| What
are the New Topics?
Optics Management. Iconoclasm. Niche Maintenance. Data Sculpting. Blip Forecasting.
Trend Dissipation. Smiles and Handshakes. Spectral Analysis. Despecified
Media. The Long Now. Comparative Syntax. Context Crunching. Tidal Markets.
Subjunctive
Dependency. Demographic Interpolation. Database Sociability. Price Fixing.
Counterfeiting. Handwriting Analysis. Temporal Factoring. Max Factor.
Loose Screws. Middle Men.
Parallel Content. Shop Talk. Portable Studios. Quantum Computing. Style Points.
Executive Decisions. Emotional Arbitrage. Jet Lag. Compact Mirrors. Design
Rhetoric. Waste and Sewage. Scenario Planning. Narrative Emissions. Shelf
Life vs. Afterlife.
Counter-indication. Dead Brands. Black Holes. Holons. Multi-Platforming.
Network as Non-Space. Beta Testing. The Global Business Network. Idea
Patterning. Perceptual
Sub-Contracting. Vacant Lots. Virtual Ethics. Regles du Jeu. Logo Vacuums.
Cul de sacs. Machine Language. Faith Popcorn. Two-Way Streets.
What is The Production of Production?
a) The incorporation of options. An evolving, volatile,
multi-directional set.
b) Osmotic practice (get to know your skin).
c) Objects and images articulating the networks that
produce them, acting as de-privileged “nodes” for spatial configurations and formal
links among media, material, data, finances and sponsorships, communities,
perceptual
mechanisms,
operative systems, and ideas.
d) It is not loud or silent. It is not still, but it might be. There are
dynamics hanging in wires. There are people on Second Avenue on a Saturday
night in
late summer. Values in possession of values. We are making something mean
anything: a coffee cup means a single man dresses in blue. A magazine for
famous girls.
Names for names. The video is of deer eating blackberries by a lake. A writer
and her editor communicate via e-mail. They say they need more time—there
is more information than they thought. It is not beginning, or it is not
the end. The Production of Production happens in unregistered time. What
is historicization
to The Long Now? What is this? A mirror reflects a dark hallway. He is going
for a glass of water late at night. He has a meeting tomorrow morning with
his distributor, a breakfast meeting. They have to talk about his visibility.
Over-discrimination
has evolved into malnourishment. His distributor wants an upgrade: Hilfiger
is suing Bluefly, after all. His distributor is worried this will look bad
for everybody.
What we need is a total repatterning. We need to water the hedge. The tunnels
leading up to the office could use a new paint job. We might install benches
in the lobby (benches with phones). The user interface should be less pandering
(these were his words).
Is the Network Only a Metaphor?
No, and it's becoming
less so all the time. Where the metaphorical begins
and where the literal ends is an
ever more pregnant question. Consider the
work of Stephen Hendee, who has in the past created computational Merzbauen:
total
interior structures generated from military scenario equations processed
by a quantum machine. His latest drawings are inspired by the mathematical
results,
yet also find visual parallels in aerial photographs of suburban subdivisions.
He has called them sketches for speculative data-architecture. In an era
saturated with new metaphors of space—the Web, the Net, chat rooms,
ATM vestibules and rest stops—Hendee's art takes shape in liminality.
Like the Mannerists before him, or de Chirico, Hendee responds to the visual
stress
placed on perspective
by the technological innovations of his time.
New technology implies new perspective implies new
space. Gareth James finds his on location. His two-headed
paper camera—half CCTV, half 35mm Hollywood—situates
the contemporary picture in-between the surveillance frames of the closed circuit
and the desire-laden, branded image-space of cinema. James suggests that the
two kinds of production are essentially no different from one another, as they
both rely on property relations and hyper-administered space. James’ camera
operates, on a discursive level, like a particle accelerator. It collides
contexts: the star system is recast with famous security guards. James flaunts
the incongruities
and blended dogmas of video and film like a true iconoclast: what kind of
image would a two-headed camera make? Who is filming the filming?
If Networks Aren't Metaphorical, What Are They?
Unfolding practices constantly performing and restaging their limits. Practices
generate incidents generate practices. In his Data-Accumulation Print-Outs,
Dennis Balk uses images produced in photo-luminescence tests of metals.
Science is trap
door to the non-visual: applied high-end instrumentation (is technology
a magic wand?) excavates bandwidths typically off-limits to human perception.
The prints
push the idea that something remains hidden on the other side of vision—the
trick is to access it. Balk's partially wrapped array-objects (are they
sculptures?) are components of his Photo-Magnetic Receiver, a
device that may or may not allow a test subject to "see" on this photo-magnetic
spectrum. Dropped out of their initial contextual fabrics, the arrays become
mere stage
props for Balk's unique brand of analytical theater, while remaining
aesthetic objects in their own right. When does art become a hoax? When
do
we believe in
its power to move us beyond limit conditions? What is the viewer’s role?
Balks’ practice is one of testing, and as such literalizes the metaphorical.
Why Are Practices More Important Than Products?
Products are illustrative; practices are activating, programmable.
As contemporary art practices become more open-ended and diversified,
as medium-specificity
gives way to context or information management, the products that artists
make will
grow more malleable and more visibly attuned to their making: real-time
self-historization. The idea of the product is changing. Information
sells itself. A recent Sprint
ad campaign positioned a coffee cup on an otherwise empty page of the New
York Times. "You see coffee," the caption read. "We see data."
The idea that "ceci n'est pas une pipe" has made the journey
from artistic/philosophic conundrum to marketplace and back. As systems
are increasingly
objectified our best producers will be enamored with volume, movement,
distribution, outlets, translation, spontaneous capitalization, and
reflective scale.
German artist Daniel Pflumm is one of the new entrepreneurs.
His practice extends from running the Berlin nightclub
Elektro to producing techno CDs with Kotai
+ Mo to pirating logos for his line of T-shirts to
the more traditional art endeavors of video and object
making. In his lightboxes, Pflumm sloughs off
the differentiating
aspects of corporate signage (this one is from Baulssen
cookies), leaving only the insistent ghost of production,
a kind of marketing gestalt. Pflumm’s
minimalism is mediated by the repetitive flicks of
channel surfing: Donald Judd at the CNN news desk.
And
then there's ChanSchatz, whose practice/identity is
that of the multi-tasking digital Factory. Not artist
as machine, pace Warhol, but practice as intergrated
system. For over a decade, ChanSchatz has been compiling
and processing an information archive influenced as
much by corporate business models and R&D
matrices as by art. Aesthetics as advanced data management.
Their Series Lineage Drawing
light-box functions as a genealogy of the diffuse outlets
their practice has taken: archive of formal information
(patterns, shapes, colors, evolutions of
the same), textiles (ties and scarves “branded” with
the signature ChanSchatz emblems), performance events,
and corporate partnerships: products forever eclipsed
by their production.
Cashing in or Selling Out?
Consider the paradox of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
today: both futurist/constructivist and ad man. "Practice crunches categories."
You've never had
more options and the stakes have never been higher. For The Production
of Production,
Bernadette Corporation presents the Bernadette Entertainment Group (B/E/G),
a casual culture venture with interests in underground cinema, fugitive
fashion, and magazine publishing. B/E/G proposes a hypothetical non-space
for products
outside their markets. Let's meet there for drinks. What would an underground
cinema look like on Prince Street? In the heart of Chinatown? On Wall Street?
What would it show? Who would come? What would they wear? Their various
projects may change with time and place, but one aspect remains the
same: the interactive
environment around art changes what art is, and what it can be.
Tim Griffin & Bennett Simpson
©1999 | 
