the Niquets have none and remind the brothers to pass by. Jean-Michel so does regularly: we have a drink and a chat, he insists that we take no other and off is he. Repeat action. Mr. Gérard used to work with the family, started his own company and accepts no work without talking to the brothers first. He’s the one competitor we dared approach. Jean-Michel, upon hearing this, is relieved, but we won't let him escape that easily.



HA AGENCY


Ha! Tell me!



WE’RE GETTING BETTER AT IT


Thierry advances quickly. He closes the drainage ditch with gravel and uses the earth that came out to roughly shape the terrace. So I must hurry up at lemoulindumerle.com. Keep that pace. FYI: just did the dining room.



HOW MILLS TEACH

mdm over the mill pond

the Villa du Moulin from the same angle as 145 years ago
Stewart Brand (no updates to this document since september ‘02001’... updates are kinda slow when the now's long) told us all about How Buildings Learn. Meanwhile we've got a Moulin that teaches. We're beginning to get it. At lemoulindumerle.com I am preparing a log on whatever these lessons produce in terms of adjustments interior and exterior. How we learn together. We are at the same time relocating functions, digging drainage, replanning and replanting the garden and throwing out a lot of ‘stuff that surrounds us’. Also, inscribed in the basement, we found the date of the villa's construction on the foundations of the 17C mill: 1859.



TEMPUS FUGIT

R and me in the Jacques Coeur house in Bourges

Rentrée. Ondertussen brengen we Rolf naar de middelbare school, waar je in Frankrijk een jaar eerder aan begint dan in Nederland. Hij werd elf deze zomer. Het is een belangrijk moment voor het hele gezin, waarmee een nieuwe periode aanbreekt. R+r raken weer gescheiden, in het schoolbusvervoer, met andere schooltijden en sociaal in twee zeer verschillende omgevingen. R. naar de ‘stad’ Clamecy, naar een school met 500 leerlingen in de eerste 4 jaar, r. weer naar Courcelles, voor nog twee jaar ‘être et avoir’, 13 leerlingen op 3 niveaus in één lokaal, niet geheel naar zijn zin.


Meanwhile R. enters high school, the sixième of the collège, at age 11 since 17 July last. The family undergoes this change together, it has a lot of impact on our organization and experience. R+r get divorced in the daytime again, r. staying at Courcelles with Mr. Genty, R. immersed in the larger 500- pupils context of college.



O TEMPORA, O MORES


Soms moet je in het Nederlands schrijven. Voor een Nederlands gehoor over Nederlandse toestanden orakelen. Zoals in mijn ingezonden berichtje naar de Volkskrant, naar aanleiding van de onzin die 20e eeuwers De Baere (B), König (D), Sans (F) en Szeemann (CH) over de Nederlandse kunst uitkramen. Over de reductie van een complex bestel en rijk veld tot een paar verondersteld dominante krachten en hun cryptoconspiratoire verbanden. Grote stappen, snel thuis. Het subsidiestelsel krijgt weer de schuld. En de publiekscijfers. Over het lamme verweer van een paar NL ingewijden. Alles getuigend van een volstrekte naïviteit over het huidige tijdsbestek, over de mediatiserende en informatiserende economische en culturele krachten die ook de kunsten beheersen en al zichtbaar zijn in muziek en vormgeving en architectuur en zelfs in de beeldende kunst en de politiek.

Van: Jouke Kleerebezem
Datum: din, 31 aug 2004 11:54:40 Europe/Paris
Aan: redactie@volkskrant.nl
Onderwerp: n.a.v. 'Dood tij in Nederland museumland', Kunst op Komst 26/08


Geachte redactie,

hierbij een korte reactie op voornoemd artikel.

met vriendelijke groet,

Jouke Kleerebezem, beeldend kunstenaar

Visionary Holland

Aan de gratuite mening van diegenen voor wie ‘de’ Nederlandse beeldende kunst niet meer behelst dan 3 musea, 3 mythische directeuren, 1 subsidiesysteem, en 7 kunstenaars kunnen we het belang van de vaderlandse ontwikkelingen moeilijk wegen. Als Rutger Pontzen de relativering van de buitenlandse borrelpraat (‘subsidie’, ‘overheid’, ‘politiek’, ‘commercie’... stirred, not shaken) vervolgens meent te moeten vinden bij Nederlandse ingewijden die tegenwerpen dat het ‘overal behelpen is’ (Schampers), of dat ‘de’ politiek ‘de’ achterban niet warm krijgt voor de internationale positie van onze kunst (Boers) dan zou je van schrik de kritiek nog bijna serieus nemen. Het achterkamerglobalisme van de Belg (‘Nederland neemt niet meer deel aan de buitenlandse visie over wat kunst is’), en de losse flodders van een Duitser en een Zwitser die hun internationale aansluiting vandaag de dag respectievelijk in Polen en China en in Oostenrijk en België zoeken, of van de Fransman die erin slaagt om een krakersmuseum naar het 25 jaar oude model van het kunstenaarsinitiatief tot zijn belangrijkste wapenfeit te maken, verdienen geen betere repliek. In plaats van 8-koloms voorpagina alarmisme verdient de lezer van de Volkskrant in de jaarlijkse Kunst op Komst echter wel degelijk een betere journalistiek.


(Geachte lezer,

Dank voor uw e-mail, die we met belangstelling hebben gelezen. Helaas kunnen wij uw reactie niet publiceren. Wij ontvangen dagelijks een honderdtal brieven, faxen en e-mails. De redactie is daar heel blij mee, maar de ruimte om reacties te publiceren is beperkt. Wij hopen dat u hiervoor begrip heeft.

Met vriendelijke groet,

redactie brieven
de Volkskrant)

VISIONARY HOLLAND, OF:
KOOPT NEDERLANDSCHE WAAR
DAN HELPEN WIJ ELKAAR


Keulen en Parijs leiden weg van Nederland.

De veronderstelling van een ‘buitenlandse visie over wat kunst is’ is op zijn zachtst gezegd curieus. Alsof er nog binnen- en buitenlanden bestaan en deze niet onder economische druk geheel vermengd en over de wereld uitgespreid worden, en in dezelfde beweging, maar onder druk van andere behoeften, opgedeeld worden in een eindeloze hoeveelheid, soms krachtige maar short lived micro-identiteiten, flash identities voor flash crowds, die individuele achtergronden en interessen volgen — maar nog geheel afgezien daarvan, alsof er daarbuiten, na fascisme en communisme, nog verenigende visies zouden bestaan die hun bestaansrecht mede zouden vinden in de overbrugging (onderwerping) van nationale identiteiten. Over welke markt hebben De Baere, König, Sans en Szeemann het eigenlijk? Ze zouden tenminste hun idee van ‘nationale identiteit’ moeten bijstellen.

NLID. Wat mogelijk met rede kan worden aangevoerd is dat de Nederlandse musea een NL ‘identiteit’ niet op een intelligente en polemische manier presenteren. We horen DB/K/S/S niet over het effect van de internationalisering, over de afgelopen decennia, van het NL kunstonderwijs en de post-academische research praktijk. Die internationalisering is geen gevolg van een luie ‘politieke correctheid’ of van een te sociaal subsidiebeleid of een andere polderwaan, maar van de grote naam die NL kunst en vormgeving en de instituten die jonge mensen daarin opleiden en begeleiden internationaal heeft, tenminste bij jonge kunstenaars. Dat we een politiek klimaat hebben geschapen waarin deze internationalisering onder druk van een nieuwe xenofobie weer wordt afgebroken blijft ook onvermeld. Broddelwerk.

STATE OF EMERGENCY


Visionary Sealand. Over hoe nationale identiteiten vormgegeven (zouden kunnen) worden organiseert de JvE/MetaHaven de 23e september aanstaande overigens een symposium, ‘State of Emergency’, in het Stedelijk Museum CS. Komt dat zien en onderwijl koopt Nederlandse waar, dan helpen wij elkaar.

SCRATCH ID


National identities have always been designed and produced from a variety of forces which formed and shaped and forged the nation state in every one of its expressions and representations. (Graphic) designers and architects, theatre makers and fine artists, composers then built on these expressions and representations further markers of national identity. Designers don't design identity from scratch.

(re: ‘Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind’, Hofstede dimensions; Tribal Media 1995; Branding nations: Swiss army knife (now with USB memory blade), Miro Spain, ‘Cool Britannia’, Selling Wacky, Incredible India?; Hakim Bey TAZ and after; Neil Stephenson Snow Crash; competing cities; OMA EU flag; expat exaggeration; &tc.)

Designer Regime? How to design (for) a regime? Design for/of Regime.



MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

passions de liesse



UNMIXED BAG


The bag
— Vilem Flusser

Omnia mea mecum porto. In plain English: Everything that I've written and published in the last 18 months is kept in a bag. The bag was stolen recently from a car parked outside a Paris hotel. It was found again in a nearby street with the contents intact. The thief found no value in them. A discarded literary judgement.

The bag can be seen as a part of my memory. Whoever reads the papers it contains and the way they are ordered will recognise me, in a limited though intense way. I intend here to examine and analyse the bag. Not as if I myself were interesting but because the thief, if he had inspected the contents more carefully, would have found himself in the company of historians, archeologists, palaeontologists, psychoanalysts, and similar researchers.

What is at issue here is a yellow leather bag equipped with a zipper. It contains different coloured folders. One contains my correspondence from june 1972 until now, including copies of my letters and letters addressed to me. Some of my letters have remained unanswered, and some of those that I have received I have never replied to. The letters are ordered chronologically. Another folder is titled: ‘unpublished papers’. It contains about 30 essays in Portuguese, English or German concerning art criticism and phenomenology, the originals of which were sent to newspapers. These papers are unordered. Another folder is titled ‘published papers’. It contains about ten essays published during my stay in Europe. They are arranged according to their date published. A further folder is titled ‘La Force du Quotidien’ and contains a book manuscript — fifteen essays about things in our environment — it will be released in December in Paris. Another is titled ‘Ca existe, la Nature?’ and contains eight essays. Both folders are arranged according to their content. A further is titled ‘New York’ and contains outlines for a lecture about the future of television that I plan to hold next year at the Museum of Modern Art. Another is titled ‘Rio’ and contains essays that my publisher in Rio de Janeiro will bring out soon. Another is titled ‘Talks’ and contains outlines for lectures that I have held and will hold in Europe. They are not ordered. Another is titled ‘Bodenlosigkeit’ and contains 100 pages of an autobiography that I began and never completed. Another is titled ‘Biennal’ and contains references to the ‘XII Bienal des Arts’ in Sao Paulo. The last has the title ‘Documentatos’ and contains ‘self-referential’ certificates from government offices, universities and other institutions. This is then the semantic and syntactical dimension of the bag.

The folders are firstly arranged syntactically. They are arranged in three classes:

[A] Dialogues (the correspondence folder)
[B] Discourses to others (lectures and manuscripts)
[C] Discourses about myself (documents)

The first class would have given the thief a view into the structure of my relationships with others, what connects me to them, who rejects me, and who I reject. The second class would have allowed the thief to see me from ‘within’, and how I try to make myself public. The third class would have allowed him to see me in the way the establishment does, my mask, via which I play my public role. The knowledge that the thief thus gains would be problematic for the following reasons: (1) The authenticity of the papers would need to be checked (2) The authenticity of the documents contained therein would have to be checked. The thief would be required to make a close reading of the texts and of their contexts. The folders are also arranged semantically.

Again they are arranged into three classes:

[A] Factual information (documents, sections of letters, lectures and manuscripts).
[B] Interpretations of facts (lectures and manuscripts)
[C} Expressions of emotion and value (letters, and beneath the surface in most manuscripts).

The first class would have offered the thief a view into my ‘objective-being-in-the-world’. The second the way in which I maintain a distance therefrom. The third a view of my ‘subjective and intersubjective-being-in-the-world’. From this he might have held the keys to the subjective and objective position we find ourselves in. All this, of course, cautiously. The facts could be misunderstood or misinterpreted, and the emotions and values expressed dishonestly, as much by me as by others. The thief would have to ‘decode’ and ‘de-ideologise’ the messages contained in the bag.

The folders are also arranged structurally. Again there are three classes:

[A] Chronological arrangement
[B] Logical arrangement
[C] Disorder.

The first structure puts us in mind of geological and botanical formations. The second of encyclopaedia and computers. The third of genetic information. Together they reveal a picture of the structure of the human memory. What is missing however is a ‘formal structure’ of the kind found in ‘alphabetical arrangement’. Without this the thief might have concluded a defect in my way of thinking. The interaction of the ordered and disordered structures in the bag would have given the thief the opportunity to contribute to Jaques Monods problem ‘coincidence and necessity’. The bag is a fertile hunting-ground for ‘structural analysis’.

Finally the folders are arranged according to their relationship to the bag itself. Two classes result:

[A] Folders that are in the bag so that they can be kept in mind.
[B] Folders that are there to keep things that are not there in mind.

The letters, manuscripts, and essays belong to the first class, the unfinished autobiography to the second. This reveals two functions of the bag (and of memory): to keep things in the present and to bring things into the present. The real situation is nevertheless much more complex. Some papers in the bag point to the future (the ‘New York’ folder and the unpublished manuscript); thus proving the function of memory, namely to construct designs for the future. The thief could have recognised all of this. Not, however, this: This article itself which the reader has before him is found in the bag in the folder titled ‘published papers’. The article is not only concerned with the bag, it is not just a ‘meta-bag’ but a part which the thief could not have studied. The thief could never have recognised this aspect of the bag.

I always carry the bag with me. We all do this only my bag is more readily available. The question is: can our bags be stolen from us? Or would they always be found again a few blocks away, intact? Put differently; firstly: are we lighter and therefore progress more quickly into the future when our bags are lifted from us? And secondly; are these living or dead weights in our bags? The bag is too complicated to give a satisfactory answer to these questions. In any case it's good that from now on the questions themselves are kept safely in the bag.


The nettime source for above story adds:

[From Vilem Flusser, Nachgeschichten, Bollmann Verlag, Düsseldorf, 1990. Translated from German 1998 by Michael Stapley for nettime-zkp5].

I browsed Nachgeschichten page by page but did not find it. Anyway. I was searching Flusser and Sao Paulo because I was invited to go there this October for Digitofagia. Flusser lived in SP for over 30 years, 1940-1972, taught at the university and wrote many of his seminal work in that period.



SHADOWPLAY

silhouette Mienke Koetzier 1914

‘Kermis in Sneek, 1914’



LAND LINKS


Started some actual exquisite enclave link landing in objects that are distributed. Signature URLs were sent out to Almere, Amsterdam and Arles without alphabetical preference.

A signature URL mark-up provides the owner (in case it is private) or passer-by (in case it is public) of an object with a unique address within the enclavexquise dotcom domain. At such address s/he might typically find some one-to-one information (private) or expansion of the piece (public) to which the URL is attached. Said object provides the only link to this URL. Private ones may expect to remain private as long as the link is kept hidden within the estate of the owner — as most private things are. Public ones might eventually get some online reference. Search engine visits are excluded.



SEE

type catalogue

Lettergieterij Amsterdam voorheen Tetterode
Supplement op onze beknopte proef van drukletters,
‘Vette antieke cursief’
I want to see things. I change one word in a text, say ‘household’ to ‘ecology’, also because I used household a couple of lines before etc., but, I switch immediately to browser mode to see what it does, what it looks like. If it doesn't look good, I switch it back and see if I can change the earlier household, or any other word. I have endlessly tweaked texts in Quark to see what different words do to the image of the text. Not for readability only, but for the exact look and feel which can face its content. What you see is what you publish.



LOCAL COLOR

rays

I sent more images to the ExE slide show which runs in the installation in À la mère. In NQP 88 I will continue Dear Barbara, at the same time I continue NQP in a new issue.



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