Where are the individuals of today? What has happened to original intimacy, the humanization of our being? How do we identify and actualise ourselves? How does one substantiate the originality of an encounter? Is there real worth in this new system?

There has emerged a technological system for living. Our beings are represented through symbols, logos and simulated reality. Society organizes and categorizes us then provides opportunities for encounters within a virtual context. Our existence is over-rationalized, over-politicized and over-consumed. This has become our system of living; our life-program. Rather than relationships with others we seek relationships with machines, simulated reality and reflections of being. Diversity of personality fades away. Social encounters become homogenized.

Nietzsche suggests that less-developed organisms are those that need to be in permanent contact with one another to exist. Rather than being able to reflect in solitude and search for meaning within oneself, these organisms must be connected for their own survival...surviving in a cyber-world attached by sensationalized sound bites and regurgitated images. We are connected, but the question becomes urgent, connected to what? We live enclosed by data, measurements and categorized existence. Most come to us without any clear-cut attribution of authorship. Reworkings of media society have become central aspects of how pop-culture operates. Reality has been transformed into mere statistics where computer programs determine our being.

Walter Benjamin discusses art in relation to this technology. He notes that "the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics." This new technological system lends itself especially well to the political function of art, without the traditional confines of authorship or authenticity. Art is a way to reencounter this actuality in the search for understanding, communication and the reaffirmation of our identity. An artistic image is one that acts as a symbol of reality. It can make possible a new and intelligent social conversation.

Umberto Eco

derive a new way of seeing

“Every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself.” Eco, quoting Henri Pousseur, defines the "open" work as one that "produces in the interpreter acts of conscious freedom, putting him at the centre of a net of inexhaustible relations among which he inserts his own form"

can we categorize conscious freedom?

openness is a fundamental part of perception
openness is an interpretive freedom
open work is freedom

This is reflection upon the ideal. Open work represents an evolutionary difference in the whole experience of the world. It reflects the relativity, subjectivity and discontinuity of our contemporary world. Eco contrasts this concept with the traditional closed work, which allows the viewer far less choice in interpretation. The categories are ideal--no work can be completely open or closed--but they function well in making distinctions between different kinds of art. What is more important, adopting the proper attitude toward an open work has political and social ramifications: the open work denies conventional views of the world, replacing them with a sense of its discontinuity, disorder, and dissonance. Eco considers this alienation as beneficial, since from this feeling of crisis, one may derive a new way of seeing, feeling, and understanding a social order in which traditional relationships have been shattered.

art and interpretations are shattered
every viewer derives their own meaning
we can observe and interpret, but essentially never exhaust

For artistic creation, the artist’s role is to start a work, and it is the role of the viewer to finish it. The completed work, which exists from the interpretation of the observer, still belongs to the artist in a sense, but must also belong to the viewer. There is an internal mobility to form which sets up a possible dialogue or interaction between artist and audience. An openness emerges and evolves

in creating and making there is taking and replacing

Arts and creative acts are merged under the influence of analog and digital, commercial and noncommercial. A "mixed ecology" emerges.

artistinction

The Separation

Body
Shame
Artificial membrane

Eye undone by you

Chasm
Quiet
Sadistic violence

Teeth like shattered wood

Hush demon
Obstruct

Inviolate Judas
Be still

Let the essence and the Eye grieve

A stolen crimson flag
Scorched by a sun of dripping wax
My swollen throat opens

Hush Judas
Obstruct

Be silent
Listen hear

A syllable
(not a symphony)

A syllable I regret

A lovers death
Mutated breath
Premature dissemination

Detournement

It is important to step out of our own artistic disciplinary frames to understand and redistribute the relationship between space and time. Remix as media can either detract or enhance our art. I am reminded of the three regimes presented by Ross. The ethical regime which refers to art at the surface of community. The representational regime which encompasses form and is imitational - this seems relative to Debord's detournement. Lastly the aesthetic regime which suggests an art that is freed from the first two agendas...referring to works which take on life of their own and evolve far beyond the mere formal imitation or concept of the artists original intent.

Reflections upon these reading brought up questions about my own considerations on this subject:
Is there a link or historical connection between aesthetic judgement and the specificity of medium?
Is medium an art unto itself or a means to an end?
Can/does art ever exist apart from pop culture and media?
What is the relationship of art to capitalist culture?
What is the role of artist as consumer?




SITUATIONIST MANIFESTO
The existing framework cannot subdue the new human force that is increasing day by day alongside the irresistible development of technology and the dissatisfaction of its possible uses in our senseless social life. Alienation and oppression in this society cannot be distributed amongst a range of variants, but only rejected en bloc with this very society. All real progress has clearly been suspended until the revolutionary solution of the present multiform crisis. What are the organizational perspectives of life in a society which authentically "reorganizes production on the basis of the free and equal association of the producers"? Work would more and more be reduced as an exterior necessity through the automation of production and the socialization of vital goods, which would finally give complete liberty to the individual. Thus liberated from all economic responsibility, liberated from all the debts and responsibilities from the past and other people, humankind will exude a new surplus value, incalculable in money because it would be impossible to reduce it to the measure of waged work. The guarantee of the liberty of each and of all is in the value of the game, of life freely constructed. The exercise of this ludic recreation is the framework of the only guaranteed equality with non-exploitation of man by man. The liberation of the game, its creative autonomy, supersedes the ancient division between imposed work and passive leisure. The church has already burnt the so-called witches to repress the primitive ludic tendencies conserved in popular festivities. Under the existing dominant society, which produces the miserable pseudo-games of non-participation, a true artistic activity is necessarily classed as criminality. It is semi-clandestine. It appears in the form of scandal. So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game, which more exactly is provoked by the human presence. The revolutionary gamesters of all countries can be united in the S.I. to commence the emergence from the prehistory of daily life. Henceforth, we propose an autonomous organization of the producers of the new culture, independent of the political and union organizations which currently exist, as we dispute their capacity to organize anything other than the management of that which already exists. From the moment when this organization leaves the initial experimental stage for its first public campaign, the most urgent objective we have ascribed to it is the seizure of U.N.E.S.C.O. United at a world level, the bureaucratization of art and all culture is a new phenomenon which expresses the deep inter-relationship of the social systems co-existing in the world on the basis of eclectic conservation and the reproduction of the past. The riposte of the revolutionary artists to these new conditions must be a new type of action. As the very existence of this managerial concentration of culture, located in a single building, favors a seizure by way of putsch; and as the institution is completely destitute of any sensible usage outside our subversive perspective, we find our seizure of this apparatus justified before our contemporaries. And we will have it. We are resolved to take over U.N.E.S.C.O., even if only for a short time, as we are sure we would quickly carry out work which would prove most significant in the clarification of a long series of demands. What would be the principle characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with ancient art? Against the spectacle, the realized situationist culture introduces total participation. Against preserved art, it is the organization of the directly lived moment. Against particularized art, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the usable elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (at least to the extent where the works are no longer stocked as commodities, this culture will not be dominated by the need to leave traces.) The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behavior and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and of being further extensible to all habitable planets. Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction. Today artists - with all culture visible - have been completely separated from society, just as they are separated from each other by competition. But faced with this impasse of capitalism, art has remained essentially unilateral in response. This enclosed era of primitivism must be superseded by complete communication. At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different "schools" - not successively, but simultaneously. We will inaugurate what will historically be the last of the crafts. The role of amateur-professional situationist - of anti-specialist - is again a specialization up to the point of economic and mental abundance, when everyone becomes an "artist," in the sense that the artists have not attained the construction of their own life. However, the last craft of history is so close to the society without a permanent division of labor, that when it appeared amongst the S.I., its status as a craft was generally denied. To those who don't understand us properly, we say with an irreducible scorn: "The situationists of which you believe yourselves perhaps to be the judges, will one day judge you. We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of privation, in all its forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of humanity." 17 May 1960