sean on June 11th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
This is a followup to the discussion yesterday (these aren’t complete minutes, or minutes at all for that matter, so if anyone thinks I’ve forgotten or underrepresented anything then add it!)
E and I got into it a little bit before anyone arrived - I found “latency” to be a formal topic (not only do the works in the exhibition make use of delay, a formal component of new media, but latency itself suggests the attitude that meaning and beauty are hidden away in the media) and I was hoping that we’d get into new media’s medium fixation, but we never even touched on this.
E also explained how the Gonzales text convinced him that latency presupposes an idea of what is to come, of what is latent (in contradiction to the normal understanding where latent means invisible and therefore unknown) - it names the threat even in the absence of the threat.
Later, we spent a while using Ernst Bloch to try and put latency in more positive terms. Bloch, after all, is the one who defines “latent” as unrealized potential (an attempt to project a positive future from within critique).
Two visions of latency - Bloch’s hopeful one and Gonzales’ cynical one.
O from Bulbo gave a history of his collaborative project, which is currently expanding to Los Angeles. The question came up: what is the core of what defines Bulbo (and for that matter, any collaborative project)? Is it site, medium, a mission, the people, etc? E said these questions were wrapped up in the idea of expansion (do projects expand “organically” or “with a plan”). I asked the related question about the life span of collaborative projects, institutions, corporations, or countries. Almost all of these seem to go as long as they can, and few ever constitutionally mandate their own end. Should we plan our own endings?
We talked about the cybernetic project guided by Stafford Beer for Allende’s Chile which never came to fruition because of Pinochet’s coup. This Cybersyn project was supposed to be a real-time computer controlled economy, where labor was modularized and compartmentalized. Possibly an alternative internet history.
The discussion returned to the value of imagining the future (as opposed to pragmatically dealing with the realities of the present) - how the Republicans and the Project for a New American Century articulated a vision and put it into practice while the Democrats couldn’t seem to agree on any real platform (that was the public perception anyway). Y talked about mid-century car design, which had a sense of the future or looking forward - now we have nostalgia for thinking about the future.
The conversation turned to academic institutions, for whom reading and theory are obligatory, bloodless exercises; O said that his students are afraid to do anything, everything needs to be justified; R said that in the post-Reagan world, the demographics of art schools became much more conservative (some discussion of that situation in Los Angeles).
General observation that institutions aren’t performing the role that they ought to be. E asked O how his students were being trained, suggested Miwon Kwon’s essay on site specificity; I mentioned a related text by Andrea Fraser. Universities seem to make the claim on critical thinking and theory, but at the same time often promote an unhealthy relationship to those activities - at the same time, students have an “on demand” approach to learning (watching videos of lectures, Googling during class, etc.) and a radically different relationship to pedagogy (teacher is seen less as an instructor and more as a bureaucratic agent to answer questions and sign off on grades). Where do we go from here?
I was filling up on coffee when we talked about identity, exhibitionism, anonymity, blogs, the (not) changing role of art criticism, so I can’t summarize it well.
Finally R was interested in minimalism (sound, art, and architecture) so I posted one essay on site