!publish! shards.. reflections..

content/reflection/accidental-neighbors.md

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+title = "Accidental neighbors"
+glassblowers = ["marcellmars.md"]
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+
+At the moment there is a ![](shard:accidenta0-neighbors.md) which should become this reflection.
+
+There are many examples of concepts with the same spellings existing across different fields. Bringing them together can be rewarding after a successful composition. However, if this attempt fails, it can be quite embarrassing. It might work if done with an understanding of why, even if it seems wrong initially. If it can politicize or broaden our imagination, it could be powerful.
+
+The term "mirror" is highly saturated. Saying, "Let's mirror each other in solidarity!" sounds great. Mirroring, as in cloning digital content from one hard disk to another, is technically simple and possibly underwhelming, but tactically, politically, and in terms of social reproductio, it's important. Having desirable content and a good vision for the mirroring act might help. Ubu has desirability for many, and if only a few of those mirror it, we're already on our way. 
+
+This is an attempt to unfold the fantasy part.
+
+
+Notes:
+
+- "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear"
+ - ![](glassblower:nickthurston.md): driving in reverse is like using an archive. the present, possibly future, is blury in front but the archive is focused, made wider through the lenses, seen from a less comfortable position of driving
+ - other examples:
+   -critical apparatus in sandpoints and poststructural philosophy. to make a point about formalization politicizing
+   - tracing concepts to explain accidental neighors

content/reflection/archiveapocalypse.md

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+title = "The Apocalypse of the Archive"
+has_shards = ["processnotplace.md", ]
+glassblowers = ["sreckohorvat.md", "duree.md"]
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+
+The origin of the archive is always already linked to destruction. Something is preserved in order to avoid destruction. And vice versa, something is destroyed in order to abolish knowledge and memory. The destruction of books is as old as the book.
+
+The Great ![Library](shard:processnotplace.md) of Alexandria, the most famous historical attempt at a universal repository of human memory, vanished in flames. Yet, immediately after destruction, “daughter libraries” were established and the transmission of knowledge continued.
+ 
+More than two centures earlier, around 213 BC, China's first emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the first book burning in recorded history. Anticipating the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine who said “where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too”, he also buried alive some 460 scholars for owning forbidden books. 
+
+Later would come the Inquisition and the Nazis who would perfect the method of burning books together with burning people. 
+
+During the early days of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was burned to the ground together with some 3 million books and artifacts. With this event Sarajevo didn't just lose a building, it was dispossessed and deprived of its memory, including of original documents from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires that were a testimony to various aspects of Bosnia's centuries-old history and a proof of peaceful coexistence and multiculturalism even before the term was invented by the so called "West".
+
+Around the same time, during the 1990s, almost 2,8 million books or 13.8% of total books were removed from Croatian libraries. Not in flames, but in a seemingly more "civilised" process of “writing off books” – not only books about socialism and marxism, but also classics like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and others who were considered to be on the “Yugoslav” = “Serbian side”. 
+
+Thirty years later, we have witnessed a similar process in Ukraine that has “withdrawn” from its libraries around 19 million Russian and Soviet-era copies of books. 
+
+Since October 7th, 2023 until spring 2024, besides the destruction of public libraries, every single university in Gaza was bombed and more than 396 UNRWA and public schools were destroyed or damaged, which left more than 600,000 students without access to education. The Edward Said library, with its English language collection, is likely be ruined too. 
+
+As we can see, a new order, which usually comes after or during a war, is always connected to epistemicide, the systematic eradication of education and knowledge of those you want to destroy. Since war seems to be as old as humanity, we must consider epistemicide – along the lines of Walter Benjamin's famous remark that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism" – as old as "progress”. 
+
+In his book Archive Fever, based on a lecture given in London two years after Bosnia's national library was destroyed, Jacques Derrida notably linked the compulsion to archive with Freud's death drive: “right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction.”
+
+Derrida calls this death drive the archive drive or archive fever (mal d'archive), claiming that there would be no archive desire without radical finidute. In other words,
+> the archive always works, and a priori, against itself. 
+
+If every archive is inevitably caught in this apocalyptic paradox, what is the use and meaning of archive in our (post-)apocalyptic times? Where does our contemporary archive fever come from if not from the realization that extinction, as the most radical finitude that we can imagine, also means the final death of the archive. Or not? What if the archive has to be pointed not only towards some possible future humans, but also other species that might be a receiver of the memory of the world in some near or distant future? 
+
+What is at stake today is not simply extinction and destruction of the biosphere, but also the semiosphere – namely the universe of signs that we created. The question is the following one: who and how is going to interpret these signs after the end of the world as we know it? 
+While today everyone is occupied by the short-term perspective and destroying the world as quickly as possible, it is precisely these sorts of questions that need to be raised – how to communicate something to the future while preserving it even if the (semiotic) context of the archive might be completely destroyed? If even 4,500 years after the famous Giza Pyramids were built, we are still not able to fully comprehend them, what guarantee is there that some future archaeologist will be able to understand our contemporary semiotic systems and archives?
+
+Interestingly, these kinds of questions were posed in 1981 by the US Department of Energy and the Bechtel Group, the conglomerate in charge of maintaining and securing several nuclear facilities in the United States. Their main concern was how to communicate the Apocalypse (as revelation) about the dangers of buried or leaking radiocactivity to future generations. So, they invited a team of linguists, semioticians, anthropologists and nuclear physicists into The Human Interference Task Force to explore how to reduce the likelihood of future interference in radioactive waste repositories. 
+
+The prime objective of this grand initiative of applied “nuclear semiotics”, which had to take into account also the possibility that over such a long period spoken and written languages might go extinct, was to come up with concrete proposals of how to transmit knowledge about the repositories to future generations. To put it simply, how do we prevent some future archaeologists from thinking that they have found the Giza pyramids of our time instead of nuclear waste? 
+
+The Human Interference Task Force concluded that significant reductions in the likelihood of human interference could be achieved, for perhaps thousands of years into the future, if appropriate steps are taken to communicate the existence of the repository. Consequently, the Task Force directed most of its study for two years towards the field of long-term communication. Around the same time, in order to determine how to convey such a message to a distant future, the German Zeitschrift für Semiotik carried out a survey in 1982 asking the following question:
+
+> How would it be possible to inform our descendants for the next 10,000 years about the storage locations and dangers of radio- active waste?
+
+The responses, even though the period of 10,000 years seems a rather optimistic projection of how long nuclear waste would stay radioactive, were highly original and thought-provoking, even from today’s perspective. And the more we head out into the one-way street of planetary catastrophe, the more interesting – and important – they are becoming. Because they open up the terrain of the ![long-term perspective](shard:duree.md) that is so absent today, and, at the same time, a sense of urgency and necessity to widen our ![sense](shard:senseofimagination.md) of ![imagination](shard:theimaginary.md).
+
+For instance, the American semiotician and linguist Thomas Sebeok, one of the founders of “zoosemiotics” and “biosemiotics”, who was a member of the Human Interference Task Force in the early 1980s, proposed the creation of what he called an “Atomic Priesthood", a panel composed of scientists (physicists, anthropologists, semioticians) that would, like the major religious institutions (for example, the Catholic Church), have the obligation to preserve and chronicle the ‘warning’ over the next 2,000 years (in this case, not the biblical “revelation”, but the message about the dangers and locations of the radioactive waste). How would they do it? In his detailed report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management, titled “Communication measures to bridge ten millennia”, Sebeok proposes a “folkloric relay system”, basically suggesting that the ‘Atomic Priesthood’, after dividing the 10,000-year frame into manageable segments of shorter periods, should deal with creating annually renewed rituals and legends retold year-on-year. 
+
+The Polish science fiction author Stanisław Lem, famous for his novel Solaris (1961), proposed the creation of artificial satellites that would transmit the warning from their orbit to Earth for millennia and, just in case, would encode information about the nuclear waste into the DNA of flowers to be planted near the repositories. The German physicist and author Philipp Sonntag went a step further and suggested constructing an artificial moon that would last for 10,000 years engraved with the warning message. And certainly, one of the most thought-provoking proposals, based on evidence of the long history of coexistence between cats and humans, a French author together with an Italian semiotician proposed breeding “radiation cats” that would change colour when they went near radioactive sites. 
+
+In 1984, after two years of interdisciplinary deliberation across the world, the Human Interference Task Force published a substantial technical report for the US Department of Energy containing their final proposal. None of the above proposals entered the final report, and instead of zoosemiotics or engineering a new religion to protect nuclear waste repositories, the Task Force proposed an architectural – or rather “place- making” – solution, namely, the creation of a large monument at the site formed out of several gigantic stone monoliths inscribed with the information in all human languages. It is an interesting solution, but the same question remains: how to communicate the Apocalypse (the “revelation”) across millennia so that it could be read and decoded, and what if – in that distant future – there is no one to communicate it to? 
+
+This brings us, finally, to public shadow archives and libraries. Aren’t the contemporary shadow librarians a sort of a Human Interference Task Force? With an important difference: they want interference, they don't want to warn some future recepient of the archive to leave it alone, they want her to interfer, to dive into the archive. Yet, there is also a similiarity, as ![](glassblower:nickthurston.md) has pointed out by comparing the nuclear “archive” with the “public library”. The “radioactivity” of UbuWeb – and other archives, including the pioneering work and tragic fate of Aaron Swartz – consists in its mission to make knowledge publicly available and free, thus subverting the prevailing model of intellectual property and the highest semiotic order that organizes our present, namely, capital – and profit. 
+
+So, are the custodians and those involved in shadowing and mirroring some sort of preppers? On the contrary, while the Silicon Valley billionaires are building nuclear shelters on New Zealand and preparing escapes to Mars with their own private archives, shadow librarians are interested in spreading, decentralizing and decolonizing archives, creating conditions for “autonmous life” [shard: Saša Savanović, Autonomous life] in the here and now, while “becoming parasitic” [shard: Saša Savanović, Becoming parasitic] and “barbarian” [reflection: Olga Goriunova]. Their strength is not in acceleration and growth, but in slowness. Like Michael Ende's Momo. While hacking temporality, they rehabilitate and reinvent the vernacular. They are embracing the inevitable: namely the possibility of post-linguistic communication that is not ashamed of being absurd, on the contrary, they take the absurd as the means of survival. 
+
+Shadowing, mirroring, copying, permacomputing, combining low-tech and sustainable technology, using systems that are easily constructed and deconstructed, might seem a bit absurd in a world on the verge of biospheric and semiotic collapse, but as the Custodians remind us in their solidarity letter with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub [shard: Custodians.Online "In solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub]:
+> This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective disobedience.
+
+The “public library” as an institution for survival [shard: Tomislav Medak, Libraries against the separation from the common], or the archive as barbarian and parasitic – is indeed an act of collective disobedience. It is the contemporary response to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in which firemen burn books, while so called “drifters” become living archives – each of them having memorized books in order to rebuild society after the dystopian nightmare. 
+
+More recently, the science fiction film Leave the World Behind ends with a girl finding an underground bunker with shelves filled with DVDs, including, the final season of Friends which she watches while the world is ending. “If there's any hope left in this fucked-up world, I want to at least find out how things turn out for them”, says the girl, meaning the six principal characters of Friends. 
+
+You could say this is another ironic proof of the contemporary escapism, but it reveals an important insight about archiving – there is always something, connected to a particular pleasure (or even: jouissance). It is both Thanatos and Eros, destruction and preservation, apocalypse and the archive, which is at play here. 
+
+And it brings us back to the starting paradox which obviously can't be resolved but has to be accepted as the fundamental precondition and – destiny of the archive. If we will never escape the “archive fever”, we should embrace it. 
+
+“Everything is temporary”, anyhow.

content/reflection/closingwindowopendoor.md

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+title = "Closing the window to open the door."
+glassblowers = ["felixstalder.md"]
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+
+The reflexion has two parts. Closing the window is a critique of the neoliberal demands for transparency and openness. Rather, certain ways of being accessible, of being read must to refused. With possible reference to Eduard Glissant’s Right to Opactiy.
+
+In order for closing the window, enforcing some boundaries not to become a reactionary stance, there is a need to think about what one wants to open up towards. Hence, the opening the door. 
+
+I want to think about an opening in two directions: towards /abundance, which implies things and objects beyond the commodity from, that become more valuable in a social sense through use and re-use. We all know, degrowth is coming. Question is: can it be avoided to become civil war. This makes thinking about abundance urgent.
+
+The second direction I want to open the door towards is the /duree, the long-term. On an infrastructural level, this means /permacomputing and question of autonomy. On a cultural level, it means providing a framework that allows for both readability in the long-term and for unknown future adaptations. Here there is a possible reference to Achille Mbembe’s Earthly Community, in which he writes: „The Earth can attain unlimited duration, but only if it is capable of fecundity and regeneration. In the absence of this capacity for periodic (re-)begetting, it amounts to no more than the darkened mask of a vast house of the dead.“ (p.9)

content/reflection/decapitated.md

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+title = "Decapitated UBU: a Decapitated Reflection"
+glassblowers = ["sanjabojanic.md"]
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+
+I had in mind Walter Benjamin: I'm back in my library. 
+> You have all heard of people whose loss of their books has turned them into invalids or of those who, to acquire them, became criminals.
+
+I aim to connect at least two dots or questions:
+
+- One is on meaning out of language – referencing Godard – in order to go back to reality (or conquer reality) 
+- The other is on archives void of content and back to the gesture. 
+
+Both dots should provide a trajectory for recovering the imaginary.

content/reflection/homelandlessparasite.md

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+title = "A homelandless parasite"
+glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
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+
+As repositories of knowledge, archives and libraries are old as the written word itself (actually, in some instances, they precede it). In their modern form, they emerge over the course of 18th and 19th century as monolithic and hierarchical but public and supposedly neutral institutions, meant to provide uncommodified access to culture and knowledge in the climate of rising capitalist commodification. As Medak and Mars write, “the public library held a utopian promise of making all the world’s memory available to all members of society without barriers.”
+
+The idea that libraries are in any way neutral was challenged during 1960s and 1970s, when it increasingly became obvious that the notion of neutrality effectively perpetuated implicit structural exclusions of class, gender, and race. Libraries provided access but were also the instruments of enclosure, serving as gatekeepers of epistemic and material privilege. They were meant to conserve not only the artefacts, but even more importantly, the context in which these have been acquired and stored, that is to say, the ways in which the artifacts are meant to be interpreted. The type of world’s memory that libraries/archives held, turned out to be very particular, despite posing as universal.
+
+For a brief time, the emergence of the internet invigorated the dream of libraries as providers of universal access to the entire world’s memory and knowledge. But, the availability of appropriate technological infrastructure to conduct the task did not translate into desired political and economic reality. [shard: technological determinism] Quite the contrary, internet helped enforce capitalist intellectual property regimes even more efficiently, creating artificial scarcity in the place of actual abundance [shard: abundance]. 
+
+At the same time, the public function of the library itself came under attack as the logic of the market penetrated the public realm of politics. Wendy Brown argues that the neoliberal extension of market values into formerly non-economic domains turned all human and institutional action into “rational entrepreneurial action”. Not only have libraries progressively lost funding, they also had to orient themselves towards commercial ends; curation processes were supplemented by an imperative to provide what is commercially viable, popular, dictated by demand. The public became even more porous. 
+
+Owning to methodological nationalism [shard: methodological nationalism], the national container of public repositories of knowledge has for a long time remained invisible. With revisionist politics taking hold around the world, the function of the library as not simply public, but national-public institution, came to the forefront. The revisionist trend showed that the notion of the public is further demarcated, nationally cast, and instrumental for any nationalist project.
+
+Digital shadow libraries germinate and sprout on the verges of these enclosures and redefinitions of what constitutes the public and how is one able to access it. They reject the rules of the game – copyright law, the logic of supply and demand and the imperative of profit, the dominant ideology of nationalism and identitarianism – without exiting it. They are parasites [shard: becoming parasitic]. They hide within the system, they latch onto it, without belonging. 
+
+As UbuWeb memorably stated: “We are hiding in plain sight, right out in the open. You just have to know how to find us.” 
+
+As carriers of context, digital shadow libraries and archives do not aspire to universality. In line with the feminist politics of location, they are always located somewhere, in a certain context, taking accountability for their particular position. However, they are firmly homelandless [shard: homelandless]. They are not patriotic; they don’t pledge allegiance to any particular state or nation. They hide where ever a shelter is available. They are on the go, barbarian [reflection: Barbarian library].
+
+They are institutions, not communities of the like, but negotiators of difference working towards a common goal. They are not unconditionally open nor transparent. They determine rules and procedures for admittance and exclusion [reflection: closing the window to open the door]. They are not blind to power relations. They are autonomous in as much as they are ![interdependent](shard:autonomouslife.md) [reflection: the interdependent networks of archives]. They are fragile and ephemeral. They are vernacular, functional rather than monumental. They change hands. From ![custodians to custodians](shrad:custodianshipinrelationalpractices.md). They are ![produced](shard:productionreproduction.md) through ![care](shard:care.md).
+
+
+References:
+
+Tomislav Medak & Marcell Mars. 2022. Public Library and The Return of the Repressed Memory of the World. Stories and Threads: Perspective on Art Archives. L’Internationale Online 
+
+Wendy Brown. 2003. Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy

content/reflection/material.md

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 title = "A Material Basis for Digital Archives"
+glassblowers = ["cristobalsciutto.md"]
 has_shards = []
 +++
 

content/reflection/variations.md

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+title = "Variations on preserving a digital archive of the avant-garde"
+glassblowers = ["dusanbarok.md"]
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+
+consider diff approaches to preservation, non-digital, but also small-digital
+
+- media archaeology approach - remediation to non-digital media  ( skor codex, tapebook , ....) .. vhs, vinyl, paper / print, microfilm, tape
+- poetic compression - florian's floppys, slit-scan photography 
+- activation : temporal / social / site-based - eg. via exhibitions, KG did it : printing out the internet, retyping a library, top tens show in athens /// or via workshops such as this one
+- selection (eg. only top tens), curation, sampling, playlists, screenshot per day, metadata archive / sitemap
+- oral tradition, narration, literary interpretation (KG's ubu book, ubu bibliography @ monoskop)
+- video registration of browsing ubu
+- forking : making a mirror and continue adding stuff
+- approaches from contemporary art conservation - view ubu as an artwork from an individual artist with its performative gestures etc... eg. if this is acquired by a museum (different to when it is acquired by an archive such as archive.org or LOC via web snapshots etc..) ... eg. understanding ubu as a complex artwork consisting not only of digital files but also of physical manifestations in the form of exhibitions and as a long-term performance .... artist interview, identifying artist intent, identifying components and their relations and dependencies 
+- taking into account : longevity / enviro footprint (digi size constraint, non-digi or non-electric formats) / accessibility--distribution / usability / original/social context , ...
+- ref : https://permacomputing.net/personalities/

content/shard/autonomouslife.md

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+title = "Autonomous life"
+glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
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+
+In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow identify three basic social freedoms – freedom to disobey, freedom to move away and freedom to create and transform social orders – found across cultures and centuries, which facilitated the ability of pre-modern peoples to leave behind – by transforming, destroying, or simply abandoning – social setups that have become inappropriate or otherwise unwanted.  
+
+In contrast to the modern (Western) concept of individual freedom, where to be free means to be self-sufficient and as such is inseparable from private property, for the indigenous societies of America, individual freedom was embedded within structures of care; it implied that people permitted each other to live without fear of falling through the cracks. Individualism of European societies is thus about getting advantage over others, while for the indigenous American societies it was about guaranteeing one another the means for an autonomous life. 
+
+Autonomy is not about self-sufficiency, ![it](shard:dependency.md)’s about ![interdependence](shard:interdependencenetworks.md).
+
+References: 
+
+Graeber, David & Wengrow, David. 2020. The Dawn of Everything. Macmillan Publishers

content/shard/becomingparasitic.md

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+title = "Becoming parasitic"
+glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
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+
+How to Disappear, a short film by the collective Total Refusal, is an artistic intervention into a war game and an attempt to subvert it. Can a player in Battlefield refuse to fight, can they desert? To a certain extent. Leaving the battlefield is not an option. Neither is putting down weapons. She can only choose not to use them. Interestingly, the player can attack any object in the game, except the national flag, which can be shot at, but it can never be hit, destroyed or in any way affected. It just keeps on flattering. [shard: Methodological nationalism]
+
+The Deleuzian notion of becoming-minoritarian comes to mind. The player has all the weapons afforded by the game at her disposal, i.e., she is a fully playable character, yet she refuses to follow the rules, she rejects the script, she plays the role of the unplayable, she becomes the ambient. She puts herself in the position of fragility, vulnerability, ultimately invoking death. Again, Deleuze’s idea of becoming-imperceptible, as blending in, becoming indistinguishable from the environment. The intent is not to exit the game, to go off grid or step out, but to do something other than the game prescribes in the game itself. Would it be possible to convince somebody else to join this futile exercise? To mirror the strategy? [shard: The Audible Mirror]
+
+Will it be futile? Is futile that which doesn’t pay off? The autonomy of a player who refuses to play by the rules is extremely limited. But it can be extended. Higher autonomy [shard: Autonomous life] may be achieved only collectively, with rising number of disappeared that can guarantee one another means of temporary escape and respite. The player hides not in a place, but in a process, in a relation [shard: a process, not a place]. Nevertheless, she is located and locatable. One can hide within the system only for so long. It is risky. The logic of the game works to identify and eliminate irregularities. She is constantly under attack. Latched onto the game, feeding from it, but separate. Pursuing her own ends. Like a parasite, a predator that eats her prey in units of less than one. With no contingency plan. Able to achieve symbiosis, to destroy or repurpose her host, and/or herself.
+
+A parasite is not welcome, she does not belong, she is unwanted [shard: Homelandless]. She creates discomfort, she disturbs, she castrates, destroying her hosts ability to reproduce. Parasite is not the Underground [shard: Underground]. She is neither excluding nor open. She is within and without. Chewing. She is competitively coexisting: she limits her own growth more than she limits the growth of another species. Parasite is the border. ![](shard:border:md), not as a boundary but as gateway, a crossing. 
+

content/shard/border.md

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+title = "Border"
+glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
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+
+The central paradox of today’s liberal democracies, according to Étienne Balibar, is that they must simultaneously “understate and affirm” the equation between nationality and citizenship. Squeezed between the ubiquitous transnational movement of capital and people on one hand, and the national roots of their legitimacy on the other, liberal democracies employ complex administrative and coercive apparatuses [shard: order maintenance] to differentiate between citizens and non-citizens, those who belong and those who are excluded, those that can be “integrated” and those that will remain second-class. [shard: Migration Regime under Runaway Climate Change]
+
+The line of separation – the border – thus also runs through state territories not simply around them. And further. The pervasive border lingers in the body itself. As Shahram Khosravi has suggested, “the unwanted” are themselves “forced to be border”. Even when they are afforded the status of citizens, they may be called to “live up to their passports” at any moment, their rights can be put in question at random. To them the law is available but not accessible. Put simply, they do not belong. Citizenship is not enough; one has to be a national as well. But it’s difficult to become one. Many fail, becoming, or remaining, ![homelandless](shard:homelandless.md).
+
+References:
+
+Balibar, Étienne. 2008. Šta je granica?. Treći program Radio Beograda, Br. 137–138, I– II/2008. 
+
+Shahram Khosravi, 2010. ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

content/shard/ecology-of-distribution.md

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+title = "The Ecology of Distribution"
+glassblowers = ["alessandroludovico.md"]
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+
+The Gutenberg paradigm is over there are digital mirrors everywhere. Controlled reproduction of print has been replaced by billions of cameras and software that mirror content wherever people want to see it and potentially reembody it. The network can echo a publication with its own unpredictable space and time. But the role of the digital in the material space of information would be to transcend our physical boundaries and connect physical spaces, rather than continue to expand the endless digital spaces.
+
+From two of my artist friends, I received a forged copy of my previous book, Post-Digital Print, that was photocopied and spiral bound. They found it by chance and bought it from a stand at an artist book fair in Mexico City. When asked, the owner replied that he liked the book but that it would have been too expensive to sell there if he had imported original copies and that his small economy had not hurt the book business. Actually, I consider this gesture a major acknowledgment. This is an example of how an invisible digital mirror mirrors a publication elsewhere, deciding autonomously on the form of materiality, the space and time of distribution, and introducing it into a local publishing ecology.
+
+The space of a publication’s physical distribution is still a value, mainly because of higher costs, lower support, and specific logistics. It cannot simply be replaced by digital distribution, because it allows for a physical exchange between author, publisher, and reader and takes place in a nondigital time, a slower time, conditioned and reinforced by the law of gravity, and in a nondigital space that is the same as the one we move in and very different from the alienated space our eyes follow on screens.

content/shard/entering-the-flow.md

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+title = "Entering the Flow"
+authors = ["borisgroys.md"]
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+
+Traditionally, the main occupation of art was to resist the flow of time. Public art museums and big private art collections were created to select certain objects—the artworks—take them out of private and public use, and therefore immunize them against the destructive force of time. Thus, our art museums became huge garbage cans of history in which things were kept and exhibited that had no use anymore in real life: sacral images of past religions or status objects of past lifestyles. During a long period of art history, artists also participated in this struggle against the destructive force of time. They wanted to create artworks that would be able to transcend time by embodyingeternal ideals of beautyor, at least, by becoming themedium of historical memory, by acting as witnesses to events, tragedies, hopes, and projects that otherwise would have been forgotten.In this sense, artists and art institutions shared a fundamental project to resist material destruction and historical oblivion.
+
+Art museums, in their traditional format, were based on the concept of a universal art history. Accordingly, their curators selected artworks that seemed to be of universal relevance and value. These selective practices, and especially their universalist claims, have been criticized in recent decades in the name of the specific cultural identities that they ignored and even suppressed. We no longer believe in universalist, idealist, transhistorical perspectives and identities. The old, materialist way of thinking let us accept only roles rooted in the material conditions of our existence: national-cultural and regional identities, or identities based on race, class, and gender. And there are a potentially infinite number of such specific identities because the material conditions of human existence are very diverse and are permanently changing. However, in this case, the initial mission of the art museum to resist time and become a medium of mankind’s memory reaches an impasse: if there is a potentially infinite number of identities and memories, the museum dissolves because it is incapable of including all of them.
+
+While the museum emerged as a kind of secular surrogate for divine memory during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, it is merely a finite material object—unlike infinite divine memory that can, as we know, include all the identities of all people who lived in the past, live now, and will live in the future.
+
+This illustration depicts Jorge Luis Borges's short story “The Library of Babel,” which was originally published in Spanish in the collection of stories El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), 1941.
+
+But is this vision of an infinite number of specific identities even correct, e.g., truly materialist? I would suggest that it is not. Materialist discourse, as initially developed by Marx and Nietzsche, describes the world in permanent movement, in flow—be it dynamics of the productive forces or Dionysian impulse. According to this materialist tradition, all things are finite—but all of them are involved in the infinite material flow. So there is a materialist universality—the universality of the flow.
+
+However, is it possible for a human being to enter the flow, to get access to its totality? On a certain very banal level the answer is, of course, yes: human bodies are things among other things in the world and, thus, subjected to the same universal flow. They become ill, they age, and they die. However, even if human bodies are subjected to aging, death, and dissolution in the flow of material processes, it does not mean that their inscriptions into cultural archives are also in flow. One can be born, live, and die under the same name, having the same citizenship, same CV, and same website—that means remaining the same person. Our bodies, then, are not the only material supports of our persons. From the moment of our birth we are inscribed into certain social orders—without our consent or often even knowledge of this fact. The material supports of our personality are state archives, medical records, passwords to certain internet sites, and so forth. Of course, these archives will also be destroyed by the material flow at some point in time. But this destruction takes an amount of time that is non-commensurable with our own lifetimes. Thus, there is a tension between our material, physical, corporeal mode of existence—which is temporary and subjected to time—and our inscription into cultural archives that are, even if they are also material, much more stable than our own bodies.
+
+A photograph of Aby M. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas features the Boards of the Rembrandt Exhibition, 1926.
+
+Traditional art museums are a part of these cultural archives—even if they claim to represent the subjectivity, personality, and individuality of artists in a more immediate and richer way than other cultural archives are capable of doing. Art museums, like all other cultural archives, operate by restoration and conservation. Again: artworks as specific material objects—as art bodies, so to speak—are perishable. But this cannot be said about them as publicly accessible, visible forms. If its material support decays and dissolves, the form of a particular artwork can be restored or copied and placed on a different material base. The history of art demonstrates both these substitutions of old supports by new supports and the efforts of restoration and reconstruction. Thus, the individual form of an artwork insofar as it is inscribed in the archives of art history remains intact—only marginally affected by material flux, if at all. And we believe that it is precisely this form that, after the artist's death, somehow manifests his or her soul—or at least a certain zeitgeist or certain cultural identity that has disappeared.
+
+We can thus say that the traditional art system is based on desynchronizing the time of the individual, material human existence from the time of its cultural representation. However, the artists of the historical avant-garde and later some artists of the 1960s and 1970s already tried to resynchronize the fate of the human body with the mode of its historical representation—to embrace the precariousness, instability, and finiteness of our material existence. Not to resist the flow of time, but to let it define one’s own artwork, to pursue a certain self-propelled fluidity, rather than trying to make the work, or oneself, into a self-eternalizing being. The idea was to make the form itself fluid. However, the following question emerges: What is the effect of this radicalized precariousness, of this will to resynchronize the living body with its cultural representation within the relationship of artists to art institutions?
+
+Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Celebration? Realife, 1972.
+
+I would suggest that the relationship between these entities went through two different periods: the first is enmity on the part of the artist against the art system and, especially, art museums, complete with attempts to destroy them in the name of living art. The second encompasses the slow morphing of museums themselves into a stage, on which the flow of time is performed. If we ask ourselves what institutional form the classical avant-garde proposed as a substitute for the traditional museum, the answer is clear: it is the Gesamtkunstwerk. In other words, the total art event involving everybody and everything—as a replacement for a totalizing space of trans-temporal artistic representation of everybody and everything.
+
+Wagner introduced the notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk in his programmatic treatise “The Art-Work of the Future” (1849–1850). Wagner wrote this text in exile, in Zurich, after the end of the revolutionary uprisings in Germany in 1848. In this text he develops a project for an artwork (of the future) that is heavily influenced by the materialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. At the beginning of his treatise, Wagner states that the typical artist of his time is an egoist who, in complete isolation from the life of the people, practices his art exclusively for the enjoyment of the rich; in so doing he follows the dictates of fashion. The artist of the future, says Wagner, must become radically different: “He now can only will the universal, true, and unconditional; he yields himself not to a love for this or that particular object, but to wide Love itself. Thus does the egoist become a communist.”
+
+Becoming communist, then, is possible only through self-renunciation—self-dissolution in the collective. Wagner defines his supposed hero as such: “The last, most complete renunciation [Entäusserung] of his personal egoism, the demonstration of his full ascent into universalism, a man can only show us by his Death; and that not by his accidental, but by his necessary death, the logical sequel to his actions, the last fulfillment of his being. The celebration of such a death is the noblest thing that men can enter on.” Admittedly, there remains a difference between the hero who sacrifices himself and the performer who makes this sacrifice onstage (the Gesamtkunstwerk being understood by Wagner as a musical drama). Nonetheless, Wagner insists that this difference is suspended by the Gesamtkunstwerk, for the performer “does not merely represent in the art-work the action of the fêted hero, but repeats its moral lesson; insomuch as he proves by this surrender of his personality that he also, in his artistic action, is obeying a dictate of necessity which consumes the whole individuality of his being.”
+In other words, Wagner understands the Gesamtkunstwerk precisely as a way of resynchronizing the finiteness of human existence with its cultural representation—which, in turn, also becomes finite.
+
+“Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk,” exhibition poster.
+
+All the other performers achieve their own artistic significance solely through participating in the hero’s ritual of self-sacrifice. Accordingly, Wagner speaks of the hero performer as a dictator who mobilizes the collective of collaborators, with the exclusive goal of staging his own sacrifice in the name of this collective. In the sacrificial scene, the Gesamtkunstwerk finds its end—there is no continuation, no memory. In other words, there is no further role for the dictator-performer. The artistic collective dissolves, and the next Gesamtkunstwerk is created by another artistic collective, with a different dictator-performer in the main role. Here the precariousness of an individual human existence and the fluidity of working collectives are artistically embraced, and even radicalized. Historically, we know that many artistic collectives followed this model: from Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire to Andy Warhol’s Factory and Guy Debord’s Situationist International. But the contemporary name for this temporary and suicidal dictatorship is different: the “curatorial project.”
+
+Harald Szeemann, who initiated the curatorial turn in contemporary art, was so fascinated by the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk that he organized an exhibition called “The Tendency to Gesamtkunstwerk” [“Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk”] (1984). Considering this historical show based on the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, it becomes necessary to ask: What is the main difference between a traditional exhibition and a modern curatorial project? The traditional exhibition treats its space as anonymous and neutral. Only the exhibited artworks are important—but not the space in which they are exhibited. Thus, artworks are perceived and treated as potentially eternal—and the space of the exhibition as a contingent, accidental station where the immortal artworks take a temporary rest from their wanderings through the material world. In contrast, the installation—be it artistic or curatorial—inscribes the exhibited artworks in this contingent material space. (Here one can see an analogy between this shift and the shift from theater actor or cinema actor to the director of theater and cinema.)
+
+The curatorial project, rather than the exhibition, is then the Gesamtkunstwerk because it instrumentalizes all the exhibited artworks and makes them serve a common purpose that is formulated by the curator. At the same time, a curatorial or artistic installation is able to include all kinds of objects: time-based artworks or processes, everyday objects, documents, texts, and so forth. All these elements, as well as the architecture of the space, sound, or light, lose their respective autonomy and begin to serve the creation of a whole in which visitors and spectators are also included. Thus, stationary artworks of the traditional sort become temporalized, subjected to a certain scenario that changes the way they are perceived during the time of the installation because this perception is dependent on the context of their presentation—and this context begins to flow. Thus, ultimately, every curatorial project demonstrates its accidental, contingent, eventful, finite character—in other words, it enacts its own precariousness.
+
+Man Ray, Waking Dream Seance, 1924.
+
+Indeed, every curatorial project necessarily aims to contradict the normative, traditional art-historical narrative embodied by the museum’s permanent collection. If such a contradiction does not take place, the curatorial project loses its legitimation. For the same reason, the next curatorial project should contradict the previous one. A new curator is a new dictator who erases the traces of the previous dictatorship. In this way, contemporary museums continually morph from spaces for permanent collections into stages for temporary curatorial projects—temporary Gesamtkunstwerks. And the main goal of these temporary curatorial dictatorships is to bring art collections into the flow—to make art fluid, to synchronize it with the flow of time.
+
+As previously mentioned, at the beginning of this process of synchronization, artists wanted to destroy art museums. Malevich offers a good example of this in his short but important text “On the Museum,” from 1919. At that time, the new Soviet government feared that the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text, Malevich protested against this pro-museum policy by calling on the Soviet state to not intervene on behalf of the old art collections, because, he said, their destruction could open the path to true, living art. In particular, he wrote:
+
+"Life knows what it is doing, and if it is striving to destroy, one must not interfere, since by hindering we are blocking the path to a new conception of life that is born within us. In burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powder: accordingly thousands of graveyards could be accommodated on a single chemist’s shelf. We can make a concession to conservatives by offering that they burn all past epochs, since they are dead, and set up one pharmacy."
+
+Later, Malevich gives a concrete example of what he means:
+
+"The aim [of this pharmacy] will be the same, even if people will examine the powder from Rubens and all his art—a mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often more alive than actual representation (and take up less room)."
+
+It is obvious that what Malevich proposes here is not merely the destruction of museums but a radical curatorial project—to exhibit the ashes of artworks instead of their corpses. And in a truly Wagnerian manner, Malevich further says that everything that “we” (meaning he and his artistic contemporaries) do is also destined for the crematorium. Of course, contemporary curators do not reduce museum collections to ashes, as Malevich suggested. But there is a good reason for that. Since Malevich’s time, mankind has invented a way to place all artworks from the past on one chemist’s shelf without destroying them. And this shelf is called the internet.
+
+Indeed, the internet has transformed the museum in the same way that photography and cinema transformed painting and sculpture. Photography made the mimetic function of the traditional arts obsolete, and thus pushed these arts in a different—actually opposite—direction. Instead of reproducing and representing images of nature, art came to dissolve, deconstruct, and transform these images. The attention thus shifted from the image itself to the analysis of image production and presentation. Similarly, the internet made the museum’s function of representing art history obsolete. Of course, in the case of the internet, spectators lose direct access to the original artworks—and thus the aura of authenticity gets lost. And so museum visitors are invited to undertake a pilgrimage to art museums in search of the Holy Grail of originality and authenticity.
+At this point, however, one has to be reminded thataccording to Walter Benjamin, who originally introduced the notion of aura, artworks lost their aura precisely through their museumification.The museum already removes art objects from their original sites of inscription in the historical here and now.Thus for Benjamin, artworks that are exhibited in museums are already copies of themselves—devoid of their original aura of authenticity. In this sense, the internet, and its art-specialized websites, merely continue the process of the de-auratization of art started by art museums. Many cultural critics have therefore expected—and still expect—that public art museums will ultimately disappear, unable to compete economically with private collectors operating on the increasingly expensive art market, and be replaced by much cheaper, more accessible virtual, digitized archives.
+
+[figure 2013_12_BBC-Documentary-Ways-of-SeeingWEB.jpgThis film still shows the author and narrator John Berger, from the TV series Ways of Seeing, 1972.]
+
+However, the relationship between internet and museum radically changes if we begin to understand the museum not as a storage place for artworks, but rather as a stage for the flow of art events. Indeed, today the museum has ceased to be a space for contemplating non-moving things. Instead, the museum has become a place where things happen. Events staged by museums today include not only curatorial projects, but also lectures, conferences, readings, screenings, concerts, guided tours, and so forth. The flow of events inside the museum is today often faster than outside its walls. Meanwhile, we have grown accustomed to asking ourselves, what is going on in this or that museum? And to find the relevant information, we search for it on the museums’ websites, but also on blogs, social media pages, Twitter, and so forth. We visit museums far less often than we visit their websites and follow their activities across the internet. And on the internet, the museum functions as a blog. So the contemporary museum does not present universal art history, but rather its own history—as a chain of events staged by the museum itself. But most importantly: the internet relates to the museum in the mode of documentation, not in the mode of reproduction. Of course, the museums’ permanent collections can be reproduced on the internet, but the museum’s activities can only be recorded.
+
+Indeed, one cannot reproduce a curatorial project; one can only document it. The reason for this is twofold. First, the curatorial project is an event, and one cannot reproduce an event because it cannot be isolated from the flow of time. An artwork can be reproduced because it has an atemporal status from the beginning, but the process of the production and exposure of this artwork can only be documented. Second, curatorial and artistic installation is a Gesamtkunstwerk that can be experienced only from within. The traditional artwork is perceived from an outside position, but an artistic event is experienced from a position inside the space in which this event takes place. In this way, visitors to a curatorial or artistic installation enter the space of the installation and then begin to position themselves inside this space, to experience it from within rather than from without. However, the movement of a camera can never fully coincide with the movement of an individual visitor’s gaze—as the position of a painter or a photographer making a reproduction of a painting coincides with the gaze of an average spectator. And if any form of documentation attempts to reconstruct the inner view and experience of an art event from different positions, it necessarily becomes fragmentary. That is why we can re-cognize the traditional reproduction of an artwork but are never able to fully re-cognize the documentation of an art event.
+
+Nowadays, one speaks time and again about the theatralization of the museum. Indeed, in our time people come to exhibition openings in the same way as they went to opera and theater premieres in the past. This theatralization of the museum is often criticized because it might be seen as a sign of the museum’s involvement in the contemporary entertainment industry. However, there is a crucial difference between the installation space and the theatrical space. In the theater, spectators remain in an outside position vis-à-vis the stage, but in the museum they enter the stage, and find themselves inside the spectacle.
+
+Thus, the contemporary museum realizes the modernist dream that the theater itself was never able to fully realize—of a theater in which there is no clear boundary between the stage and the space of the audience. Even if Wagner speaks about the Gesamtkunstwerk as an event that erases the border between stage and audience, the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth that was built under the direction of Wagner did not erase this border but, rather, radicalized it. Contemporary theater, including Bayreuth, uses more and more art, especially contemporary art, on stage—but it still does not erase the difference between stage and audience. The inclusion of contemporary installation art remains inscribed in the traditional scenography. However, in the context of an artistic and curatorial installation, the public is integrated into the installation space to become part of it.
+
+Two Boys, an opera by Nico Muhly, attempts to portray a murder in cyberspace.
+
+The same can be said about mass entertainment. A pop concert or a film screening creates communities among those in attendance. However, mass culture itself cannot make these communities self-reflective—cannot thematize the event of building these transitory, precarious, contingent communities. The perspective of the audience during a pop concert or movie screening is too forward-directed—to the stage or screen—for them to adequately perceive and reflect upon the space in which they find themselves, or the communities to which they temporarily belong. That is the kind of reflection that advanced art installation allows us to achieve. To borrow Marshall McLuhan’s vocabulary, the medium of installation is a cool medium—unlike the internet, which is obviously a hot medium, because it requires users to be spatially separated and to concentrate their attention on a screen. By cooling down all other media, contemporary art installation offers visitors the possibility of self-reflection—and of reflection upon the immediate event of their coexistence with other visitors and exhibited objects—that other media are unable to offer to the same degree. Here, individual human beings are confronted with their common fate—with the radically contingent, transitory, precarious conditions of their existence.
+
+Actually, the traditional museum as a place of things, and not events, can be equally accused of functioning as part of the art market. This kind of criticism is easy to formulate—and it is universal enough to be applied to any possible artistic strategy. But as we know, the traditional museum did not only display certain things and images; it also allowed theoretical reflection and analysis of them by means of historical comparison. Modern art has not merely produced things and images; it has also analyzed the thingness of things and the structure of the image. In addition, the art museum does not only stage events—it is also a medium for investigating the event, its boundaries, and its structure. If classical modern art investigated and analyzed the thingness of things, contemporary art begins to do the same in relation to events—to critically analyze the eventfulness of events. This investigation takes different forms, but it seems to me that its focal point is reflection on the relationship between event and its documentation—analogous to the reflection on the relationship between an original and its reproduction that was central to the art of modernism and postmodernism. Today, the amount of art documentation is permanently growing. One also begins to document performances, actions, exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and artistic projects that become more and more important in the framework of contemporary art.
+
+One begins also to document the work of artists who produce artworks in a more traditional manner because they increasingly use the internet, or at least a personal computer, during their working process. And this offers the possibility of following the whole process of art production from its beginning to its end, since the use of digital techniques is observable. Here the traditional boundary between art production and art display begins to be erased. Traditionally, the artist produced an artwork in his or her studio, hidden from public view, and then exhibited a result, a product—an artwork that accumulated and recuperated the time of absence. This time of temporary absence is constitutive for what we call the creative process—in fact, it is precisely what we call the creative process.
+
+André Breton tells a story about a French poet who, when he went to sleep, put on his door a sign that read: “Please, be quiet—the poet is working.” This anecdote summarizes the traditional understanding of creative work: creative work is creative because it takes place beyond public control—and even beyond the conscious control of the author. This time of absence could last days, months, years—even a whole lifetime. Only at the end of this period of absence was the author expected to present a work (maybe found in his papers posthumously) that would then be accepted as creative precisely because it seemed to emerge out of nothingness.
+
+Walter Pichler, Small Room (Prototype 4), 1967. The image features a prototype of a wearable TV helmet.
+
+However, the internet and the computer in general are collective, observable, surveillable working places. We tend to speak about the internet in terms of an infinite data flow that transcends the limits of our control. But, in fact, the internet is a machine to stop and reverse data flow. The unobservability of the internet is a myth. The medium of the internet is electricity. And the supply of electricity is finite. So the internet cannot support an infinite data flow. The internet is based on a finite number of cables, terminals, computers, mobile phones, and other equipment. Its efficiency is based precisely on its finiteness and, therefore, on its observability. Search engines such as Google demonstrate this. Today, one hears a lot about the growing degree of surveillance, especially online. But surveillance is not something external to the internet, or merely a specific technical use of its services. The internet is, in its essence, a machine of surveillance. It divides the flow of data into small, traceable, and reversible operations, thus exposing every user to surveillance—real or potential. The internet creates a field of total visibility, accessibility, and transparency.
+If the public follows my activity all the time, then I do not need to present it with any product. The process is already the product. Balzac’s unknown artist who could never finish his masterpiece would have no problem under these new conditions—documentation of his efforts would comprise this masterpiece and he would become famous. Documentation of the act of working on an artwork is already an artwork. With the internet, time became space indeed—and it is the visible space of permanent surveillance. If art has become a flow, it flows in a mode of self-documentation. Here action is simultaneous with its documentation, its inscription. And the inscription simultaneously becomes information that is spread through the internet and instantly accessible by everybody. This means that contemporary art work can produce no product—yet it still remains productive. But again: if the internet takes over the role of the museum as the place of memory—because the internet records and documents the activities of the artist even before his or her work is brought into the museum—what is the goal of themuseumtoday?
+
+Contemporary museum exhibitions are full of documentations of past artistic events, shown alongside traditional works of art. Thus, the museum turns the documentation of an old event into an element of a new event. It ascribes this documentation a new here and now—and as such gives it a new aura. But, unlike reproduction, documentation cannot be easily integrated into contemporaneity. The documentation of an event always produces nostalgia for a missed presence, a missed opportunity. It does not erase the difference between past and present, as reproduction tends to; instead, it makes the gap between past and present obvious—and in this way thematizes the flow of time. Heidegger described the whole world process as an event staged by Being. And he believed that we can get access to the eventfulness of this event only if Being itself offers us this possibility—through a clearance of being (Lichtung des Seins). Today’s museum is a place where the clearance of being is artificially staged.
+
+In a world in which the goal of stopping the flow of time is taken over by the internet, the function of the museum becomes one of staging the flow—staging events that are synchronized with the lifetimes of the spectators. This changes the topology of our relationship to art. The traditional hermeneutical position towards art required the gaze of the external spectator to penetrate the artwork, to discover artistic intentions, or social forces, or vital energies that gave the artwork its form—from the outside of the artwork toward its inside. However, the gaze of the contemporary museum visitor is, by contrast, directed from the inside of the art event towards its outside: toward the possible external surveillance of this event and its documentation process, toward the eventual positioning of this documentation in the media space and in cultural archives—in other words, toward the spatial boundaries of this event. And also towards the temporal boundaries of this event—because when we are placed inside an event, we cannot know when this event began and when it will end.
+
+The art system is generally characterized by the asymmetrical relationship between the gaze of the art producer and the gaze of the art spectator. These two gazes almost never meet. In the past, after artists put their artworks on display, they lost control over the gaze of the spectator: regardless of what some art theoreticians say, the artwork is a mere thing and cannot meet the spectator’s gaze. So under the conditions of the traditional museum, the spectator’s gaze was in a position of sovereign control—although this sovereignty could be indirectly manipulated by the museum’s curators through certain strategies of pre-selection, placement, juxtaposition, lighting, and so forth. However, when the museum begins to function as a chain of events, the configuration of gazes changes. The visitor loses his or her sovereignty in a very obvious way. The visitor is placed inside an event and cannot meet the gaze of a camera that documents this event—nor the secondary gaze of the editor that does the postproduction work on this document, nor the gaze of a later spectator of this document.
+
+[figure 2013_12_WeiWeiWEB.jpg Ai Wei Wei tweeted this image of himself in bed after suffering a hemorrhage caused by police aggression. Ai Wei Wei is the second most followed artist on Twitter, despite Twitter being illegal in China.]
+
+That is why, by visiting contemporary museum exhibitions, we are confronted with the irreversibility of time—we know that these exhibitions are merely temporary. If we visit the same museum after a certain amount of time, the only things that will remain will be documents: a catalogue, or a film, or a website. But what these things offer us is necessarily incommensurable with our own experience because our perspective, our gaze is asymmetrical with the gaze of a camera—and these gazes cannot coincide, as they could in the case of documenting an opera or a ballet. This is the reason for a certain kind of nostalgia that we necessarily feel when we are confronted with documents of past artistic events, whether exhibitions or performances. This nostalgia provokes the desire to reenact the event “as it truly was.”
+
+Recently in Venice, the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form” was reenacted at the Fondazione Prada. It was a very professional reenactment—and so it provoked a new and even stronger wave of nostalgia. Some people thought how great it would be to go back to the 1960s and breathe the wonderful atmosphere of that time. And they also thought how awful everything is at the Biennale itself, with all its fuss, compared to the sublime askesis of “When Attitudes Become Form.” At the same time, visitors from a younger generation found the exhibition unimpressive, and liked only the beautiful guides in their Prada clothes.
+
+The nostalgic mood that is inevitably provoked by art documentation reminds me of the early Romantic nostalgia towards nature. Art was seen then as the documentation of the beautiful or sublime aesthetic experiences that were offered by nature. The documentation of these experiences by means of painting seemed more disappointing than authentic. In other words, if the irreversibility of time and the feeling of being inside rather than outside an event were once the privileged experiences of nature, they now became the privileged experiences of contemporary art. And that means precisely that contemporary art has become the medium for investigating the eventfulness of events: the different modes of the immediate experience of events, their relationship to documentation and archiving, the intellectual and emotional modes of our relationship to documentation, and so forth. Now, if the thematization of the eventfulness of the event has become, indeed, the main preoccupation of contemporary art in general and the museum of contemporary art in particular, it makes no sense to condemn the museum for staging art events. On the contrary, today the museum has become the main analytical tool for staging and analyzing the event as radically contingent and irreversible—amidst our digitally controlled civilization that is based on tracking back and securing the traces of our individual existence in the hope of making everything controllable and reversible. The museum is a place where the asymmetrical war between the ordinary human gaze and the technologically armed gaze not only takes place, but also becomes revealed—so that it can be thematized and critically theorized.
+

content/shard/homelandless.md

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+title = "Homelandless"
+glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
++++
+
+The term ‘homeland’, in its contemporary meaning as native country, appears together with the concept it is meant to designate: the modern nation state. Homeland and state form an inherent pair, one does not exist without the other. Whereas the state stands in correlation to its citizens, homeland is endowed to its nationals. So, unlike the state, homeland is an affective concept, not a matter of recognition, of rights, but of belonging. 
+
+The nation state creates its corresponding homeland. It fills it with content, it composes songs, recites verses, it invents and retells myths. It cleans, it homogenizes, it kicks out, it assimilates, all in the name of the nation. 
+
+The (potential or factual) loss of a homeland can be read a kind of genre of the present. Ece Temelkuran’s view on Erdogan’s Turkey, Arundhati Roy’s perspectives on Modi’s India, Farahnaz Sharifi’s account on hidden lives of Iranians, all articulate the growing sense of homelandlessness that parallels the gradual (or sudden) transformation of their home countries away from (liberal) democracies and towards autocratic, totalitarian, illiberal, fundamentalist, fascist etc. orders. To these homelands they no longer belong, and they no longer belong to them. Here, the container of the nation-state is not in question, only its current (authoritarian and reactionary) form. There’s an inherent assumption that these, or any homelands are salvageable, that they could and should be saved. 
+
+Svetlana Alexievich and Dubravka Ugrešić deal with another kind of homelandless people in their work, the former ones: former Soviets, former Yugoslavs. Here, any continuity is erased, their states had vanished and so had their homelands. One was replaced with the other, into which one ceases to fit. There’s no possibility of return, these homelands are forever lost. 
+
+Then there are homelandless migrants, “illegals”, temporal, circular in-betweens. Traversing the globe, in search of safety, jobs, decent life, freedom. Those that left their homelands, those that move between not-anymore and not-yet, those that have inherited the leaving, descendants of the displaced, eternally out-of-joint. Those stuck in limbo, in detention centers, forever. To them, homeland is unreachable, no matter it’s actual existence. It’s a myth, a memory, a story, a hope, a waiting.
+
+Alan Badiou sees in the emergence of the “undocumented”, the sans papiers, the single most important contemporary political event. I propose homelandless, due to its scope and affectivity, as a useful complementary concept. Is it possible to abandon the concept of homeland? Can one become homelandless as a political act? What if [shard: What if?] one refuses to “pledge allegiance”?
+
+> my country is a mouth trying to say pledge and it comes out all salt // my country is a mouth and nobody can pronounce my name // I mean my country forgets my name // I mean my country is always asking for my name // and I’m always saying it twice // spelling it like an address // my country is a number
+
+> (…)
+
+> it is every year and my country is taken // I mean my country is stolen land // I mean all my countries are stolen land // I mean sometimes I am on the wrong side of the stealing // my country is an opening // I mean bloom // I mean bloom not like flower // but bloom like explosion // my country is a teacher // I mean do you want to see my passport // I mean do you like my accent // I mean I stole them // I mean I stole them // I mean where do you think I learned that from - **When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I say
+Hala Aylan**
+
+References:
+
+Alexievich, Svetlana. 2016. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Random House
+
+Alyan, Hala. 2020. “When they say pledge allegiance, I say”. The Adroit Journal. Issue 33. May 2020.
+
+Boochani, Behrouz. 2018. No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison
+
+Roy, Arundhati. 2019. My Seditious Heart: Collected Non-Fiction. Haymarket Books
+
+Shahram Khosravi. 2010. ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Palgrave Macmillan 
+
+Sharifi, Farahnaz. 2023. My Stolen Planet (documentary film)
+
+Temelkuran, Ece. 2019. How to Lose a Country: the 7 steps from democracy to dictatorship. Fourth Estate Ltd.
+
+Temelkuran Ece. 2010. Deep Mountain Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide. Verso
+
+Ugrešić, Dubravka, 1998. The Culture of Lies. Weidenfeld and Nicolson
+
+Ugrešić, Dubravka, 1998. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Weidenfeld and Nicolson
+
+Ugrešić, Dubravka, 2011. Karaoke Culture. University of Rochester: Open Letter Books

content/shard/methodologicalnationalism.md

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+title = "Methodological nationalism"
+glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
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+
+Methodological nationalism, a concept developed by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, refers to “the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world”. Modernity, as they put it, “was cast in the iron cage of nationalized states”. Understanding nation states and societies as naturally given objects of study, and the nation-state model as the only thinkable way of organising politics, produced an analytical separation between “nation” and “state”, and subsequently “nation” and “democracy”, so that the national framing of modern state-building and democratisation became invisible. For this reason,
+> nationalism appears as a force foreign to the history of Western state building. Instead, it is projected to others […] Western state building was reimagined as a non-national, civil, republican and liberal experience.
+
+References:
+
+Wimmer, A., & Glick Schiller, N. 2002. Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences. Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, 2 (4) 

content/shard/technologicaldeterminism.md

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 glassblowers = ["sasasavanovic.md"]
 ++++
 
-technological determinism is a reductionist theory that assumes technical developments are the key driver of history and social change.
+Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that assumes technical developments are the key – practically, the only relevant – driver of history and social change.
 
-if industrial revolution culminated with mass production of death (that was the holocaust), what ends await us at the pinnacle of its digital counterpart? the ubiquity of various monitoring mechanisms pervading all spheres of (digitally mediated) life serves as a signpost. humans turn into data-subjects, identifiable bodies processed on demand.
+This is best exemplified in the universe of Star Trek. If we could only invent the replicator – a machine that reconstitutes matter and produces everything that is needed out of pure energy (food, medicaments, spare parts) – all our (social) troubles could be avoided. 
 
-this trajectory is not inevitable.
+Current techno-optimistic visions follow the same logic. Take crypto currency. If we could just create a technology that guarantees no contract will be broken, we have solved the problem of trust. The problem is not solved, only disposed of. 
 
-FUTURE CANNOT BE PREDICTED (+Jameson: The function of sci-fi fiction is “not to give us the images of the future (...) but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present”)
+An adequate technological topology will not necessarily produce desired social outcomes. 
 
-The promise of network topology, which some technologies offer, often doesn't match what the community ends up with. Distributed and/or federated nodes and the flow of information among them rarely resemble the initial vision among people using that technology, often with the goal to recreate a more distributed and federated topology.
+If industrial revolution culminated with mass production of death (that was the Holocaust), what ends await us at the pinnacle of its digital counterpart? The ubiquity of various monitoring mechanisms pervading all spheres of (digitally mediated) life serves as a signpost. Humans turn into data-subjects, identifiable bodies processed on demand. AI guided drones identify human targets and assassinate them on site. This is reality and a developmental direction.
+
+This trajectory is not inevitable. Future cannot be predicted (+ Jameson:
+> The function of sci-fi fiction is not to give us the images of the future (…) but rather to defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present”).
+
+References:
+Jameson, Frederic. Archaeologies of the Future. Verso