| Geert Lovink on Sat, 7 Apr 2007 16:35:13 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime-ann> The Redistribution of the Sensible |
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Begin forwarded message:
From: "warren neidich" <mas01wn@gold.ac.uk> Subject: The Redistribution of the Sensible
Dear Friends,
I just wanted to let you know about a show I'm curating in Berlin, called
Redistribution of the Sensible, that opens next Friday, April 13th. I
would love to see you there if you happen to be in town.
All the best, Warren
For Immediate Release:
The Re-distribution of the Sensible, curated by Warren Neidich
Gallery Magnus Muller, 10 /12 , Weydinger Strasse, Berlin, 10178 Opening: Friday, April 13th, 18:00-21:00 Exhibition continues until May 26
The "distribution of the sensible" (Partage du Sensible) refers to the
implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms
of Participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of
perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the
sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based
on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well
as what can be said, thought, made or done. Strictly speaking,
distribution therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of
exclusion. The sensible of course, does not refer to what shows good sense
or judgment but to what is aistheton or capable of being apprehended by
the senses. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics
But sovereignty today organizes this distribution with sophisticated
apparati that are reminiscent of the Society of Control expressed in
Michael Hardt's and Tony Negri's Empire. The logics of perception and
experience are no longer materialistically defined only by contours of
geometric and linear time and space arranged hierarchically in
a rigid lattice but rather follow curved, non-linear Rheimannian paradigms
that are expressed in complicated, non-hierarchical,rhizomatic shifting
patterns. Consider for a moment the way commodities are now linked
together as branded networks that intensify their desire quotient or how
people communicate on chat rooms or move in and out of blog sites.
Sovereignty, utilizing these methods and those of the global market place
with the help of the continuing scientific research on perception and
cognition, has conspired in creating powerful complex networks of
attention which allow for the manufacture of explicit "connectiveness"
that today defines the distribution of the sensible. Phatic Stimuli, as
Paul Virilio refers to them, have evolved into highly attention grabbing
conglomerates of stimuli that act as multiplicities and operate beyond the
sensorium reaching into the folded gyri and sulci of the brain itself.
These networks form a hegemonic cultural syntax which is inscribed en mass
on the society as a whole producing new forms of subjectivity and in the
case of world tuned in to global media, a bounded multitude. When these
networks are internalized and become part of the automatic operation of
the body’s or mind’s habitual relationships they form a Society of Control
rather then the Disciplinary Society. Self-Censorship is a perfect
example of the Society of Control and how insidiously this process becomes
self-evident. These images together produce the "Institutional
Understanding". This "institutional understanding" is the framework
through which most of us operate in the real world of material things.
But artists also create their own distribution of the sensible. They use
their own historical referents, materials, processes, apparati, spaces,
performances, to create complex assemblages that together compete with
institutional arrangements for the attention of the brain and mind. Their
artistic imaginations produce practices that allow for the exploration of
remote
territories, like the paranormal, non-linear, psychic, and insensible,
which pulsate beyond the reach of the formulaic methodologies of the
philosophers logic and the scientist experimental design. This is not to
imply that art is disengaged and distanced from life as some form of
hermetic endeavor but quite the opposite. It is
embedded in the interwoven fabric of social, political, economic,
psychological, historical and spiritual relations. It in fact commingles
with it and forms complex systems of recurrent and recursive loopings that
in the end help produce novel forms of networks that empower the
imagination of each receptive/productive subject with new possibilities
for creativity which in the end reconstitute the cultural landscape with
new objects, object relations, contexts and arrangements. They inhabit the
same spaces and temporalities as the institutional arrangements that
characterize the institutional understanding. Their presence however acts
to bend and contort it, in the end, altering its static and rigid
arrangements in significant ways. Works like installation art,
performative sculpture and urban geographies act to redistribute the facts
of this distribution of the sensible while conceptually-based works,
relational aesthetics and the institutional critique operate on more
metaphysical levels superimposing meaning, contexts and critiques upon it
in order to change the way those distributions are read and understood and
processed for instance as memories. For instance, Situationism has taught
us to kinesthetically understand the urban space differently through the
derive and detournement, attend to what before was uninteresting and
insignificant, and process all of this in a ways that allows us to
understand the significance, of say, the urban sprawl in the context of a
grand conceptual schema of the meaning of contemporary life. .(Of course
the institutional understanding is always attempting to co-opt its
methods, terminology and processes.) The exhibition "The Re-distibution
of the Sensible" attempts to investigate some contemporary art practices
that are addressing these issues……... text by Warren Neidich.
Artists in the exhibition include Eric Angles, Matthew Antezzo, Pash
Buzari, Krysten Cunningham, Olafur Eliasson, Liam Gillick, Jan Mancuska,
Yudi Noor, Tomas Saraceno, Erik Smith, Nora Schultz, Jordan Wolfson
Warren Neidich is an artist born in New York City and living and working
between Berlin and London. He is currently Research Fellow at the Center
for Cognition, Computation and Culture, Goldsmiths College, London.
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