File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1997/97-02-19.172, message 159


Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 16:10:49 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re:  Art in the gutter/Stars in the sky.


> What kind of programming do you do M-? Perhaps we should leave the list and
> go do something more interesting together. I think one stakes a space by
> making art.

Joseph, my most excellent: I am not going to leave this list, I am its
affectionate (or sometimes disaffectionate) caretaker.  As for programming,
I am mostly into system tools -- compilers, OSs, etc.  As for art, I am
more than mostly into performance. 

You say:

> Artists need to actively
> patrol the frontiers of scientific and technological research to identify
> future trends that could benefit from the artist as researcher
> investigation. [...] Even within research labs, artist's apportionment
> within investigation squads could annex a standpoint that could foster the
> research operation...

> ...not at all about only sitting on your ass in front of a shinny box.

Well, I am not sure that this language of "patrolling" and "squads"
is enough to propel computer-based artmaking away from being about sitting 
on one's ass in front of a shiny box.  After all, even in the military people
in patrol squads increasingly sit on their asses in front of shiny boxes. 
And why this military language?   What war are we waging?  Just before
I got your message, I was going to type in for you this wonderful passage
>from "A Thousand Plateaus" (we seem to be rubbing against Deleuze a lot
lately on this list):

"What does it mean to disarticulate, to cease to be an organism?  How can we
convey how easy it is, and the extent to which we do it every day?  And how
necessary caution is, the art of dosages, since overdose is a danger.
You don't do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file.  You invent
self-destructions that have nothing to do with the death drive.  Dismantling
the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body
to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions,
levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and
territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor.
Actually, dismantling the organism is no more difficult than dismantling
the other two strata, signifiance and subjectification.  Signifiance clings
to the soul just as the organism clings to the body, and it is not easy
to get rid of either.  And how can we unhook ourselves from the points of
subjectification that secure us, nail us down to the dominant reality?
[...] Caution is the art common to all three; if in dismantling the
organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from
signifiance and subjection one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination
and psychic death."

We do it every day, and it requires great caution and using a very fine file.  
This from guys who _do_ think we are at war -- in their case at war with 
"what nails us down to the dominant reality".


-m 


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