Notes, Quotes, Provocations And Other Fair Use II


Amsterdam 1998

May 15
Attention vv. Articulation. Attention is an articulation of expression? I'm No Believer.

URLification—Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. URLs on every vehicle we come across.

Since the French reality check I long for the material world like I didn't for a long time. I came across some old work when mining my archives. The new media brain drain certainly came with a price tag. Is this what they call nostalgia?

May 4-14
ST(*)boretum consumed most of my time, up to its vernissage Saturday 9 May. The past week I was back to Doors 5: Play, the upcoming new media conference with the Netherlands Design Institute. But I also met Maarten de Reus and Joke Robaard, and enjoyed to have Francine Zubeil here from Marseille, who prepares for a presentation at the Almere Paviljoens. There I discussed Joke's work on Sunday 10 May. I read some pages from Witold Gombrowicz' 'Pornografia' to the small audience, and ended with Yves Klein's jump into 'le vide'. Joke's recent large prints defy 'photography' and the 'document', meanwhile showing interest groups and individuals in an intricate relationship, staged yet improvising, very alive, with Joke as the artist in a role comparable to Fryderyk's in 'Pornografia': enhancing inevitable realities by perverting existing relations, allowing the viewer to witness the actions. The work Long Suit in Almere focussed on three adolescents with typical Gombrowiczian gut.

Joke a few days earlier showed me 'o.k. Ortsbezug: Konstruktion oder Prozess?', with Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber's contribution on the contemporary Dutch public art 'landscape', containing interviews with Maarten, Joke and myself, and with Bart Lootsma and Ronald van Tienhoven. Sabine and Helmut have plundered my sites for illustrations. Most of my text is on the IJsseloog project.

Going back over my notes I notice that I spent quite some attention to intensifying my thoughts on play. In the margin of these scribbles I even sketched some objects... among which a big dice with rubber stamps on all six sides, that would leave a trace when thrown, of the sides opposite to the ones that we normally read for value. Remember Robert Filiou...

In the Hortus Botanicus (where I tried to ease my confusion this week), I met with old friends.


May 3
My first dreamless night in a week. A five hour one too. Welcome back to Dataholics Anonymous.

Performed another reality check: before returning the car I drove to IJmuiden to see my studio/storage and buy salmon for dinner. Had not been at the 'Koelhuis' for at least a year. Temporary Autonomous Zoo parts are there, and stuff that is way older, paintings, wooden constructions, prints and some raw material. Returned some boxes there and brought two large frames that are now staring at me from the left wall of my office.

A nice find was Huizinga's 'Homo Ludens'. It seems to be left there by Maarten.

May 2-3
Had my reality check on the French coast. There's still a world out there—I must admit I was quite embarrassed to find out. What to do with it? When I returned at the house at 11.19pm our Wistaria (blauweregen, 'blue rain') waved a heavy load at me: all flowers and no leaves yet, it glows in the dark. I left Gilberthe and the kids with her parents to chill out in their garden a few days. I unloaded the car, picked random vinyl from the shelf (King Crimson, In the Wake of Posseidon, 1970), generously watered my passion flower and poured myself a Té Bheag. Collected E and V mail. Ready to pay attention. Snail mail can wait another day or two.

Our trip lead by Koos and Margriet Staal, right at its start. When we drove by their Haren house we saw Koos in their front yard, I waved, he waved back not knowing it was us, so I pulled over to really surprise them after 10, 12 years? They have two lovely daughters at the ages of 6 and 9. We boasted our two sons. It was like old days right away, we just picked up where we left off. Great to see them and hear the story of their lives. One of the best things that happened the past week.

The market in Wissant was the next big thing. Every morning fishermen drive their small boat on a trolley onto the market place and sell their salty bounty straight from the nets. Our hotel had the best restaurant we could wish for (though we could not compare with the acclaimed La Sirène at nearby Cap Gris Nez—it unfortunately had its seasonal closing—but we had our share of Fruits de Mer).

Before even starting to read my mail I checked Paul's Alamut to see what he's been up to: after all we have a pamphlet to deliver before next Saturday... depending on the decissions he took on the ST(*)boretum piece that was banned from the Wageningen university site because of its Uranium containment. He uploaded a correspondency we had in the summer of 1993. I'll read it back tomorrow, with my mail. I shouldn't haste into any old routines. Having written this I realize it might already be too late. Old habits die hard. Let's pray for an unwired world. I'll flip KC and sit back before I go to sleep.

April 24
The past days were filled to the brim with Knowledge Mapping and Mining. Now for some real exercise. We're off the grid for a week. Gone fishing.

April 22
I am preparing for a short break: so work piles up before departure and immediately after return. But the break will save me from going nuts. I long for our beloved France. The food, the rolling campagne landscapes, the Normandy coast, the bric-à-brac, local markets and la langue Française. Provincial bookstores with no American culture jamming but plenty of French literature,

April 19
Paul brings me 'The Japanese Art of Stone Appreciation' (Suiseki), and other books to prepare his Nuclear Garden publication. Great aesthetic. Sexy prose: 'Aside from the suiban's color, height, and length, the style and the shape of the lips, legs, and sides also need to be considered.' (on the display container). Also, 'appreciation' has an interesting ring about it, especially vv. 'attention': no attention without appreciation. The Republic of Appreciation. An appreciation economy—talking about scarcity...

Last night read some new pages of Johannes Monstrans' 'Informatiseringsopruiming' (informationalization sale). He picked up writing after a long silence. Lucid stuff. Hope to publish it with Korsaar next year. Otherwise Saturday was sabbath, after Judith Cahen's KPN farewell party, Friday night.

April 17
Uploaded Collection of the Artist, a text from 1995-1996 that was published in 'Beyond Ethics and Aesthetics', edited by Ine Gevers and Jeanne van Heeswijk, for Sun publishers (isbn 90 6168 493 5). I'll soon summarize and update it for on-line publication. Currently on the Blast 'eyebeam' list the discussion on the museum and the exhibition still suffers from mixed up ideas about publicness, so there's relevance to secrecy promotion. The past days I listened to Hakim Bey's TAZ audio CD (Axiom 314 524 014 2) and his notions of secrecy I generally share (hard copy: Immediatism, AK Press, isbn 1 873176 42 2). It is widely available on the web.

This afternoon I am at the arboretum to hear davidkremers' talk and test run the computers at the information kiosk. The official ST(*)boretum opening is due May 9.

April 16
Uploaded ST(*)boretum first draft. The Landbouwuniversiteit Wageningen, host to this independently organized presentation of the works of davidkremers, Paul Perry and Mike Tyler, yesterday forbid Paul's use of uranium in the arboretum... NOT because of the danger of it (which they admit is 0.0), but because of the anticipated reaction of the public: academia giving up on education, dialogue, freedom of expression! The third culture still has a long way to go in Wageningen.

April 14
In their April/May issue Dutch contemporary art magazine Metropolis M published my spontaneous rant about the naive arrogance of contemporary Dutch art mediation, after a 'future-of-art-criticism' panel at the Stedelijk Museum, March 1, with eg. Chris Dercon and Anna Tilroe. Where have our critics' and curators' eyes been fixed upon the past five years? They have no idea of audiences' aesthetic idiosyncracies and cognitive interests. Their own role in art mediation is totally hierarchical: pre-(even mass)media, they want to educate. They're clueless to the unruly intricacies of contemporary production and distribution. And how much we like that.

Spent Easter building up a nice spring cold. Slept a lot. I mean a lot.

April 9
I split off the first document of this series. Not following any calender, spatial logic or attention shift—I just closed it for the reason of its slowing down byte-load, to continue in a ('save as ciw_nqp2.html') new document. Business as usual.

Florian Roetzer asked me to write an article for the Fall 1998 issue of Kunstforum, on 'art, media and attention', as an elaboration of the review I'm doing on the Culture of Interactivity conference (New York 17-18 January 1998), for Telepolis. A quote from my introduction:

- The Information Age is in its infancy, but we're positioned right in the middle of its constitutive turbulence, which doesn't offer much of an angle for critical reflection in the first place. Probably for the next decades or so the cultural embedding is in all that came before interactivity and which makes up largely our present cultural conditions. A critical tradition will have a hard time to specify a new condition. It is remarkable that with the advent of crucial new media and connectivity of networked computation, cultural discourse doesn't know how to translate these phenomena into a new cultural paradigm.

I keep receiving these weird but intriguing email messages and attachments from Harry Dierendonck in Arnhem.

Had a long and topical telephone conversation with Paul (Perry), whom I will be finally visiting tomorrow, in Rotterdam. First time over, to see his new home and have dinner and spend the evening to continue our discussion chest-to-chest. I'll ask him when he'll allow me to link to his webside ponderings. Actually I just did ask, because we're a mutually sub-Scribed Tribe. Paul?

Spent the entire day browsing yellowed web documents on the Netherlands Design Institute server, for in-/exclusion in the new site. What are the 'best bits'? I'd rather throw everything off and start anew. On the other hand I like it when you can tell the short blazing history of the web by the looks and contents of its documents. The new NDI design by Michael Samyn for VanRiet online productions is way sober. Exoticism has to be added by related web projects that gain autonomy, like Doors of Perception. For the fifth issue also Michael is doing great. All out there soon.


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