Open Access – what's next?

ART/SCIENCE and EDUCATION. we have to know what we want to know before we can start looking for it

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:47 +0000

There has been an ongoing discussion for several years now on the relationship of art and science in educational and professional contexts. Is this just another attempt to put an old fashion into new clothes? I do not think so, because this time the arguments do not constitute an attempt to make a qualitative distinction between universities or higher institutions of art, design and media. Nor is there a fundamental dispute involved whether the artistic singularity of an artefact or scientific objectivity claims to have more epistemic value. In search of significant sources nourishing the current discourse, paradigmatic changes in the process of renewing and preserving the conditions of cultural self-organization are key to a major shift in how we construct knowledge, technology and cultural memory. It concerns institutional forms as well as the individual.
One of the standpoints is to consider a revival of the „Leonardo principle“. A second standpoint might close the chapter of the relationship between art and science for the benefit of scientific-economic prosperity, whereas a third engages with the question of how cultural, intellectual and spiritual fields are prerequisite to evolutions in art, science and technology. My affinity is with the third one, although some of the issues relating to this area are similar to other positions.
Many questions derive from the context of audiovisual restructuring of knowledge and communication areas in interrelated and cooperative fields moulding into novel forms of interdisciplinary design, such as BANG design, whose acronym stands for the basic modules of our world (B=Bits, A=Atoms, N=Neurons, G=Genes).¹ This field will be extended by neurophysiological research into cognition and perception, not to be confused with the ontological and philosophical terminology of cognition and perception.
In conjunction with media- and biotechnological industrialization of codes, concepts and design in the educational context of art and science have been renewed.
Can both art and science learn from each other, and, if so, at what and for what? Do both act in the same framework of design and conceptualization, as some of the new generation of media artists suggest in their explorative approach? Would it make sense to exchange curricular modules between specific study programmes?
Narrowing down the thematic frame, one crucial question remains: Which of the teaching and learning fields between art (in terms of audiovisual media design and media use) and science (in terms of research of audiovisual cognition, development of formalized models containing complex mediality and prototyping of media structures) can be formulated? The paradigmatic closeness of art, science, the economy and politics might suggest a consistent media evolution based on media convergence, yet this does not give us a satisfying answer.
The point is if, and if so, to what extent does it become meaningful to reformulate the very densely organized media evolutionary areas to make plausible and distinct the differences between artistic and scientific education. In that respect it will not make sense to reactivate old habits to distinguish between art and sciences. Current developments in media and biotechnology, neuroscience and cognition research, but also in humanity and cultural science, demonstrate the interrelatedness of knowledge creation and knowledge representation. These developments cope with the complexity of design and research thus being of a transferable structure. This principle similarly applies to art and science.
In fact, novel theoretical delineations of model, game and communication knowledge in different contexts has changed the theoretical architecture if we consider the impact of second-order cybernetic and radical constructivism (von Foerster), positions in Endophysics (Rössler),² concepts of neuronal networks and fuzzy logic and boundary management concepts mediating between disciplines and product developments. However, these radical changes in cognition and design architecture have had less impact on learning and knowledge organization thus far. A conceptual lag can be identified in both teachings and research.
We know, for example, that not only knowledge and media technology is changing rapidly, but learning attitudes and styles are also changing fluidly across different technologies, interfaces and modes of interaction. As a consequence institutions react with a stronger emphasis on project and praxis orientation. It is not so much about how specific themes relate to a subject or university-specific didactics. The crucial issue concerns the way and to what extent the changing organization of perception and cognition, designing, processing and selection is teachable, and if it is teachable, how it can be conducted.
If we accept one of the prevailing concepts in 20^th century theory, art would predominantly be created by its viewer and users; based on the economy of attentiveness and the market, a serious discussion on curricular changes would be useless. In other words art cannot be taught if it is to “potential” art producers. Would education then solely be a privilege for curators, patrons, visitors of museums and galleries, cultural managers who create, reflect and provide affirmative market behaviour? Obviously there is still a dichotomy between institutional education and self-education.
The educational landscape and discourse relating to art has long since evolved to cover a much wider range of important issues to be explored such as media and popular culture. „Takeover – who is doing the art of tomorrow“, the topics of Ars Electronica 2001³, strove for a much broader discussion on new manifestations of art and fluid learning arrangements driven by the dynamics of digital revolution. The dynamism of „Takeover“ does not originate from traditional art practice and mediation, but rather from largely heterogeneous, rhizome-like structures and networks of remotely connected individuals and online communities. The common goal of these activities pertaining to evolving culture are not merely a distant-reflective kind of reaction to techno-social changes; in fact, they constitute and develop further this genuine field.
Digital network culture has not only been changing the modes of media production and distribution: it coevally conveys emerging models of cooperation, communication and interaction by accumulating various ideas, talents and capabilities. Hence, the tasks of tomorrow’s artist is that of an intermediary, a catalyst between diverse fields of knowledge, ways of thinking, social models and solution strategies. The protagonists of this development, hackers, software artists, media and knowledge designers who are irrespectively showing strong commitment in the face of considerable risk, are opening up new territories in which their role and their scope of action have not yet been fully explored. This alludes to critical inquiry, research and development in socio-political and scientific (biotechnology and genetic engineering) contexts.
Interestingly yet not surprisingly, the conventional artistic discourse has been cultivating and maintaining a self-referential and affirmative practice among galleries, magazines, investors, dealers and critics. The corporate image of the artwork has long since replaced the artwork itself. A good example is the “Institutional Critique“, an art practice in which often only advanced artists, theorists, historians, and critics can participate. Due to its highly sophisticated understanding of modern art and society, as part of a privileged discourse like that of any other specialized form of knowledge, it has predominantly yielded alienated and marginalized viewers. Net art in contrast has explored the field in a much broader context by exemplifying the work of art as a process, as opposed to a conception of art as object making. Since net art is “immaterial”, commodity value is replaced by utility value: i. e., the principles of the net economy are based on an economy of scale where there is no scarcity of goods. Thus the added value is not generated by a thousand copies of the same “product” but instead by the “exchange value” that is based on each different source of information and not on each individual copy (cf. Ghosh 1998).⁴In his lecture „Science as an Open Source Process“, Friedrich Kittler⁵ argues that the liberty of science rises and falls in parallel with source code liberation. Only now will science become a university. In that sense, the definition of university implies, differently from in closed or secret research centers, that the knowledge must circulate and be accessible without the protection of patents and copyright issues. Media convergence gives us the opportunity to dissolve the media-technical boundaries between natural scientific, technical and cultural knowledge.

Transitory processes
In my reflection on transitory processes in art, science and education, I would like to stress the material, logical and cultural practical use and developments of media. Art and science are dependent on these morphic surroundings by inventing, developing and generating new ones. Relating to this dimension of mediamorphic events, I would like to add the following quotation:
Cyberspace … enables its audience not merely to observe a reality, but to enter it and experience it as if it were real …. Whereas film is used to show a reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies.⁶Questions arising in this specific context relate to teachable contiguity in media production and design, the ratio between subject and media specific teachings, and how both can be applied in a dynamic, reciprocal mode.
Media evolutionhas been taking place over many centuries as specialization and fragmentation of sensual perception, communication and concepts of truth. It has been a long history of segregation of multisensoric options in human self-organization. The effects of this process of specialization and disjuncture have generated particularly strong systems such as paintings, scripture, sciences, aesthetics and so on. This has led to a material and mental disparity to which can be assigned the same texture and facture and distinctive canonic differences as with institutions, iconoclastic and iconophilic cultures. Some of the distinctive systems that arose out of this process, such as the privileged status of reading over vision, have come under pressure by multimodal and multicodal forms of production, perception and reception. Alongside the media’s evolutionary “agenda”, post-modernist and post-structuralist concepts (Derrida, Foucault, Lévinas) and tendencies of individualization as for socio-cultural changes and use of the new media are frequently being conceptualized as a dichotomy of unleashing (“deboundarisation“). However, in the current media discourse there are tendencies to discover media practice from another perspective, which means that a connection between persistence and recombination of social structuring and social practices can be seen as a model for social change. This model is based on the hypothesis that the use of new media is based on given social structures and social practices. With respect to tendencies like individualization and globalization, the social potential of new media such as weblogs⁷ offers distinct forms of media use within different social practices, including the strengthening of the latter as well as doing without them.
With regard to media-related functions and their proliferation, the extension of computer technology is irreversibly encoded in delocalised media and electronic networks as part of culture and society as distributed and diversified systems. A constituent factor in this process is media convergence or integration. Alongside the media synthetic approach to merge different media into one, we can identify another important attempt towards multisensory perception. The visual sense, the faculty of vision, gets back its vast cultural spectrum and in parallel the interface changes into a multisensory one. This epoch-making electronic and fibre-optic based media convergence has ceased the history of media divergence. From now on, the point is how different media functions, whether in a pure or crossover mode, come into play.
Screenager, a term first coined by Douglas Rushkoff in his 1997 book Playing the Future, is a technologically savvy young person, living next door with audiovisual gadgets and interfaces, where he/she interacts in a mediated setting of learning, entertainment, peer bonding and play. Is the interconnected “mediaspace a co-operative dream, made up of the combined projections of everyone who takes part“,⁸ or do these trade-offs speak to a wider set of socio-cultural implications and consequences in light of an education “close to reality“?
Taking into account the next generation of students there is now a way to cope with hybrid digital learning cultures. What was with all those demands for change in higher education institutional settings? Although several educational outreach activities have been undertaken since then, the mediation paradigm (“blended/hybrid modes of teaching and learning“) often fails on the basics.
If we interpret art and science as two dimensions relating to (post)modernist and interface culture, the prerequisites in defining a new curriculum changes significantly. It would thus demand another structure of design capabilities corresponding with an all-encompassing model of knowledge design. Thus, many of the practices and alternative viewpoints these theories claim, as for adaptive, flexible and transgressive forms of learning and developing new contextual abilities, would likewise change artistic and scientific educational processes.
The most fundamental macro-question in communication, media theory, and cultural theory is the nature of mediation, which means that we have always been in language, in symbolic systems, and we know our lived-in world by language, discourse, and signs, not by immediate access to “things in themselves“ (Kant). The primacy of mediation in any theoretical model is milieu, medium, structure and system of mediation. Hence artistic practice significantly changes into mediation between the viewer and the subject, between “art“ and “life“, media, technique and expression, art and institutions, copyright and art work …
Over the last two decades, we have learned to know about dissipative structures in biology, fractal and chaos theory, network and self-organization theory, yet with little impact on the academic institutional teaching and learning culture. With the notion of social technologies, the accompanying current transformation process from single authorship to co-authorship, public versus person-to-person communication, contributions versus display, has become virulent in the net activism of the 1990s that links in many ways with the social or socially critical processes of the 1960s and 70s (e. g. U. Eco’s “open“ works of art and J. Beuys’s concept of “social sculpture“ relating plastic creativity to socio-political activities, K. Galloway and S. Rabinowitz’s “Hole-In-Space“ as for telematics and telepresence). Current social software developments are merging the socio-political and media-technological towards a democratizing and participatory media approach.
By applying this to learning processes in a digital age, one of the main questions is how the increased recognition of interconnections in differing fields of knowledge, systems and ecology theories is perceived in light of learning tasks. Alternative theories deriving from chaos, self-organization and social network theories suggest that we can no longer personally experience and acquire the learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections. Chaos, as a science, recognizes the connection of everything to everything.⁹ The butterfly analogy highlights the challenge of how we deal with sensitive dependence on initial conditions that profoundly impact what we learn and how we act based on our learning. As for social-network theories, Albert-László Barabási states that “nodes always compete for connections because links represent survival in an interconnected world”.¹⁰ This competition is largely dulled within a personal learning network, but the placing of value on certain nodes over others is a reality. Connections between disparate ideas and fields can create new innovations. This amplification of learning, knowledge and understanding through the extension of a personal network is the epitome of a new learning culture.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text ist eine gekürzte Version der Originalfassung, die in Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (2008), The University of Chicago Press, S. 103–114, erschienen ist.

1.)Bolz, Norbert (2006): bang design – design manifesto of the 21st century. Hamburg: Trendbüro.
2.)Interview with Otto E. Rössler (in German): Vom Chaos, der Virtuellen Realität und der Endophysik. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5004/1.html (15.11.2006).
3.)Stocker, G./ Schöpf, C. (ed.) 2001: Ars Electronica 2001. Wien, New York: Springer.
4.)Ghosh, R. A.: „In an environment where it costs next to nothing to duplicate a product, exactly what is scarce? A Ferrari F40 would presumably be cheaper if it cost under a dollar to make a perfect copy.“ firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/580 (01/05/2013).
5.)Kittler, F.: „Wissenschaft als Open-Source-Prozeß“, http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/kittler/os.html (1.6.2013).
6.)Walser, R: „Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse“ (1990), cited in Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 192.
7.)See also Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Wright, E., and Bonus, S. (2005): Weblogs as a Bridging Genre. Information, Technology, & People, 18 (22), pp. 142–171.
8.)Rushkoff: 1999, p. 269.
9.)cf. Gleick’s “Butterfly Effect“. In: Gleick, J., (1987). Chaos: The Making of a New Science. New York, NY, Penguin Books.
10.)Barabási, A. L., (2002): p. 106.

Literatur
Barabási, A.-L. 2003. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life. NY: Plume Books.
Bolz, N. 2006. bang design. design manifest des 21. Jahrhunderts. Hamburg: Trend Büro
Galison, P. In: Latour, B., Weibel, P. 2002. Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Boston: MIT Press.
Gleick, J. 1987. Chaos: The Making of a New Science. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
Rushkoff, D. 1999. Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids. New York: Riverhead Books.
Stocker, G./ Schöpf, C. (ed.) 2001. Ars Electronica 2001. Wien, New York: Springer.
Walser, R. 1990. Elements of a Cyberspace Playhouse, cited in Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Waldrop, M. 1992. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. NY: Touchstone.

FREE

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:45 +0000

– Who wants to know? – I want to know.
– What do you want to know? – I don’t know!

At some point last year I proposed within my institution, Goldsmiths, University of London, that we develop a free academy adjacent to our institution and call it “Goldsmiths Free.” The reactions to this proposal, when not amused smirks at the apparently adolescent nature of the proposal, were largely either puzzled – “What would we get out of it? Why would we want to do it?” – or horrified – “How would it finance itself?” No one asked what might be taught or discussed within it and how that might differ from the intellectual work that is done within our conventional fee-charging, degree-giving, research-driven institution. And that of course was the point, that it would be different, not just in terms of redefining the point of entry into the structure (free of fees and previous qualifications) or the modus operandi of the work (not degree-based, unexamined, not subject to the state’s mechanisms of monitoring and assessment), but also that the actual knowledge would be differently situated within it. And that is what I want to think about here, about the difference in the knowledge itself, its nature, its status, and its affect.
The kind of knowledge that interested me in this proposal to the university was one that was not framed by disciplinary and thematic orders, a knowledge that would instead be presented in relation to an urgent issue, and not an issue as defined by knowledge conventions, but by the pressures and struggles of contemporaneity. When knowledge is unframed, it is less grounded genealogically and can navigate forwards rather than backwards. This kind of “unframed” knowledge obviously had a great deal to do with what I had acquired during my experiences in the art world, largely a set of permissions with regard to knowledge and a recognition of its performative faculties – that knowledge does rather than is. But the permissions I encountered in the art world came with their own set of limitations, a tendency to reduce the complex operations of speculation to either illustration or to a genre that would visually exemplify “study” or “research.” Could there be, I wondered, another mode in which knowledge might be set free without having to perform such generic mannerisms, without becoming an aesthetic trope in the hands of curators hungry for the latest “turn”?
Heads will surely be shaken! The notion of “free” is currently so degraded in terms of the free market, the dubious proposals of the new “free” economy of the internet, and the historically false promises of individual freedom, that it may be difficult to see what it might have to offer beyond all these hollow slogans. Nevertheless, the possibility of producing some interrogative proximity between “knowledge” and “free” seems both unavoidable and irresistible, particularly in view of the present struggles over the structures of education in Europe.
The actual drive towards knowledge and therefore towards some form of expansion and transformation seems far more important than simply a discussion of the categories it operates within. In order to attempt such a transition I need to think about several relevant questions:
1. First and foremost, what is knowledge when it is “free“?
2. Whether there are sites, such as the spaces of art, in which knowledge might be more “free” than in others?
3. What are the institutional implications of housing knowledge that is “free”?
4. What are the economies of “free” that might prove an alternative to the market- and outcome-based and comparison-driven economies of institutionally structured knowledge at present?
Evidently, en route I need to think about the struggles over education, its alternative sitings, the types of emergent economies that might have some purchase on its rethinking, and, finally, how “education” might be perceived as an alternative organizational mode, not of information, of formal knowledges and their concomitant marketing, but as other forms of coming together not predetermined by outcomes but by directions. Here I have in mind some process of “knowledge singularization,” which I will discuss further below.
Obviously it is not the romance of liberation that I have in mind here in relation to “free.” Knowledge cannot be “liberated,” it is endlessly embedded in long lines of transformations that link in inexplicable ways to produce new conjunctions. Nor do I have in mind the romance of “avant-garde” knowledge, with its oppositional modes of “innovation” as departure and breach. Nor am I particularly interested in what has been termed “interdisciplinarity,” which, with its intimations of movement and “sharing” between disciplines, de facto leaves intact those membranes of division and logics of separation and containment. Nor, finally, and I say this with some qualification, is my main aim here to undo the disciplinary and professional categories that have divided and isolated bodies of knowledge from one another in order to promote a heterogeneous field populated by “bodies” of knowledge akin to the marketing strategies that ensure choice and multiplicity and dignify the practices of epistemological segregation by producing endless new subcategories for inherited bodies of named and contained knowledge.
There is a vexed relation between freedom, individuality, and sovereignty that has a particular relevance for the arena being discussed here, as knowledge and education have a foothold both in processes of individuation and in processes of socialization. Hannah Arendt expressed this succinctly when she warned that
Politically, this identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will. For it leads either to a denial of human freedom – namely, if it is realized that whatever men may be, they are never sovereign – or to the insight that the freedom of one man, or a group, or a body politic, can only be purchased at the price of the freedom, i. e. the sovereignty, of all others. Within the conceptual framework of traditional philosophy, it is indeed very difficult to understand how freedom and non-sovereignty can exist together or, to put it another way, how freedom could have been given to men under the conditions of non-sovereignty.¹
And in the final analysis it is my interest to get around both concepts, freedom and sovereignty, through the operations of “singularization.” Perhaps it is knowledge de-individuated, de-radicalized in the conventional sense of the radical as breach, and yet operating within the circuits of singularity – of “the new relational mode of the subject” – that is preoccupying me in this instance.
And so, the task at hand seems to me to be not one of liberation from confinement, but rather one of undoing the very possibilities of containment.
While an unbounded circulation of capital, goods, information, hegemonic alliances, populist fears, newly globalized uniform standards of excellence, and so forth, are some of the hallmarks of the late neoliberal phase of capitalism, we nevertheless can not simply equate every form of the unbounded and judge them all as equally insidious. “Free“ in relation to knowledge, it seems to me, has its power less in its expansion than in an ultimately centripetal movement, less in a process of penetrating and colonizing everywhere and everything in the relentless mode of capital, than in reaching unexpected entities and then drawing them back, mapping them onto the field of perception.

STRUGGLES
In spring and autumn of 2009 a series of prolonged strikes erupted across Austria and Germany, the two European countries whose indigenous education systems have been hardest hit by the reorganization of the Bologna Accord; smaller strikes also took place in France, Italy, and Belgium.² At the center of the students’ protests were the massive cuts in education budgets across the board and the revision of state budgets within the current economic climate, which made youth and the working class bear the burden of support for failing financial institutions.
The strikes were unified by common stands on three issues:
1. against fees for higher education
2. against the increasing limitation of access to selection in higher education
3. for re-democratization of the universities and re-inclusion of students in decision-making processes
Not only were these the largest and most organized strikes to have been held by school and university students since the 1980s, but they also included teachers, whose pay had been reduced and whose working hours had been extended, which, after considerable pressure from below, eventually moved the trade unions to take a position.
The concerns here were largely structural and procedural, and considering all that is at stake in these reorganizations of the education system, it is difficult to know what to privilege in our concern: the reformulation of institutions into regimented factories for packaged knowledge that can easily be placed within the marketplace; the processes of knowledge acquisition that are reduced to the management of formulaic outcomes that are comparable across cultures and contexts; “training“ replacing “speculating“; the dictation of such shifts from above and without any substantive consultation or debate. All of these are significant steps away from criticality in spaces of education and towards the goal that all knowledge have immediate, transparent, predictable, and pragmatic application.
The long, substantive lines that connect these struggles to their predecessors over the past forty years or so, and which constitute “education” as both an ongoing political platform and the heart of many radical artistic practices, are extremely well articulated in a conversation between Marion von Osten and Eva Egermann, in which von Osten says of her projects such as “reformpause”:
Firstly, I tried to create a space to pause, to hold on for a moment, to take a breath and to think – to think about what kinds of change might be possible; about how and what we might wish to learn; and why that which we wished to learn might be needed. I guess, in this way, both Manoa Free University and “reformpause” shared similar goals – not simply to critique the ongoing educational reforms and thereby legitimize established structures, but rather to actively engage in thinking about alternate concepts and possible change.
Secondly, there is a long history of student struggles and the question arises as to whether or not these are still relevant today and, if they are, how and why? The recent student struggles did not simply originate with the Bologna Declaration. The genealogy of various school and university protests and struggles over the past forty years demonstrates that we live in an era of educational reforms which, since the 1960s, have led to the construction of a new political subjectivity, the “knowledge worker.” This is not just a phenomenon of the new millennium; furthermore, many artistic practices from the 1960s and 1970s relate to this re-ordering of knowledge within Western societies. This is one of the many reasons why we so readily relate to these practices, as exemplified by conceptualism and the various ways in which conceptual artists engaged with contemporary changes in the concepts of information and communication.³
All of this identifies hugely problematic and very urgent issues, but we cannot lose sight of the status of actual knowledge formations within these. When knowledge is not geared towards “production,” it has the possibility of posing questions that combine the known and the imagined, the analytical and the experiential, and which keep stretching the terrain of knowledge so that it is always just beyond the border of what can be conceptualized.
These are questions in which the conditions of knowledge are always internal to the concepts it is entertaining, not as a context but as a limit to be tested. The entire critical epistemology developed by Foucault and by Derrida rested on questions that always contain a perception of their own impossibility, a consciousness of thinking as a process of unthinking something that is fully aware of its own status. The structural, the techniques, and the apparatuses, could never be separated from the critical interrogation of concepts. As Giorgio Agamben says of Foucault’s concept of the apparatus:
The proximity of this term to the theological dispositio, as well as to Foucault’s apparatuses, is evident. What is common to all these terms is that they refer back to this oikonomia, that is, to a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient – in a way that purports to be useful – the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of human beings.⁴
So the struggle facing education is precisely that of separating thought from its structures, a struggle constantly informed by tensions between thought management and subjectification – the frictions by which we turn ourselves into subjects. As Foucault argued, this is the difference between the production of subjects in “power/knowledge” and those processes of self-formation in which the person is active. It would seem then that the struggle in education arises from tensions between conscious inscription into processes of self-formation and what Foucault, speaking of his concerns with scientific classification, articulated as the subsequent and necessary “insurrection of subjugated knowledges,” in which constant new voices appear claiming themselves not as “identities,” but as events within knowledge.⁵ The argument that Isabelle Stengers makes about her own political formation has convinced me that this is a productive direction to follow in trying to map out knowledge as struggle:
My own intellectual and political life has been marked by what I learned from the appearance of drugs users’ groups claiming that they were “citizens like everyone else,“ and fighting against laws that were officially meant to “protect“ them. The efficacy of this new collective voice, relegating to the past what had been the authorized, consensual expertise legitimating the “war on drugs,“ convinced me that such events were “political events“ par excellence, producing – as, I discovered afterwards, Dewey had already emphasized – both new political struggle and new important knowledge. I even proposed that what we call democracy could be evaluated by its relation to those disrupting collective productions. A “true“ democracy would demand the acceptance of the ongoing challenge of such disruptions – would not only accept them but also acknowledge those events as something it depended upon.⁶
Knowledge as disruption, knowledge as counter-subjugation, knowledge as constant exhortation to its own, often uncomfortable implications, are at the heart of “struggle.” The battle over education as we are experiencing it now does not find its origin in the desire to suppress these but rather in efforts to regulate them so that they work in tandem with the economies of cognitive capitalism.

ECONOMIES
The economies of the world of knowledge have shifted quite dramatically over the past ten to fifteen years. What had been a fairly simple subsidy model, with states covering the basic expenses of teaching, subsidizing home schooling on a per capita basis (along with private entities incorporated in “not -for-profit” structures); research councils and foundations covering the support of research in the humanities and pure sciences; and industry supporting applied research, has changed quite dramatically, as have the traditional outlets for such knowledge: scholarly journals and books, exhibitions, science-based industry, the military, and public services such as agriculture and food production. Knowledge, at present, is not only enjoined to be “transferable” (to move easily between paradigms so that its potential impact will be transparent from the outset) and to invent new and ever expanding outlets for itself, it must also contend with the prevalent belief that it should be obliged not only to seek out alternative sources of funding but actually to produce these. By producing the need for a particular type of knowledge one is also setting up the means of its excavation or invention – this is therefore a “need-based” culture of knowledge that produces the support and the market through itself.
So, when I speak of a “free” academy, the question has to be posed: if it is to meet all the above requirements, namely, that it not be fee-charging, not produce applied research, not function within given fields of expertise, and not consider itself in terms of applied “outcomes,” how would it be funded?
In terms of the internet, the economic model of “free“ that has emerged over the past decade initially seemed to be an intensification or a contemporary perpetuation of what had been called by economists, the “cross-subsidy“ model: you’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service. This primary model was then expanded by the possibilities of ever increasing access to the internet, married to constantly lowered costs in the realm of digital technologies.
A second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs. And so it goes, too, for everything from banking to gambling, check it out! The moment a company’s primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but also the inevitable destination.⁷ The cost of actually circulating something within these economies becomes lower and lower, until cost is no longer the primary index of its value.
A third aspect of this emergent economic model is perhaps the one most relevant to this discussion of education. Here the emphasis is on a shift from an exclusive focus on buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, to a tripartite model, in which the third element that enters does so based on its interest in the exchange taking place between the first two elements – an interest to which it contributes financially. In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is “free to air,” and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market.
In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts. This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added“ subscriptions, and direct e-commerce. Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.⁸
The question is whether this model of a “free” economy is relevant to my proposal for a free “academy,” given that in an economic model the actual thing in circulation is not subject to much attention except as it appeals to a large public and their ostensible needs. Does this model have any potential for criticality or for an exchange that goes beyond consumption? Novelist, activist, and technology commentator Cory Doctorow claims that there’s a pretty strong case to be made that “free” has some inherent antipathy to capitalism. That is, information that can be freely reproduced at no marginal cost may not want, need or benefit from markets as a way of organizing them. . . . Indeed, there’s something eerily Marxist in this phenomenon, in that it mirrors Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s ability to create a surplus of capacity that can subsequently be freely shared without market forces’ brutality.⁹
The appealing part of the economy of “free” for debates about education is its unpredictability in throwing up new spheres of interest and new congregations around them. It has some small potential for shifting the present fixation on the direct relation between fees, training, applied research, organization-as-management, predictable outputs and outcomes, and the immediate consumption of knowledge. This however seems a very narrow notion of criticality as it is limited to the production of a surplus within knowledge and fails to take on the problems of subjectification. And it is the agency of subjectification and its contradictory multiplicity that is at the heart of a preoccupation with knowledge in education, giving it its traction as it were, what Foucault called “the lived multiplicity of positionings.” The internet-based model of “free” does break the direct relation between buyers and sellers, which in the current climate of debates about education, in the context of what Nick Dyer-Witheford has called “Academia Inc.,” is certainly welcome. But it does not expand the trajectory of participation substantively, merely reducing the act of taking part in this economy of use and exchange. The need to think of a “market” for the disruption of paradigms emerges as an exercise in futility and as politically debilitating. To think again with Agamben:
Contemporary societies therefore present themselves as inert bodies going through massive processes of desubjectification without acknowledging any real subjectification. Hence the eclipse of politics, which used to presuppose the existence of subjects and real identities (the workers’ movement, the bourgeoisie, etc.), and the triumph of the oikonomia, that is to say, of a pure activity of government that aims at nothing other than its own replication.¹⁰
What then would be the sites of conscious subjectification within this amalgam of education and creative practices?

SITES
Over the past two decades we have seen a proliferation of self-organized structures that take the form, with regard to both their investigations and effects, of sites of learning.¹¹ These have, more than any other initiative, collapsed the divisions between sites of formal academic education and those of creative practice, display, performance, and activism. In these spaces the previously clear boundaries between universities, academies, museums, galleries, performance spaces, NGOs, and political organizations, lost much of their visibility and efficaciousness. Of course, virtually every European city still has at least one if not several vast “entertainment machine” institutions, traditional museums that see their task as one of inviting the populace to partake of “art” in the most conventional sense and perceive “research” to be largely about themselves (to consist, that is, in the seemingly endless conferences that are held each year on “the changing role of the museum”). These institutions however no longer define the parameters of the field and serve more as indices of consumption, market proximities, and scholastic inertia.
What does knowledge do when it circulates in other sites such as the art world?
As Eva Egermann says:
Of course, the art field was seen as a place in which things could happen, a field of potential, a space of exchange between different models and concepts and, in the sense of learning and unlearning, a field of agency and transfer between different social and political fields and between different positions and subjectivities. In a way, the exhibition functioned as a pretext, a defined place for communication and action that would perhaps establish impulses for further transformations. So, the project functioned as an expanded field of practice from which to organize and network between many different groups, but also to question and experiment with methods of representation and distribution for collective artistic research. We wanted to disseminate our research for collective usage through various means, such as the study circle itself, a wiki, publications and readers and through the model of a free university.¹²
More than any other sphere, the spaces of contemporary art that open themselves to this kind of alternative activity of learning and knowledge production, and see in it not an occasional indulgence but their actual daily business, have become the sites of some of the most important redefinitions of knowledge that circulate today.
As sites, they have marked the shift from “Ivory Towers” of knowledge to spaces of interlocution, with in between a short phase as “laboratories.” As a dialogical practice based on questioning, on agitating the edges of paradigms and on raising external points of view, interlocution takes knowledge back to a Socratic method but invests its operations with acknowledged stakes and interests, rather than being a set of formal proceedings. It gives a performative dimension to the belief argued earlier through the work of Foucault and Derrida, that knowledge always has at its edges the active process of its own limits and its own invalidation.
In setting up knowledge production within the spaces and sites of art, one also takes up a set of permissions that are on offer. Recognizing who is posing questions, where they are speaking from, and from where they know what they know, becomes central rather than, as is typical, marginal qualifications often relegated to footnotes. Permission is equally granted to start in the middle without having to rehearse the telos of an argument; to start from “right here and right now” and embed issues in a variety of contexts, expanding their urgency; to bring to these arguments a host of validations, interventions, asides, and exemplifications that are not recognized as directly related or as sustaining provable knowledge. And, perhaps most importantly, “the curatorial,” not as a profession but as an organizing and assembling impulse, opens up a set of possibilities, mediations perhaps, to formulate subjects that may not be part of an agreed-upon canon of “subjects” worthy of investigation. So knowledge in the art world, through a set of permissions that do not recognize the academic conventions for how one arrives at a subject, can serve both the purposes of reframing and producing subjects in the world.
Finally, I would argue that knowledge in the art world has allowed us to come to terms with partiality – with the fact that our field of knowing is always partially comprehensible, the problems that populate it are partially visible, and our arguments are only partially inhabiting a recognizable logic. Under no illusions as to its comprehensiveness, knowledge as it is built up within the spaces of art makes relatively modest claims for plotting out the entirety of a problematic, accepting instead that it is entering in the middle and illuminating some limited aspects, all the while making clear its drives in doing so.¹³
And it is here, in these spaces, that one can ground the earlier argument that the task at hand in thinking through “free“ is not one of liberation from confinement, but rather one of undoing the very possibilities of containment. It is necessary to understand that containment is not censure but rather half acknowledges acts of framing and territorializing.

VECTORS
In conjunction with the sites described above it is also direction and circulation that help in opening up “knowledge” to new perceptions of its mobility.
How can we think of “education” as circulations of knowledge and not as the top-down or down-up dynamics in which there is always a given, dominant direction for the movement of knowledge? The direction of the knowledge determines its mode of dissemination: if it is highly elevated and canonized then it is structured in a particular, hierarchical way, involving original texts and commentaries on them; if it is experiential then it takes the form of narrative and description in a more lateral form; and if it is empirical then the production of data categories, vertical and horizontal, would dominate its argument structures even when it is speculating on the very experience of excavating and structuring that knowledge.¹⁴
While thinking about this essay I happened to hear a segment of a radio program called The Bottom Line, a weekly BBC program about business entrepreneurs I had never encountered before. In it a businessman was talking about his training; Geoff Quinn the chief executive of clothing manufacturer T. M. Lewin said he had not had much education and went into clothing retailing at the age of sixteen, “but then I discovered the stock room – putting things in boxes, making lists, ordering the totality of the operation.”¹⁵ He spoke of the stockroom, with a certain sense of wonder, as the site in which everything came together, where the bits connected and made sense, less a repository than a launch pad for a sartorial world of possibilities. The idea that the “stockroom” could be an epiphany, could be someone’s education, was intriguing and I tried to think it out a bit … part Foucauldian notion of scientific classification and part Simondon’s pragmatic transductive thought about operations rather than meanings – the “stockroom” is clearly a perspective, an early recognition of the systemic and the interconnected, and a place from which to see the “big picture.” While the “stockroom” may be a rich and pleasing metaphor, it is also a vector, along which a huge range of manufacturing technologies, marketing strategies, and advertising campaigns meet up with labor histories and those of raw materials, with print technologies and internet disseminations, with the fantasmatic investments in clothes and their potential to renew us.
Therefore what if “education” – the complex means by which knowledges are disseminated and shared – could be thought of as a vector, as a quantity (force or velocity, for example), made up of both direction and magnitude? A powerful horizontality that looks at the sites of education as convergences of drives to knowledge that are in themselves knowledge? Not in the sense of formally inherited, archived, and transmitted knowledges but in the sense that ambition “knows” and curiosity “knows” and poverty “knows” – they are modes of knowing the world and their inclusion or their recognition as events of knowledge within the sites of education make up not the context of what goes on in the classroom or in the space of cultural gathering, but the content.
Keller Easterling in her exceptionally interesting book Enduring Innocence builds on Arjun Appadurai’s notion of “imagined worlds” as “the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe … these mixtures create variegated scapes described as “mediascapes and “ethnoscapes.” Which, says Easterling, by “naturalizing the migration and negotiation of traveling cultural forms allows these thinkers [such as Appadurai] to avoid impossible constructs about an authentic locality.”¹⁶ From Easterling’s work I have learned to understand such sites as located forms of “intelligence” – both information and stealth formation. To recognize the operations of “the network” in relation to structures of knowledge in which no linearity could exist and the direct relation between who is in the spaces of learning, the places to which they are connected, the technologies that close the gaps in those distances, the unexpected and unpredictable points of entry that they might have, the fantasy projections that might have brought them there – all agglomerate as sites of knowledge.
We might be able to look at these sites and spaces of education as ones in which long lines of mobility, curiosity, epistemic hegemony, colonial heritages, urban fantasies, projections of phantom professionalization, new technologies of both formal access and less formal communication, a mutual sharing of information, and modes of knowledge organization, all come together in a heady mix – that is the field of knowledge and from it we would need to go outwards to combine all of these as actual sites of knowledge and produce a vector.
Having tried to deconstruct as many discursive aspects of what “free” might mean in relation to knowledge, in relation to my hoped-for-academy, I think that what has come about is the understanding of “free” in a non-liberationist vein, away from the binaries of confinement and liberty, rather as the force and velocity by which knowledge and our imbrication in it, move along. That its comings-together are our comings-together and not points in a curriculum, rather along the lines of the operations of “singularity” that enact the relation of “the human to a specifiable horizon” through which meaning is derived, as Jean-Luc Nancy says.¹⁷ Singularity provides us with another model of thinking relationality, not as external but as loyal to a logic of its own self-organization. Self-organization links outwardly not as identity, interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of coexistence in space. To think “knowledge” as the working of singularity is actually to decouple it from the operational demands put on it, to open it up to processes of multiplication and of links to alternate and unexpected entities, to animate it through something other than critique or defiance – perhaps as “free.”

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: e-flux Journal, Education Actualized, #14, 03/2010 unter: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/free/ [07.06.2013].

1.) Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” Chapter VI “Revolution and Preservation” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, (ed. Peter R. Baehr) (Penguin, London:, Penguin, 2000), 455.
2.) See Dietrich Lemke’s “Mourning Bologna” in this issue, http://e-flux.com/journal/view/123.
3.) Marion von Osten and Eva Egermann, “Twist and Shout,” in Curating and the Educational Turn: 2, eds. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson (London: Open Editions; Amsterdam: de Appel, forthcoming).
4.) Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” in What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, eds. and trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12.
5.) Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (London: Harvester, 1980), 81.
6.) Isabelle Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism,” in Subjectivity 22 (2008): 38–59.
7.) This is Chris Anderson’s argument in Free: The Future of a Radical Price (New York: Random House, 2009).
8.) See http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free.
9.) See Cory Doctorow, “Chris Anderson‘s Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short, “ Guardian (July 28, 2009), http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/jul/28/cory-doctorow-free-chris-anderson.
10.) Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 22.
11.) See for example: Copenhagen Free University, http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/freeutv.html Universidad Nómada, http://www.sindominio.net/unomada/ Facoltà di Fuga, http://www.rekombinant.org/fuga/index.php
The Independent Art School, http://www.independent-art-school.org.uk/ Informal Universityin Foundation, http://www.jackie-inhalt.net/
Mobilized Investigation, http://manifestor.org/mi
Minciu Sodas, http://www.ms.lt/ , including http://www.cyfranogi.com/, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/backtotheroot/, http://www.onevillage.biz/
Pirate University, http://www.pirate-university.org/
Autonomous University of Lancaster, http://www.knowledgelab.org
Das Solidarische Netzwerk für offene Bildung (s.n.o.b.), Marburg (Germany), http://deu.anarchopedia.org/snob
The Free/Slow University of Warsaw, http://www.wuw2009.pl/
The University of Openness, http://p2pfoundation.net/University_of_Openness
Manoa Free University, http://www.manoafreeuniversity.org/
L’université Tangente, http://utangente.free.fr/
12.) Von Osten and Egermann, “Twist and Shout.”
13.) See Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality, “ available on the website of the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies,
http://eipcp.net/dlfiles/rogoff-smuggling.
14.) See Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury, “What is the Empirical?” European Journal of Social Theory 12, no. 1 (February 2009): 5–20.
15.) Geoff Quinn, interview by Evan Davis, The Bottom Line, BBC, February 18, 2010, available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qps85#synopsis
16.) Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Masquerades (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 3.
17.) Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), xi.

Museum Futures: Distributed

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:38 +0000

Museum Futures: Distributed – is a machinima record of the centenary interview with Moderna Museet’s executive AYAN Lindquist in June 2058. It explores a genealogy for contemporary art practice and its institutions, by re-imagining the role of artists, museums, galleries, markets, manufactories and academies.

Centenary Interview 2058

Interior: The common room, Moderna Museet v3.0
A beautiful lounge, comfortable seating, local lighting, graduated windows with breathtaking views of the sea.
Ayan Lindquist, fixed-term executive of Moderna v3.0, is waiting to be interviewed in real-time from Guangzhou, in the Asian Multitude.
She is browsing screens as a face fades-up on the wall window.

MS CHAN
Nihao, hej, hello!
Hello is that Ayan Lindquist?

AYAN LINDQUIST
Nihao, hello.
Yes Ms Chan, this is Ayan.
We are in sync.

MS CHAN
Thank you so much for finding time … you must be very busy with the centenary launch.

AYAN
It’s a pleasure.
We really admire your work on mid 20th C image ecologies. Especially your research on archival practice.

MS CHAN
Well I’m flattered. For many Asian non-market institutions, your pioneering work with long-term equity contracts has been inspirational too!

AYAN
Oh, there was a whole team of us involved … So lets begin.

MS CHAN
Ok. Just to refresh, for the centenary I’d like to archive your live-thread recall of Moderna.

AYAN
Yep, that’s fine, I’ve enabled about 20 minutes.

MS CHAN
Ok, live.
Maybe we could start with some personal history. What were you doing before you became executive at Moderna Museet v3.0?

AYAN
Well, I joined Moderna 2.0 in 2049, almost ten years ago. First as adviser to the development working group. Then as part of the governance team. I participated in the forking of Moderna 3.0 in 2’51. And was elected fixed-term executive in 2’52, ….. uhmm, … until today.
I’ve got another four years in the post.

MS CHAN
And before that?

AYAN
Immediately before joining Moderna I collaborated in the exhibition programme at the MACBA cluster in Mumbai for six years. Although, more in resource provision. That’s where we worked on a version of the equity bond issue you mentioned.

MS CHAN
And before that?

AYAN
In programming again at Tate in Doha for four years, particularly developing exhibitionary platforms. And even before that, I participated in research on cultural governance, for the Nordic Congress of the European Multitude for six years. I suspect exhibition agency and governance are my real strengths.

MS CHAN
Maybe we should dive into the deep-end. Could you briefly say something of why Moderna v3.0 devolved, and why was it necessary?

AYAN
As you can imagine there was a lot of consultation beforehand. It’s not something we did without due diligence. For almost forty years Moderna v2.0 has explored and developed the exhibitionary form. We pioneered the production of many collaborative exhibitions, resources and assemblages.
We helped build robust public – what you prefer to term non-market cultural networks. And scaled those networks to produce our i-commons, part of the vast, glocal, Public Domain. We have continually nurtured and developed emergent art practice. Moderna can proudly, and quite rightly say that we participated in shaping the early 21st century movement of art. From an exhibitionary practice based around art-artefacts, spectacle and consumption – to that of embedded co-production.

MS CHAN
Do you mean …

AYAN
Of course there are many complex factors involved …………
But we were agent in the shift from a heritage cultural mind-set of ‘broadcast’, to that of emergent, peer-to-peer meshworks. Following the logic of practice, we became an immanent institution.

MS CHAN
Could you say a ……………

AYAN
Uhmm …….. Although having said all of that ……….
We’ve not really answered your question, have we? Given that Moderna 2.0 continues its exhibitionary research, some of us believe that exhibition as a technology, and immanence as an institutional logic needed to be subject to radical revision. So this is what we intend to explore with Moderna 3.0, we want to execute some of the research. To enact. To be more agent than immanent.

MS CHAN
Ok. I wondered if you could you say a ……………

AYAN
Sorry to over-write, but in a way the forking follows something of the tradition of Moderna Museet. Moderna 2.0 mutated through 1.0 because the tension between trying to collect, conserve, and exhibit the history of 20th Century art, and at the same time trying to be a responsible 21st Century art institution proved too difficult to reconcile. Moderna 1.0 continues its mandate. Its buildings and collection has global heritage status. In turn, this early hybridization enabled Moderna 2.0 to be more mobile and experimental. In its organizational form, in its devolved administration, and its exhibition-making practice ….

MS CHAN
Could you just expand on the ‘more complex factors’ you mentioned earlier….

AYAN
That’s a big question!! Let me re-run a general thread from composite ………… […] … uhmm
Well, a good place to start might be the bifurcation of the market for ‘contemporary art’ from emergent art practices themselves. Although the public domain has a long genealogy; Waaaay ……. back into ancient European land rights, ‘commons’ projects and commonwealth’s.
It was the advent of digitalisation, and particularly very early composite language projects in the 1980’s which – and this appears astonishing to us now, were proprietary – that kick-started what were called ‘open’, ‘free’ or non-market resource initiatives. Of course, these languages, assemblages and the resources they were building needed legal protection. Licenses to keep them out of property and competitive marketization. The General Public License, the legendary GPL legal code was written in 1989.

MS CHAN
It’s not so old!

AYAN
So then, text and images – either still or moving; artefacts, systems and processes; music and sound – either as source or assembled; all embedded plant, animal and bodily knowledge; public research, and all possible ecologies of these resources began to be aggregated by the viral licenses into our Public Domain. Landmarks include the releasing of the sequenced human genome in 2001. The foundation of the ‘multitude’ social enterprise coalition in 2’09. Intellectual Property reform in the teen’s. The UN-Multitude initiated micro-taxation of global financial transactions in 2’13 – which redirected so many financial resources to Public Domain cultural initiatives. Well I could go on, and on, and on. But anyway, most participants will be over-familiar with this thread.

MS CHAN
Remind me, when did Moderna affiliate?

AYAN
In-Archive records suggest Öppna dagar or Härifrån till allmänningen, with Mejan ……. I’m sorry. We did some collaborative ‘open’ knowledge projects with Mejan in Stockholm in late 2’09. And when Moderna 2.0 launched in 2’12 we declared all new knowledge General Public License version 6, compliant.

MS CHAN
Wasn’t that initiated by Chus Martinez, one of your predecessors? She seems to have shaped early Moderna 2.0, which in turn, became an inspiration globally.

AYAN
It’s nice you say so. Since 2’12 we collaborated with the fledgling Nordic Congress, in what was to become the European Multitude, to form the backbone of the Public Domain cultural meshwork. It eventually convened in late 2’22. So we were at source.

MS CHAN
Ok. Uh ha, thanks.

AYAN
Now simultaneous with the exponential growth of the Public Domain, was the market for what we still call ‘contemporary art’. Many historians locate one of the sources for this ‘contemporary art’ market, as the auction in New York in 1973 of the art-artefact collection of Robert and Ethel Scull. An extraordinary collection of paintings by pop-male-artists like Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, and …… er …… I recall …….. Jasper Johns.

MS CHAN
Ok. From composite I’m streaming the John Schott analogue film of the sale, from New York MoMA’s Public Domain archive.

AYAN
It’s a great film, and many of the art-artefacts have subsequently devolved to Moderna.

MS CHAN
I have the catalogue.
It’s present, ………. I’m browsing.

AYAN
That auction set record prices for many artists.
It also connected art-artefacts with financial speculation in a way previously unimagined.
By 1981 one of the ‘big two’ auction houses, Sotheby’s, was active in 23 countries and had a ‘contemporary art’ market throughput of 4.9 billion old US dollars. Soon, global Trade Fairs mushroomed. Commercial galleries flourished and a sliver of ‘branded’ artists lived like mid 20th Century media oligarchs. By 2’06 complex financial trading technologies were using art-artefacts as an asset class. And most public Modern Art Museums were priced out of the ‘contemporary art’ market. In retrospect, we wasted an enormous amount of time and effort convening financial resources to purchase, and publicly ‘own’ vastly overpriced goods. And we wasted time wooing wealthy speculators, for sporadic gifts and donations too!

MS CHAN
That connects! It was the same locally.
The conflictual ethical demands in early Modern Art Museums were systemic. And obviously unsustainable. Reversing the resource flow, and using Transaction Tax to nourish Public Domain cultural meshworks seems, …………………… well, inevitable.

AYAN
Ahhh, sometimes, rethreading is such a wonderful luxury! Anyway, auction houses began to buy commercial galleries. And this dissolved the tradition of the primary – managed, and secondary – free art market. As a consequence, by 2’12 the ‘contemporary art’ market was a ‘true’ competitive market, with prices for assets falling as well as rising. Various ‘contemporary art’ bond, derivate and futures markets were quickly convened. And typically, art-asset portfolios were managed through specialist brokerages linked to banking subsidiaries.

MS CHAN
Ok. I also see some local downturns linked to financial debt bubbles bursting. Spectacularly in 2’09, again in 2’24 and again in 2’28. Market corrections?

AYAN
Probably. Market corrections and their repercussions. Overall the market expanded, matured in 2’27 and has remained sufficiently resourced ever since ……… More or less. By 2014 formerly commercial galleries, the primary market, had became a competing meshwork of global auction franchises. By 2‘25 they needed to open branded academies to ensure new assets were produced.

MS CHAN
I can see the Frieze Art Academy in Beijing, that was one of the earliest.

AYAN
The market for ‘contemporary art’ became, to all intents and purposes, a competitive commodity market, just like any other. Of course, useful for generating profit and loss through speculation. And useful for generating Public Domain financial resources, but completely divorced from emergent art practice.

MS CHAN
Ok. This might be a bit of a dumb query.
But does Moderna feel that in the self-replication of the ‘contemporary art’ market, that something valuable has been lost from public Museums?

AYAN
To be perfectly honest, no. No, we only experience benefits. You see, through the UN Multitude distribution of Transaction Tax we are much better financially resourced. Which in turn, has enabled us to develop our local cluster and node network. Generally, competitive markets thrive on artificial difference and managed risk. They are just too limited a technology to nurture, or challenge, or distribute a truly creative art practice. And just take all these private art-asset collections, built by speculator-collectors, and supported through private foundations.
Apart from the hyper-resourced, they all ultimately fail. Then they’re either broken-up and re-circulated through the ‘contemporary art’ market. Or, more usually, devolve to the multitude and enter public Museum collections. Here at Moderna, we have benefited enormously from a spate of default donations. Consequently, we’ve a comprehensive collection of ‘contemporary’ art-artefacts through reversion.

MS CHAN
Ok. Then this was the basis for the amazing Moderna Contemporary Art exhibition in Shanghai in 2’24. It was reconstructed as a study module while I was at the Open University in 2’50. I can still recall it. What a collection! What an amazing exhibition! Ok, so maybe here we could locate an ethic approaching something like a critical mass. As Moderna Museet’s collection. exhibitions and activities expanded – and of course other Museums too – the ethic of public generosity is distributed, nurtured and also encouraged. Everyone benefits. I can see that when the Ericsson group pledged its collection for instance, it triggered a whole avalanche of other important private gifts and donations.
Like the Azko – la Caixa collection, or the Generali Foundation gift. Or like when the Guggenheim franchises collapsed as the debt-bubble burst in 2’18, and the Deutsche Bank executive decided to revert their collection.

AYAN
We think that’s a slightly different case, and certainly of a different magnitude!! Although it’s a common trajectory for many public/private museum hybrids.

MS CHAN
Ok, it’s certainly true of museums locally. The former Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, ………. and MOCA in Shanghai for instance.

AYAN
That connects. The increased resources, and the gifts, donations and reversions enabled us to seed our local cluster devolution. From 2’15 we invested in partnerships with the Institutet Människa I Nätverk in Stockholm; with agencies in Tallin and also Helsinki. With the early reversion of the Second Life hive, and with Pushkinskaya in St Petersburg. We created, what was rather fondly termed, the Baltic cluster.

MS CHAN
Ok, from composite I see there had been an earlier experiment with a devolved Moderna. During the enforced closure in 2’02 – 2’03, exhibitions were co-hosted with sympathetic local institutions. There was even a Konstmobilen!

AYAN
Ja, and it was always considered something of a success. Distributing and re-imagining the collection through the cluster – incidentally we cut our carbon debt to almost 12 – radically scaled our activities. So, while developing locally, we also began to produce a wider Moderna Museet network. The first Moderna node opened in Doha in the United Arab Emirates. We participated in the local ecologies restructuring of resources; from carbon to knowledge. That was in 2’18. In 2’20, Mumbai emerged, Ex Habare three-year research project in cooperation with several self-organised Research Institutions – I recall Nowhere from Moscow, the Critical Practice consortium in London, and Sarai from Delhi. And as you already mentioned Shanghai launched in 2’24 with the landmark Contemporary Art exhibition, then the Guangzhou node went live in 2‘29 with La Part Maudite: Bataille and the Accursed Share. A really timely exhibition! It explored the distribution of trust and ‘well-being’ in a general economy. The ethics of waste and expenditure; and the love, and terror, implicit in uninhibited generosity. Isn’t that node’s location near your present Guangdong Museum hub? On Ersha Island, by the Haiyin Bridge?

MS CHAN
We’re almost neighbours! As for the La Part Maudite: much of that source work is still live, and still very present.

AYAN
We saw you did some restoration to the image server codecs recently, thank you for that.

MS CHAN
Ok. A pleasure.

AYAN
Our most recent node emerged in San Paulo in the Americas in 2’33. Through the agency of the Alan Turing Centenary project Almost Real: Composite Consciousness.

MS CHAN
Ok, if I may, I’d just like to loop back with you, to the 20’s and 30’s. It’s when many academic historians think we entered a new exhibitionary ‘golden age’ with Moderna. You co-produced a suite of landmark projects, many of which are still present.

AYAN LINDQUIST
We’re not too comfortable with the idea of a ‘golden age’. Maybe our work became embedded again. Anyway, if there was a ‘golden age’ we’d like to think it started earlier, maybe in 2‘18. We set about exploring a key term from early machine logic – ‘feedback’. And we made a re-address to the source, the legendary Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; on the exhibition’s 50th anniversary.

MS CHAN
From composite – I see Tate has many Public Domain archive resources – it’s recorded as the first exhibitionary exchange between visual art and digital assemblies.

AYAN
For us at Moderna, that exhibition set in motion two decades of recurrent projects exploring Art, Technology and Knowledge. Its most recent manifestation, linked to the Turing research, has resulted in Moderna 3.0’s cooperation on a draft amendment to Article 39 of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. We are seeking to extend certain rights to organic/synthetic intelligent composites.

MS CHAN
You’re co-producing sovereign composites?

AYAN
Yes, yes, that’s what I was hinting at earlier; about Moderna being more agent, and executing as well as exhibiting.

MS CHAN
Now I understand Moderna’s centenary proposal for a Museum of Their Wishes. It’s absolutely amazing! I know it’s a very common thread, but definitely worth re-running. The one about the foundation of the Moderna Museet’s collection with the Museum of Our Wishes exhibition in 1962. And how this was revisited in 2006 by Lars Nittve, with the Museum of our Wishes II – to address the lack of women artists within the collection.

AYAN
We see our legacy as a resource, not a burden.
It’s something we have been working with for a while, recursive programmes. It’s at root. Actually, Wish II was finally fulfilled in 2’22, when some Dora Maar photographs reverted. But, with the emergence of self-conscious composite intelligence, addressing ‘their’ wishes seemed appropriate, even necessary.
And it’s true, if the draft amendment is ratified, it will be an amazing achievement.

MS CHAN
Ok. Even if you don’t like the term, maybe a new ‘golden age’ is beginning?

AYAN
For that, we’ll all just have to wait and see. But earlier, you were right to suggest that in 2’20, with Ex Habare The Practice of Exhibition, we consolidated the idea of emergent art. And, distributed new institutional practices.

MS CHAN
In the Asian network it’s common knowledge that Ex Habare reaffirmed the role of the Museum in civil society.

AYAN
Well to start, we un-compressed the Latinate root of exhibition, ex habare, to reveal the intention of ‘holding-out’ or ‘showing’ evidence in a legal court. It’s obvious, that implicit in exhibition is the desire to show, display and share with others. By grafting this ancient drive, to desires for creative co-production, we enabled exhibitions to remain core to Moderna’s aspirations. It’s also true that to source, participate, co-produce and share, to generate non-rivalous resources, are vital to the constitution of a Public Domain. And indeed, a civil society. There’s a neat homology. Ex Habare distributed these values, and it’s also true, they replicated at an astonishing speed.

MS CHAN
It’s so good to be reminded! Even I tend to take the power of exhibition as a technology for granted. Do you think that this is because artists and others moved into collaborative relationships with Moderna?

AYAN
Var ska vi börja?
Artists and others realised ……….. that the 19th Century ideological construction of the artist, had reached its absolute limit. As configured, art as a ‘creative’ process had ceased to innovate, inspire or have any critical purchase. Quite simply it was irrelevant!

MS CHAN
Everywhere, except in the ‘Contemporary Art’ market!

AYAN
That heritage ‘broadcast’ communication model of culture that we mentioned earlier, privileges creative exchanges between artist and media in the studio/manufactory. Exchanges which were distributed through competitive trade and collecting institutions. At best, ‘broadcast’ extended a small measure of creative agency to the encounter between audiences – often referred to as passive ‘viewers’ – and artworks.

MS CHAN
Ok, I have material from composite. So even when this model was disrupted; like in 1968, the Modellen; A Model for a Qualitative Society exhibition at Moderna for example. It looks like we fell back into umm …… Perhaps the wider creative ecology was just not receptive enough.

AYAN
You might be right Ms Chan. It was really when artists began to imagine art as a practice, and explore creativity as a social process ….

MS CHAN
Sometime around the late 1990’s perhaps?

AYAN
Yes, yes, then we could detect something of a change. Artists began to engage creatively with institutions, and vice versa.
With all aspects of institutional practice; of course through co-producing exhibitions, but also through archival projects – which you’ve done so much to research Ms Chan – through organisational engagement, administration, and so on ……….

MS CHAN
Ok, I’m browsing material from composite on Institutional Critique. Michael Asher and Hans Haacke, they seem to be mostly artists from the America’s in the 1970’s–1980’s

AYAN
Not sure if those are the appropriate resources? Artists associated with Institutional Critique, I recall Michael Asher and Hans Haacke but also Julie Ault and Group Material, or Andrea Fraser. They had a much more antagonistic and oppositional relationship with exhibitionary institutions. They resented being represented by an exhibitionary institution.
Especially those linked to a 19th Century ideology.

MS CHAN
Ok, now I’m browsing material on Sputniks, EIPCP, Bruno Latour, Maria Lind, Arteleku, Van Abbe Museum, Superflex, Franc Lacarde, Raqs and Sarai, Moderna’s projects, Bart de Baere ….

AYAN
Yes, this constellation feels more relevant. As artists rethought their practices, they recognised themselves as a nexus of complex social process. And that creativity was inherent in every conceivable transaction producing that nexus. At whatever the intensity, and regardless of the scale of the assembly. The huge challenge for all of us, was to attend to the lines of force, the transactions, and not be dazzled by the subjects, objects or institutions they produced. We recall that it was under these conditions that artists’ practices merged with Moderna. Merged into relations of mutual co-production. And so in exchange, Moderna began to think of itself as a creative institution. Subject to constant critical and creative exploration.

MS CHAN
Ok, so these were the forces generating Moderna 2.0 in 2’12

AYAN
You’re right. We simply stopped thinking of ourselves as a 19th Century museum – which had to constantly expand, commission signature buildings, evolve huge administrative hierarchies – exhibition, education, support, management and so on. And more on instituting – in the ancient sense of the word – of founding and supporting. On instituting creative practice. So, we started to play, risk, cooperate, research and rapidly prototype. Not only exhibitions and research projects, but ourselves. Some values were lost – which is always painful, and yet others were produced. And those most relevant maintained, nurtured and cherished. We learnt to invest, long-term, without regard for an interested return. And that’s how we devolved locally, and networked globally. We’ve had some failures; either exhibitions couldn’t convene the necessary resources, or we made mistakes. But as an immanent institution, most experiences were productive. Ahm ……… Not sure if that jump-cut thread answered your query …………

MS CHAN
Sort of …..

AYAN
The short answer could be that artists have transformed Moderna, and we in turn transformed them.

MS CHAN
Ok, but that last sound-bit is rather banal.
Although, the thread’s not uninteresting.

AYAN
Ironically, our playful devolution of Moderna 2.0 reanimated the historical collection displayed in version 1.0. We freed art-artefacts from their function, of ‘recounting’ the history of 20th Century Art; however alternative, discontinuous, or full of omissions we imagine that thread to be. And once free, they engaged with real-time discursive transactions. They became live again, contested nodes in competing transactions of unsettled bodies of knowledge.

MS CHAN
Um ………, I’m not sure I’m following this ………….
As time is running out, and there’s so much to cover. I just wonder if you could mention ……
Could you recall, even briefly, some beacon exhibitions. Like Transactional Aesthetics, or the Ecology of Fear.

AYAN
Rädslans ekologi, or the Ecology of Fear was timely, given the viral pandemic throughout DNA storage – so many systems were compromised; and the various ‘wars’ that were being waged, against difference, material resources, energy, and public attention ……..
And I guess the same for Transactional Aesthetics. It was the right moment to be participating in the production of local social enterprise and well-being initiatives ……

MS CHAN
Could you just mention the legendary ARARAT, Alternative Research in Architecture, Resources, Art and Technology exhibited at Moderna in 1976, which you revisited on its 50th anniversary in 2’26. From composite I can see archive materials. They’re present.

AYAN
There’s not much to add. Obviously the first version of ARARAT explored appropriate local technologies for buildings and urban systems – using sustainable resources. In 1976, this was the beginning of our understanding of a global ecology, and of the finite nature of mineral resources; especially carbon. Given our population reached 8bn in 2’26 it was vital to revisit the exhibition. To somehow, take stock … The first shock was that so little of the initial exhibition was recoverable – we invested in reconstruction and archival research – it’s all Public Domain composite now. And the second, was the realisation that so little of the source exhibition had had any real effect. We suspect a serious flaw in the exhibitionary form.

MS CHAN
The lack of resources from those early exhibitions is always disheartening. It’s hard to imagine a time before, even rudimentary Public Domain meshworks, embedded devices, and semantic interfaces.

AYAN
Well, one of the great outcomes of the Moderna Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2’08, is that they revisited and reflected on the preceding fifty years. We recently found shadow-traces for a Moderna History book. And for reasons that are not entirely clear, it remained unpublished during the Jubilee celebrations – so, we intend to issue a centenary heritage publication. We’ll be sure to send you a copy.

MS CHAN
I see we have overrun, I’m so sorry. I just wonder before we disconnect, what is Moderna re-sourcing in the near future?

AYAN
Well, for us, there are some beautiful assemblies emerging. Real-time consensus is moving from a local to regional scale. Triangle in the African Multitude is distributing amazing regenerative medical technologies. Renewable energy has moved through the 74 % threshold. Um ….. live, almost retro, music performance is popular again. Nano-technology has come of age, and 1:1 molecular replication will soon be enabled, linked to scanning technology hardwired to the manufactories in the Asian network. Outside of heritage, singularity will be overwritten by difference.
Now that’s exciting!

MS CHAN
Exciting indeed! Thank you so much Ayan. It’s been a privilege, really. Enjoy the centenary celebrations, we’ll all be there with you in spirit.
Zai Jian, goodbye.

AYAN
Thank you Ms Chan.
Goodbye, zai jian, hejdå.

The project was a collaboration with Marysia Lewandowska, commissioned by Moderna Museet Stockholm, Sweden, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 2008.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien unter http://www.neilcummings.com/content/museum-futures-script-0 [4.4.2013].