diversions
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Jay McInnerney when it mentions
“Mine is not an autonomous imagination”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Roland Barthes when it mentions
“a frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt when it mentions
“art cannot be dissociated from the conditions of its production and distribution”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Pierre Huyghe when it mentions
“this is the time of the storyteller rather than the historian”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Julietta Aranda when it mentions
“circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of postproducing, launching, and accelerating it. It is about the public relations of images across social networks, about advertisement and alienation”.
Peter Lemmens’ works paraphrase Yuk Hui when it mentions
“conventional notions of originality, authenticity, objecthood, narrative, and style were supplanted by appropriation, duplication, distribution, juxtaposition, and randomness”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Jacques Rancière when it mentions
“the relationship between art and politics is not a passage from fiction to reality, but a relationship between two ways of making a fiction”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Fabrice Grinda when it mentions
“a long tail model may lead to improvement in a society’s level of culture”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases somebody he can’t remember when it mentions
“the horror of Groundhog Day is not being stuck in today, but knowing the future is set”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Max Haiven when it mentions
“the appearance of ‘creativity’ as the partner of destruction here is no accident”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Lisa Gitelman when it mentions
“how are [raw] data variously “cooked” within the varied circumstances of their collection, storage, and transmission?”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Marcel Broodthaers when it mentions
“the definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Max Haiven when it mentions
“wealth is generated not by seeing the greater narrative in the market, but by spinning out new metaphors and abandoning them once they have done their work. The system is held together not by internal coherence, but by sheer momentum”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Peter Lamarque and Stein Hauom Olsen when it mentions
“the structures of narrative impose some kind of barrier between language and fact; rather than being directly ‘mirrored’, the facts, as represented in narrative, are filtered through layers of linguistic artifice”.
Peter Lemmens’ work paraphrases Miriam Rasch when it mentions
“when you believe that the future emerges mechanically from the past… the idea that the world is a conglomerate of predictable algorithms… allows no deviating options”.
Let’s look at the
levels for their social, political, economical and artistic capacities. How to organize one self responsibly? Let’s contaminate the question of “what to do?” with the question of “
”. While working on
,
, DIY, and marginal practices, let’s demarcate not only what can be done differently, but what can be done
. Conflict and development might not be about resolution, but a permanent, fragile mode of production. Amateurism might not be a lack of competence. Let’s make
works. Let’s formulate some
or some
.
loading
operational
Operational is a strange word. It could be logistic, methodological, organizing, structural, … It involves production as well as distribution. It’s pre- and/or post. It’s frontend and/or backend technologies. From dark infrastructures to glowing screens.
how to do?
Just another way to say that looking at architectures is interesting. Let’s look at methods to do things, and how it connects to that what is done. It’s discourse, it’s meta-, it’s accountability, and/or the old adage that reminds us of ‘it ain’t what you do, but the way that you do it.” Let’s try out advanced ways of being aware of the conditions we’re working in, while retaining critical attention. The romantic idea that this will automatically seep into the work and will be communicated through the work is rejected here. Even more... the notion that the work should communicate this clearly or else is a failure is even more rejected. These are simultaneous movements, that are reciprocal. One is no representation of the other, one is not the explanation to the other. This is not a radical position. It’s a setting that allows site specific interaction. A site specificity that is not limited to the interplay between space and work, but includes the interplay between the WHAT and the HOW.
distribution
Marcel Broodthaers might have said: “The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution.”
narrativity
There might be a preference of technology for immateriality in distribution. There’s a theory that says that faster-than-light speeds are achievable if mass and weight approaches zero. Connecting such predilection with dominant types of future thinking, derivatives, predictions, postponement, replaceability asked for a look at data and/or information. This seemed to favour and/or exponentially produce a certain kind of information. Information that was formatted as double narratives: the frontend and the backend. Let’s point at the grasp these narratives hold over a data and information system.Let’s propose however that in order for our current amount of data to be understandable at all, data distribution is no longer about information. It’s all about storytelling and narratives may be the dominant distributed currency.
simultaneously
Let’s not look for alternatives that simply replace the dominant narrative with a new dominant narrative. Let’s discuss bringing community and non-community together without resolving all into community. The proposal here could be: not to find new narratives to believe in. We might not need new narratives. Let’s not call out for new ghost stories. Maybe we can step away from content-providing new narratives and, in doing so, co-construct an infrastructure that allows narratives to shift meaningfully? It can be a way to break the mold in which these narratives are created. The proposal could be to find modes of denarrativizing what is presented and distributed in these infrastructures. Not to replace narratives with the narrative of bare facts, but with a critical modes of literacy towards our own narrative fallacies, to alter momentum, alter distribution, defy the average, dismantle narratives. It could be a way to address an essence of technology and redefine its backend darkness.
boring
The non-spectacular, the non-clickbait.
diversionary tactics
To be looking at something while thinking about something else. Narrativity should not be confused with the fact or fiction of information. Both are irrelevant and both can be equally and simultaneously narrativized and extracted. “Here it is no longer a case of establishing the truth about post-truth, or of cleaving fiction from fact, but making tangible the idea that truth and fiction are dynamic concepts that are both produced and productive.” As narratives function only as placeholders in a frontend clickbait-and-switch or backend tagging model, No amount of storytelling can change that. We might not need new narratives, whose quality is simply that they are new. We need to break down narratives and their structure. The question today might not be to predict what the next new narratives are, but how can we avoid getting stuck in fixed narratives? How can we allow narratives to break down and change? This emphasizes the refusal of a dominant structuring narrative. It’s an interrupted, incomplete narrative that loses itself.This interruption is a method to highlight discourse and not narration. Here it exchanges probability for possibility, it pollutes the dominant narrative with detours, speculations, derivatives, and multiplications. It is a diversionary tactic that continuously insists upon the idea of another space, another approach, another author and another criticality: a space of refusal. This refusal is in no way a radical alternative model, but an embedded, hard to maintain interaction. And it asks not only the what to do, but the how to do.
exit strategies
It is the method of the fringe and a vague center. It’s insisting on centrifugal thinking, without ever losing sight of its center. To visualize this: it is Alfred Hitchcock and the dolly zoom. The camera is moving away, while simultaneously zooming in. It brings confusion, but it also brings another kind of focus. During such a zoom, there is a continuous perspective distortion. The dolly zoom is commonly used to represent the sensation of vertigo, a “falling-away-from-oneself feeling” or a feeling of unreality, or to suggest that a character is undergoing a realization that causes them to reassess everything they had previously believed. It’s also a very cheesy cinematic effect, taught to be avoided at all cost. If we zoom in while backing up here, we can see a method of periphery and relentless decentralization. Slowness, inefficiency and abandoning ideas halfway, It’s about placeholders, simultaneity and paradox. In short, this methodology of fan fiction is an entry point disguised as an exit. And it is definitely a messy business. My thesis here is an attempt to describe that exit, even though the exit can never be completed, as in fan fiction. There is an autonomy that in its exit keeps pointing back at the center.