The experience of travel includes effort, adaptation to local conditions, navigation, guesswork, culture shock etc. In short, a "wake up" situation. The experience of international exchange, residencies and so on in the context of an international art network, includes all of the above, and therefore should be understood as part of a process of pushing through the envelope, even bursting the bubble of assumptions, psychological projections, cultural and ideological projections, and so on, and so potentially leading to the gaining of new perceptions, new knowledge, including a sense of what we do not know.
This experience is vital to the understanding of contemporary art. On the other hand, especially in Europe and North America, we have also learned how to be tourists, and tourism includes complaining about transportation, the lack of hot running water, heating or air conditioning, palatable food etc. In short, more a state of somnambulism than being awake! Artists and designers are just as likely to succumb to the syndrome of the self-absorbed tourist as anybody. By comparison the discipline of travel is a discipline indeed, a way to gaining knowledge that allows for connecting into local knowledges rather than the smoothed out global versions.
In his lecture series of 1976 at the College de France, Michel Foucault (published in English translation as Society Must be Defended, 2004) talks about using the research tools of the ‘all-encompassing and global theories’ at a local level, but in order to do this, he says the theoretical unity of their discourse needs to be ‘suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatised, theatricalized and so on (Foucault 2004 p. 6) This forms the local character of the critique, a critique that resembles;
a sort of autonomous and non-centralized theoretical production, or in other words, a theoretical production that does not need a visa from some common regime to establish its validity. (Foucault 2004 p. 6)What makes his notion of the critique possible is what he calls the ‘returns of knowledge’. Beneath the whole thematic of ‘life, not knowledge’, ‘the real, not erudition’, ‘travel not books’, he says; ‘through it and even within it we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, M. 2004 p. 7). Using this term he refers to the historical contents that have been buried or masked in the formal systematizations of knowledge, but have provided him with the wherewithal for his research;
quite simply because historical contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask. (Foucault 2004 p. 7)The critique was then able to reveal these ‘blocks of historical knowledges’ by using the tools of scholarship, but it is ‘the re-appearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible’ (Foucault 2004 p. 8).
The local, therefore, is itself the potential site of resistance to the ‘world system’. As artists interested in the way places in transition focus people’s attention on the issues of the local, and the global, the art process generates material, visual material, verbal material, mapping material and video that can be seen as equivalent to Foucault’s “the returns of knowledge”. However, this is an ongoing and ‘live’ thing, making or taking pictures, writing or speaking, making statements, drawing diagrams, editing or not editing video, making live video-streaming links and conversations, using art and everyday practices to find out about how to come back to the Earth!
Local local
Following on from considering just what is the artistic function in society, it is apposite to mention that in ANT, actor-network theory, it is equally relevant to consider the question of society, this long established and basic component of multiple discourses. As Bruno Latour writes in his introduction to Reassembling the Social, which is suggestively headlined; How to Resume the Task of Tracing Associations:
What I want to do in the present work is to show why the social cannot be construed as a kind of material or domain and to dispute the project of providing a 'social explanation' of some other state of affairs. (Latour 2005 p 1)The local to local situation is obviously embedded in the situation of connecting people and places using video streaming technology, and Latour has some powerful ways of re-working seeing how the local actually is. In Part II of this introduction to actor-network theory called First Move: Localizing the Global he writes:
An actor-network is traced whenever, in the course of a study, the decision is made to replace actors of whatever size by local and connected sites instead of ranking them into micro and macro. The two parts are essential, hence the hyphen. The first part (the actor) reveals the narrow space in which all of the grandiose ingredients of the world begin to be hatched; the second part (the network) may explain through which vehicles, which traces, which traits, which types of information, the world is being brought inside those places and then, after having been transformed there, are being pumped back out of its narrow walls. This is why the hyphenated 'network' is not there as a surreptitious presence of the Context, but remains what connects the actors together. Instead of being like Context, another dimension giving volume to a too narrow and flat description, it allows the relations to remain flat and to pay in full the bill for the 'transaction costs'. It's not that there are a macro-sociology and a micro-sociology, but that there two different ways of envisaging the macro-micro relationship: the first one builds a series of Russian Matryoshka dolls - the small is being enclosed, the big is enclosing; and the second deploys connections - the small is being unconnected, the big one is to be attached. (Latour 2005 pp179-180)So, here we are! Experience tends to indicate that the relations in connecting people and places do tend to remain flat whenever we connect, and there has always been a sense of wonder or curiosity about the other place that is perhaps connected to the equal relationship that is present in this shifting connectivity between cafe and a museum, a street corner and a studio, a pub and an apartment, a small gallery space and a lobby in the Academy.
This wonder/curiosity leads to mapping, file sharing, moving a laptop into adjacent spaces inside and outside to show what's round the corner. Sometimes it leads to work, a collective activity, interactive work between people based on questions that come out of the imaginings about the other locality, whilst the side by side 'thereness' and 'hereness' of these spaces already suggests a two way traffic, a dialogue. Links can also involve actors who in the one local context are figures of national or international repute, power or influence, and hobnobbing with actors with a non-institutional grounding in the other locality. The various and diverse situations involved in these appositions is also an intriguing element that perhaps relates to this point that Latour makes in the same chapter quoted above:
As we saw in the earlier part of the book, it is not the sociologist's job to decide in the actors stead what groups are making up the world and which agencies are making them act. Her job is to build the artificial experiment - a report, a story, a narrative, an account -where this diversity might be deployed to the full. (Latour 2005 p184)In the activity of making connections it is interesting to see how spontaneously participants engage with the link between nodes and the traffic between the nodes with running commentaries, that become fragments that are assembled to sound like stories, part of a narrative and an account produced by the sequence of elements, where to every story belongs another, in a flow that runs on and on, infinite connections creating more links, reminiscent of the archetype as explored in McLuhan and Watson's From Cliché to Archetype (1970) and of course the links of this hypertext. Latour continues:
Even though it seems so odd at first, the same is true of scale: it is not the sociologist's business to decide whether any given interaction is 'micro' while some other one would be 'middle range' or 'macro'. Too much investment, ingenuity and energy is expended by participants into modifying the relative scale of all the other participants for sociologists to decide on a fixed standard. (Latour 2005 p184)And on the next page he writes; 'Scale is the actor's own achievement.'
Inside and outside
Wandering about with a laptop connected to the internet, video-streaming, listening, talking, showing and pointing using a webcam, is hard on the arm muscles, but a fantastic way of mapping, much more than a version of a virtual fly through, laying down a memory based and spatially specific cognitive map. Connecting spaces in this attitude of mobility and inclusion really does render our everyday assumptions about inside and outside wondrously akin to the conundrums of Lewis Carroll. Thanks to the work of Martin Gardner's annotated Hunting of the Snark we have the juxtaposition of two fascinating mapping concepts from Carroll's work.
This challenge to inside-outside is equivalent to the mapping discrepancy in Lewis Carroll's Bruno and Sylvie Concluded; where in Chapter 11; the German Professor explains how his country's cartographers experimented with larger and larger maps until they finally made one with a scale of a mile to the mile. 'It has has never been spread out, yet,' he says. 'The farmers objected; they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.On and through
Looking glass geometry is also worth exploring in tandem with the screen environment.
The screen environment and the concepts of in and out, on and through, remain an intriguing dimension of what we are doing in this spatial, technical and communication context.
The screen as the global, the space local, is a reverse of the usual geographic assumption of going out into the world. The image made of pigment, ink and emulsion, is de-coded to produce the light of art, photography, whilst film is light projected onto a screen and we learn to focus on a plane that hovers invisibly in front of that screen to achieve the maximum illusion of a window onto a cinematic set of spaces and times. The telly, the computer screen is illuminated from within, this is a spatial relation akin to the architecture of glass in the medieval cathedral, not an architecture of light, a system of illumination where the human subject performs the role of a screen capable of absorbing this quite different sort of light, a sort of sculptural light, if that is possible! Texture! Or "the bairdboard bombardment screen" in the "charge of the light barricade" [349.9,11] as Joyce has it in the Wake! Enlightenment! The computer is an extension of the nervous system and the screen is as much brain information as the light your brain makes in your head when looking at the world, including all this newfangled tackle.
Hybrid spaces
Space and spaces in this interface behave in new ways, as do those who inhabit, use and work these spaces. One way of expressing these qualities is to describe the hybridity these spaces often present. For example, take this example that relates to the techniques that generate the experience of a pictorial space. In byzantine art and in medieval art, where connectedness in meaning always takes precedence over verisimilitude, the gold "background" in a work is not actually a background at all, it is a "no space" full of value, a golden value, ultimate value when considering the relationships between spiritual and earthly powers. The painting by Altdorfer of the Crucifixion is a northern European 'renaissance' work that has this dual spatial quality found in many during a transitional period of swapping between representational programmes that meant the new pictorial techniques were not always used to block this connectedness in meaning so fundamentally rooted in the purposes of representation. The angel in Altdorfer's crucifixion floats in a space that has no depth, but equally has the capacity to suggest the infinite development of a non-directional space, the kind of space that contemporary cosmological theory uses to place every individual, wherever situated, at the centre of a universe where there is no centre.
Taking in the whole work the hybridity is clearly, breathtakingly obvious and yet peculiar. Bodies occupy space, they operate in spatial relationships, and together they create a space with depth and a depth that allows for the existence of a drama, an interaction, but set forth in a "no space" of a golden dimension that is essentially a flat surface, but suggests a "fullness" of space, a presence.
This picturing of space is just that "a picturing", and what we are exploring is partly to do with representing back to ourselves the encounter with new types of space where cognitive behaviours require new mapping techniques. The example above is apposite in that the pictorial space depicted is not so bound to the perspectival systematic view of "looking through a window", because, as with the pictorial space of many northern European artists of this era, the "new space" was more in keeping with Kepler's ideas of picturing, an activity that occurs in a space, rather than Alberti's idea of looking into a space, from a point of view removed from the space represented (Alpers). Presenting rather than representing?
