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Discord: Sabotage of Realities by Gabriella Bartha and Thomas Bass A copy of the text sent to _telepolis_ and translated into German by Armin Medosch for the December issue. Our apologies for the incomplete character set. PRELUDE Sabotage implies coordinated action and a tantamount if not explosive result: the cordon up for investigation, the vigilant examination of evidence, the summoning of the forensist, the buckle of shackles, the righteous confession of the accused, the ring of the gavel. Discord hints at social strife and protest, the spontaneous rumblings of the mob. Both individual radicalism and collective malaise deserve exploration beyond the typical strategies of representation utilized to challenge the legitimacy of power and its diverse forms. Disappointingly, it appears, at least in this current manifestation concerning discord and sabotage on display in Hamburg, that the incessant distraction of capitalist totalitarianism has triumphed, for the warped culture of success has significantly dampened the conceptualization and expression of dissent. Transnational corporations and the residues of the atrophied state resist the unsupervised and the unpermitted, relying on affiliated media conglomerates armed with the mantra of objectivity to persuade the catatonic audience of its happiness and any potential saboteurs' threat to that happiness. This monopoly of monetary and political alliance effectively licenses sabotage to sychophants. Entertainment disperses any concrete attack with the lure of the next purchase. Despite the poor prognosis, reliable techniques to evade the ultimatum to behave abound: effigy, debauchery, licentousness, fraud, forgery, counterfeiture, etc. Even the enlightenment of a minor detail, an extract from the panoply of distraction, can be exquisitely pertinent to the paradox of effective sabotage: the tattoo histories of the gulags' inhabitants detailing the confessions also collected in criminal files; the transmutation of species at the freak show, a woman promising her audience a spectacular metamorphosis into a gorilla; Auroville's meditative architectural bliss for the disaffected cosmopolitan European. In the confines of art, these gestures of defiance are captured by the likes of Mark Pauline's Survival Research Laboratories, Artporn's burlesque revelry in dungeon sex, and CONTAINED's annual anarchic machine orgy in the outskirts of Linz. Courageous few attempt to rip the shroud off embalmed consumerism by defiling its sanitary corpse with the unclean and the taboo: only the exceptional saboteur manages to summon the will, the execution, and the concentration to shatter the formulaic utopia glowing on screens the world over. However, interactivity--the ambrosia of the future, the claim of contact between the organic and inorganic, the salvation of the disaffected--counterattacks to reduce experience into its simulation and replication. Stumbling with this new media in hand, coopted into perfecting the ultimate of popular tranquillizers, the artist struggles to either integrate, manipulate, or exorcise media and its technology that dwell in the subconscious where one instinctually reaches for the phone or flips through the channels. Discord does frustratingly little to resolve this dilemma of rejecting or embracing commodification. Six thematic zones demark the conceptual foundation of the exhibition: control (security/insecurity), news services (disinformation), everyday life (alienation), border politics (walking the tightrope), state machineries (law, discipline, repression), and science fiction and economy (the administration of the future). These divisions only obfuscate the rendering of the curators' praiseworthy yet muddled concept. Discord bathes in neutrality, unsure whether to undermine or support contemporary hierarchies. It fails to offer a tangible comment on what may indeed be the seeds of discord, merely documenting and representing rather than prying open a window of discourse with the theory and legacy of its subject. With this prespective on discord and sabotage, we viewed the realized and unrealized submissions, actions and concepts, that seem to replace more traditional art objects. Since the choice of media was open, the visitor found sundry embodiments of artists' projects, ranging from sculpture to video, from photography to mixed installation, from action to corporate advertisement. CONFINEMENT Upon ascending the stairs to the exhibition hall, the visitor is given the option to apply for a passport at the undeniably popular NSK, involving bureaucratic procedures and a lengthy queue; to play mai jong in an "interactive" person-to-person encounter with Wang Yigang's Chinese logic; or to shoot NSK's applicants with Lynn Hershman's mock M-16, which was supposed to simultaneously project war images appropriated from broadcast media. But only the pink traces of Yukinori Yanagi's ant and its 24 hour confinement and Gary Carsley's Ministry of Public Works are intriguing enough to demand further inspection. The success of Yanagi's Wandering Position project lies in the predictable result of an ethology experiment. The subjects of the experiment try to escape from the cages of the experimental domain, thus challenging a physical border as well as that between scientific and artistic reasoning while hinting at the protests and actions of the Animal Liberation Front. Gary Carsley approaches confinement, both of the collective and the individual, with a penchant for glamor, a decoration of the mundane that suggests liberation from the prefabricated and packaged. However, he plays with this culture of wrapping, offering his services and products to those willing to indulge their taste for metallic roses, reminiscent of the flowers for sale next to the cemetery. Indeed, these flowers serve as a font to spell out the four letter verses of private desire, consummated and unconsummated. DECEPTION Moving into the second portion of the first hall, Daisuke Nakayama's Car of Desire 1995 strikes the visitor with its crafted, voluptuous curves, though the temptation to finger its polished surface is hindered by Nakayama's insertion of metal fins into the body of the car. Without these almost invisible barriers, reclining on its wooden, lacquered surface would relieve the immediate somnolent state experienced in the presence of Anja Wiese's Erfassungbereich, Louis Couturier and Jacky Lafargue's deja vu poster project, Birgit Brenner's miserable Tranenruckfuhrung, and Mark Formanek's Archiv der 100 Statements, all uncensored. Andreas Peschka's Stempelset fur Attentater also deals with temptation. Reproduced on rubber stamps and available for sale to the more scrupulous visitor, Peschka's fingerprint serves as a catalyst to crime while mimicking the official. In the spirit of the work, the stamps can be lifted from under the glass case and taken home to assist in any crime requiring the burden of proof to fall on Peschka. Frantisek Skala's contribution, Sark, though partly impenetrable due to our language incomprehension and the lack of English translation of the accompanying philosophical extracts, plays with the role of the predator and prey, the techniques of mimicry and deception vital to survival of animal as well as human life. The large photographs showing the artist in various cycles of attack and defense have been retouched to reflect the contours of the toy shark motif gripped by the artist. NARROWCAST Dispersed within this melange of various attempts to convey deception and restriction, televisions--connected to no apparent surveillance cameras except in the case of Andre Korpys and Markus Loffler's untitled facetious bank project complemented by a diorama of the Deutsche Bank's interior--displayed the video projects of other potential saboteurs. However, in total, whether the Television Spots of Stan Douglas or Hans-Peter Scharlach's Untitled, they possessed the qualities of an amateur confused about what exactly to do with the equipment and footage. With the exception of Jayce Salloum's Kan ya ma Kan few of the videos made even a marginal attempt to cut through the biased perspectives of media enterprise. NUCLEUS In a separate dimmed room, the false euphoria of Marcus Bastel's mixed media installation dominates a disproportionately large section. Perhaps if confined to a smaller space, the project would have forced Bastel to find a more elegant way of drawing the same conclusion: the futility of trying to make order in the domain of concepts. Within this dark core, the very depths of the exhibition, awaits The File Room, Antonio Muntadas' project cataloguing censorship's practice and history. Belonging more to the well lit interior of a library, this online contribution sequestered among real filing cabinets, neither impresses nor threatens the visitor of the Kunstverein and Kunsthaus. Once again, we faced incomprehensibility with Peter Iblher's tunguska index: the banal lifted to significance by the projection of photographs and text that suggests secret services and their amoral yet ineffective plots. The final component of this darkened core is Bea de Visser's tranquil BLINK. Coined as an Interior of Difference, the installation space oozed aquatic peace, solitary faces melting into one another to form a collective. Portraits, the faces suspended in the water (though this could equally be the ether), acted as a more subtle comment on anonymity. ACTION Among those addressing their projects with action, Heath Bunting's magnetic mail art avenges the scourge of consumer surveillance. The principles of shoplifting are reversed, the bar code planted on authority, in the visage of the local postwoman, entering the premises of a shop with Heath's devious postcards. Alarms squeal and the thief is apprehended, though to the bewilderment of all, it is the postwoman who has perpetrated the deed. It was a relief to think of this scenario among the disappointments of the exhibition in terms of both discord and sabotage. Jorgen Erkius' untitled furniture deconstruction resembled Bunting's strategy in terms of reversing the hierarchy of power. Erkius tamely dissected a sofa and various household accessories that he later reconstructed with tape and glue for redelivery to his own flat. If Erkius had invited the audience to participate in the destruction, then it might have been a more enjoyable part of the exhibition. NSK's presence relied on the same psuedo-fascistic concepts that they have been recycling for the last few years in conjunction with IRWIN and Laibach, the hegemons of Slovenian art. Frank Riepe appropriates and manipulates treaties between authorities and the determined inhabitants of the autonomy seeking Italian village of Seborga. His Invisible Embassy of Seborga looks for a virtual space for the establishment of a new state, faintly suggesting a cult of personality for the as yet unnamed autocrat supported by legions of online bureaucrats. The promotional Space-Lab of Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek celebrates the aeronautic liberation of the kitchen promised in nascent 1960s consumerism. However, Cornelia's version of this sentimental era hardly touches the contemporary viewer except for her/his stomach keen for a sterile Lufthansa dinner. Although not qualifying as an action, the two E.E. PODS of Kenji Yanobe reminisce about the same 60s era motifs, the technology of the cosmonaut with one important difference: her/his emergency escape capsule is lined with snacks from the local nonstop and requires 1 DM for operation. COMMERCE Jan-Peter Sonntag's modern minimal disco 4 or Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani's mock utopian, new-agey be supernatural paralleled rather than parodied the slogans and logos of commerce. Trying to market and advertise their product, The Second Hand Water, Ingarsvala Thorsdottir and Shan Zhuan Wu at least remained reserved, ironic and sarcastic about evoking the passion to buy. However, Technology to the People eclipsed their effort by offering streetside consumer technology to the have-nots. The slick brochure elaborated on their devices intended to add convenience to the lives of the dispossessed, like the Street Access Machine, the Recovery Card and the Personal Folkcomputer. By addressing the problem of those that remain disconnected, Technology to the People will invariably provide patients for Markus Kach's Institute for media diseases. Novel in conception but lacking in execution, the mixed media installation's examining room relies on the terminology and graphics found in any desktop publishing package for its content rather than establishing an entirely new field of pathology or reinforcing medicine's role as nothing more than a product. Corporatism is not the only reference in the history of art and media, for the people's computer has yet to find a manufacturer or distributor as enthusiastic as that of the people's radio. EXECUTION The itinerary of this quick review of most of the projects realized followed the natural or arbitrary order in which the visitors encountered and grouped the works. We followed neither the zones as suggested in the press release nor the map of zones promised to be attached to the guide to the exhibition. To do so would be labyrinthian. Even after explicitly reading about the division into zones, it is hard to deduce a clear concept for Discord. Behind this problem lurks the failure to engage the potential of the exhibition, to create either the splendor of nascent dictators or the sly calculations of the manufacturers of consent. Discord could have redressed the spectacle of distraction but rather played directly into its agenda. This exhibition--which is highly conceptual and claims to have a theme and even more a strategy--inadmissibly excludes carefully researched or written theoretical material. Indeed, there is a reference to Rene Block and Robert Filliou's Peace Biennale. However, in this case it functions only as a hollow slogan regarding the goals of the exhibition: "to visualize unpeaceful realities." Perhaps the publishing of the catalogue promises salvation. In similar exhibitions the catalogue even substitutes for the show, especially due to the absence of art works (still) addressing the senses. Adding to this indecisiveness, all unrealized submissions were available on request for inspection, perhaps indicative of the insecurity of the jury in determining exactly what projects deserved realization. The visitor gets the impression that the very works that have not been realized possess a greater potential for sabotage. Most of the works seem to be interchangeable between the zones, while the ones not realized and stored in folders in the backroom promised hope in their embryonic, pure state, unspoiled by selection and materialization. Nonetheless, Discord: Sabotage of Realities deserves credit for introducing the public to an exhibit and its new media paraphenalia that begin to investigate the parallels between the invidual saboteur, the artist, and the collective mode of discord, society. Discord: Sabotage of Realities Kuntsverein und Kunsthaus in Hamburg 29 December 96--19 January 97 URLs telepolis http://tp.heise.de/tp/ Discord http://www.icf.de/discord Fileroom http://fileroom.aaup.uic.edu/fileroom.htm Invisible Embassy of Seborga http://www.foebud.org/kcoopawp/1consul/ Institut for media diseases http://www.moving-art-studio.com/ september/media_diseases.html NSK http://www.heck.com/nsk.html Artporn http://www.desk.nl/~artporn/index.html Survival Research Laboratories http://www.srl.org/ -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de