So, it turns out that choices are not being made on the base of careful thought. It’s more like consciousness provides alibi’s for choices that are made way beneath the liminal treshold. The brains is it’s own black box. Cognitive neuroscience is experimenting away free will. This notion seems to be on its way to become  part of an operational technology.
At the last UnlikeUs conference,  Bernard Stiegler elaborated on the notion of market driven neuropower – the conceptual descendant and re-booted version of Foucaults biopower. Combine the developments in cognitive neuroscience with the advancements in the algorithmical modelling of consuming behaviour that Amazon, Facebook and Google live of. Extrapolate their current rate of achievement, and in the proximate future looms a fascinating set of probabilities.

I took it like this: those in the know will not only just philosophically explain away the idea of a free-willing individual as an outdated romantic folly. They would  actually be able to develop the technology to program consuming behaviour. If you’d  still be a host to the tired meme of the individual, your purchases would feel as the result of your own agency.  But this is actually only the effect of your semantic capabilites legitimizing your behaviour. Those that have ridden themselves of this meme will have the sensation that the web knows what they need,  even if they didn’t yet know this themselves.

I will be part of what looks like a very interesting conference: United We Organize.   It will explore, among other things, what managerial practice might learn from artistic practice. Cool.

From the blurb: “Art and management appear to have little in common. Art is about questioning and disrupting normality, art embraces complexity, celebrates inconsistencies and welcomes the open-ended. Management works in the exact opposite direction it seems, by favoring all that is rational, structured, simplified, tamed, and so on.”

I will present the workshop ‘A dialogue with the material of organisation’ that I have done with groups of students of the MaHKU and the Rietveld Academy.  The process of this workshop inverts the default logic that steers the development of organisations. It takes a look at the elements of organisation(s) from the perspective of (procedural) aesthetics.

Participants take the various parts and processes of organisation(s) somewhat like game-atoms, or cogs from abstract machines. They are combined and re-ordered in a bricolage kind of process. It crucial to abstain from formulating the goal of the organisation in development until the last steps of the process. Otherwise instrumentality reduces the potential for play.

When the participants are happy with the abstract organisational machine they have made, they may begin to articulate the effects this organisation would have on its surrounding if it would really exist.

Because I can’t help but feeling irritatingly self-conscious at Facebook I thought it would be good idea to revivify (if it ever really lived) this blog. I have only fragmented scraps of explanation for this, but somehow in the wordpress environment  I’m much less bothered by the inescapable having-to-act-like-yourself.

Maybe because I have no idea of who would be reading this ? If anyone ? 31K comments on previous posts combined. All spam.

Anyways. I might even post a link on Facebook.

To my next post, that would be.

Scenario’s of manipulation, responsibility and trust between initiating authors and participating audiences

This is a growing commented selection of works and projects that are understood primarily as artistic interventions. The works have in common that in all cases the initiating author manipulates the trust of (certain groups within) the audience in his or her artistic vision and practice. The term initiating author is used to indicate the person that starts the process of the interactive work – the person who is usually responsible for for the design of most of the technical and social rules under which it operates. The term was coined by Architecture of Interaction group. (See this blog)

Conceptual tools that help coming to terms with the notion of con-art:
- the artistic contract: the mostly implicit deal between audience and artist that organizes the mutual expectations between them.
The nature of the contract is is informed by genre, by knowledge of the audience of previous works of the artist, by the context in which contact between artist /and or artwork and the audience is made. Often the nature and the terms of the art-contract only becomes visible when it is broken.

- the art script: the art script is the behavioral and perceptual scenario that the audiences follow when participating in a process of making contact with works of art. The artistic contract is a part of the art script. Some of the works listed below only function because they are not part of a recognizable art script in the perception of the audience during the process of participation. Usually the works only become con-art when the con part is identified and revealed.

- con-art (working definition) For the moment we think of it as: art in which the artist bends, twists or breaks the rules of the art contract. Con-art is (obviously) a pun on the term con-artist, but does not refer to the ordinary scams of con-artists. Rather, it refers to projects intended as artistic interventions, that apply certain mechanisms that may also be recognized in the swindles of con-artists.

The projects listed below differ highly in terms of the amount and nature of the responsibility that initiators are willing to take. In a series of discussions in class we concluded that only those interventions in which the initiating author takes full responsibility for all experiences of the audience within the work, merit the label con-art.

Choosing to take responsibility
When artworks involve participation or interaction (as in non-trivial actions on the part of members of the audience that alter the shape of the work) the matter of the artists’ responsibility for the perception of his/her work, becomes more layered and complex.
The initiating author has to consider to what extent s/he wants to take responsibility for the actions of the participants, and for the effects of those actions. Different strategies are applied. And it is clear that not all artists oversee the different implications of their interventions.

Bart Schoenmakers approached con-art methodologically We are snot sure yet if all his statements apply, but these seem to hold:

• Con Art can only exist by the grace of the system, framework, or context it operates in.
• To present itself, the work mimics as part of its hosting system, but by definition it is separate from it, and operates under a different constitutive logic.
• The system or rather an actor within the system should mark the work as fraudulent in some way:
a. only in this way the work may lay bare the mechanics behind its hosting system
b. so that the audience are given the possibility to reflect on the work and the mechanics of its hosting system
c. (in other words) in order for the work to become art and for the artist to take responsibility

May we apply (and derive inspiration from, even ?) the notion ofprocedural rhetoric (Ian Bogost) on these kinds of works to understand their perceptional mechanics ? I hope to get back to that.

Examples
Not all these works are clearly con-art. But they all function around tension in the understanding of the artistic contract. We (DT-IDUM3&4&5) have been discussing the following works and interventions:

Christoph Schlingensief: Ausländer Raus A clear example of con-art. When discussing Ausländer Raus at the Schlingensief exhibition in Utrecht we arrived at the folling hypothesis: Artist that make con-artistic interventions, have messianistic tendencies in their personalities.

Martijn Engelbrecht: REGONED At first we though this was clearly con-art. However, since Martijn Engelbrecht denies the intention of actually making the audience believe the forms he sent were ‘real’, but rather that he only intended to stir up discussion on the topic of illegality, this work is not con-art. It was percieved as such however. Discussing this work led us to the conclusion that only if the artist holds that the belief of the audience in the con is essential for the artistic effect, a work may be labelled con-art.

BNN: De Donor Show Maybe not intended as art, but otherwise a classic example of the con-art mechanisms in full throttle. As an Idols-type reality TV show, it is formally close to Schlingensiefs Auslander Raus. But BNN never claimed it to be art. It was an elaborate hoax to stir people into more awareness about the issues around organ donation.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis Public Meteor Watching in Herzele (BE). This is a border case, because Agnes Meyer-Brandis does not rely on the moment of revelation for the artistic effect of the work. Rather, it relies on the maintenance of the illusion – the permanent suspension of disbelief. This work has more mythological intentions. I think by now we don’t consider this con-art, allthough Agnes Meyer-Brandis does take full responsibility for what you might consider as complex hoaxes.

Pilvi Takala – The Trainee A pure example of con-art. Pilvi Takala claims she is an intern at Deloite & Touche, doing brain work for the communications department.

Zuzana Janin - I’ve seen my Death Another clear example. Zuzane Janin staged her own funeral, and attended it in disguise.

The Yes Men More activist than artistic in intentions.

Marina Abramovic Rhythm 0 and other works.
Some of the works engineer tension around the responsibility of the participating audience. Abramovic’s Rhythm 0 for instance. Here it is maybe more the audience that breaks the term of the art contract, allthough it is clear that Abramovic is investigating into the outer boundaries of possible relations between artist, audience and artworks. One question is to what extent it can be said that the audience acted on authority of the artist in Rhythm 0? To what extent was it absolved of responsibility by the invitation of Abramovic to do whatever it felt like doing ? We didn’t think Rhythm 0 was not con-art, since all the terms of the art contract are transparant, clear and met by Abramovic.

Weg van Nederland: http://weblogs.vpro.nl/nieuws/2011/08/24/weg-van-nederland/

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