NEWSgrist: *DELVE… 'Ready for War'* Vol.4, no.3 (Feb. 10, 2003)
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NEWSgrist
where spin is art
http://newsgrist.net
{bi-weekly news digest}
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Vol. 4, no.3 (Feb. 10, 2003)
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CONTENTS:
- *Splash* DELVE - the Transportation Issue
- *Quote/s* Art Spiegelman; Laura Bush's poetry; Guernica
- *Url/s* Elout De Kok; CABINET; Errata Erratum
- *On Target* Barry Blinderman acts locally in Normal Illinois
- *All's Fair?* Mirapaul on <wartime> activism
- *Babel Territories* Architectural layers of conflict
- *The Non-Conformist* Spiegelman quits The New Yorker
- *Shock + Awe* Laura Bush cancels poetry symposium
- *Mapping Empire* Julian LaVerdiere looks up, again
- *Book Grist* Manuel DeLanda's Intensive Science
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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net
'fighter bomber' by renee schacht
'colorado municipal airports' by kevin cooley
featured in
DELVE Vol.1, no.2 (WINTER 2002)
THE TRANSPORTATION ISSUE
http://www.delvemagazine.com
produced by paul lombardi , new york city
splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Lombardi.html
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*Quote/s*
"Our media choose to ignore news that in the rest of the world
receives wide prominence; if it were not for the Internet, even
my view of the world would be extremely limited."
– Art Spiegelman (see *The Non-Conformist* below)
"While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all
Americans to express their opinions," Ms. Rodriguez said
today," she, too, has opinions, and believes that it would be
inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event
into a political forum."
(see *Shock + Awe* below)
"Mr. Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq
surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men,
children, bulls and horses."
–Maureen Dowd, NYTimes 2/5/03: "Powell Without Picasso"
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/05/opinion/05DOWD.html
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*Url/s*
1) Self Portrait by Elout De Kok
http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/wartime/gow06.html
(produced for <wartime> project - see *All's Fair?* below)
2) Announcing the web launch for CABINET MAGAZINE
A Quarterly Magazine of Arts & Culture
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org
(see excerpt in *Babel Territories* below)
3) Errata Erratum @ LA MOCA
http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=pmiller
…allows you to create your own remix via Marcel Duchamp and
Paul D. Miller [DJ Spooky] by manipulating rotoreliefs by
Duchamp and tags by Miller…
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*On Target*
"READY FOR WAR" IN ILLINOIS
Artnet Mag Jan 29, 2003
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/artnetnews2/artnetnews1-29-03.asp
The University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal,
Ill., has put out a "call for entries" for a show titled "Ready for
War," Feb. 18-Mar. 18, 2003. Among the suggested targets for
this esthetic combat are "terrorism, poverty, environmental
protection, privacy, racism, civil liberties, drugs and reproduct-
ive rights." All works are accepted; high-tech artists must
provide their own equipment. The show is "my way of 'acting
locally'," said gallery director Barry Blinderman, "offering as
many artists as possible a forum for expressing their sentiments
about the grave state our country is in at the moment." The
show is to be posted on the gallery website
http://www.orat.ilstu.edu/cfa/galleries/
and exhibited in the museum; for more info, contact [email protected]
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*All's Fair?*
Political Points in the World's Fair of Technology
By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL
NYTimes - ARTS ONLINE Jan. 3, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/03/arts/design/03ARTS.html
Guernica," Picasso's great antiwar painting, was first shown at
the 1937 World's Fair in Paris. More than 31 million people
attended. Russell Martin, author of a recent book about
"Guernica," said in a telephone interview, "In an age that was
not given to instant communication, it was a way in which the
painting very soon after its creation was able to be seen by, for
its time, a gigantic number of people.'`
Today artists with a political point to make merely put their work
on the Internet, which is truly a world's fair of technology and on
occasion compelling art. Andrew Forbes, an Internet artist in
London, has even opened a virtual gallery for some of these
projects. In November, with talk of an attack on Iraq continuing,
Mr. Forbes issued a public call on the Internet for digital
artworks created in reaction to past, present and future wars.
He has received 83 projects from around the globe. He exhibits
them on the Wartime Project, a Web site that he put online last
month at http://offline.area3.net/wartime
With only a month or two to create their works, most artists
submitted what might be deemed miniatures: simple interactive
scenes, small animations or short videos. As one would expect
from an open-call project, the quality of the works varies widely.
Still with its variations on a theme, Wartime provides a snapshot
of the ways that digital artists approach the Internet as a
creative medium.
In a telephone interview from his studio in the Brixton neighbor-
hood in South London, Mr. Forbes said, "Wartime was never
designed to be specifically against the war against Iraq." Yet
many contributors have focused on the imminent attack and pro-
duced work that is closer to being propaganda than effective art.
And given the overuse of images of jet fighters, exploding bombs
and wounded victims, clumsy propaganda at that.
Mr. Forbes said the site's goal was "to get young people who
haven't experienced war to think about its destructiveness."
From the high level of response he appears to have succeeded.
But Mr. Forbes also has a cultural agenda. Although outsiders
might view the Internet-art world as a small, secret society, its
insiders are familiar with all the major players and their essential
artworks.
So by encouraging everyone to submit work, Mr. Forbes said, he
hopes to extend the genre's borders beyond the usual suspects.
"I'm kind of fed up with the in-ness of the Net-art world," he
said. Josephine Bosma, a critic in the Netherlands, said
Wartime's openness to submissions could "lead to the discovery
of new artists outside the now-institutionalized Net-art world."
New faces are responsible for some of the site's better works.
For instance Miguel Mendoza, a Mexican artist, contributed an
interactive scene that is surreal. Within a post-nuclear
landscape, the viewer is encircled by mushroom clouds. As an
onscreen button is repeatedly clicked, the clouds are trans-
formed into a bicycling herd of skeletons with disturbing grins.
Elout de Kok, a Dutch artist, contributed an animated self-
portrait that is dynamically "painted" on a grid of small squares.
As the viewer's cursor moves across the screen, Mr. de Kok's
head is revealed in silhouette. A self-portrait is not an obvious
choice for a site about war. But Mr. de Kok explained that the
software generating his image had been programmed so that
each square must do battle to determine if it will be black, white
or gray.
Mr. Martin, author of "Picasso's War: The Destruction of
Guernica and the Masterpiece that Changed the World" (Dutton,
2002), said the actual painting's "nonspecificity with regard to
the bombing of that town at that time allowed its message to be
readily universalized." And in general Wartime's most success-
ful works are those that are not linked to a particular conflict.
Several works on the site adapt the language of technology to
comment on war. For instance the veteran digital artists Auriea
Harvey and Michael Samyn, identified on the site as E8Z!,
created the gamelike "Aliens." In this amusingly subversive
work a blue-suited businessman is threatened by advancing
rows of sheiks. As soon as the viewer shoots at the aliens,
though, the game ends. The artists have distilled the entire
computer-game experience into a single click. The only way to
win is not to play.
Similarly "System," a clever piece by the British artist Yara
Elsherbini, purports to be the White House version of a
Microsoft operating system for a computer. So the software is
plagued with politically oriented error messages.
Parodies of Microsoft products seem rather retro now, and many
of the site's works will feel familiar to Net-art insiders. Mr.
Forbes said he was pleased that Wartime had "drawn in people
who are pretty new to the medium and don't know the back-
ground to the development of Net art." As a result, though, the
overall site suffers from a certain navet. The most exciting
digital artworks made in the last several years have been those
that rely upon the Internet for their existence, not stand-alone
pieces. While it is true, as Mr. Forbes asserted, that Wartime
could not have been assembled without the Internet, the
majority of its contributions could just as easily be published on
a CD-ROM or projected in a movie theater.
This is not the first time that current events have inspired an
online collection of digital art. In 1999 the Balkan conflict
prompted the German artist Reiner Strasser to open Weak Blood,
which included more than 50 topical works. The site remains
online at http://netartefact.de/weakblood Several small sites
also appeared after 9/11.
Mr. Forbes said he did not know if the Wartime site's virtual art
would lead to actual political action. Peter Weibel, on the other
hand, says it might.
Mr. Weibel is director of the Center for Art and Media Tech-
nology in Karlsruhe, Germany, as well as co-curator of "M_Ars:
Art and War," an exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria.
One of the questions that the controversial show poses is
whether art can be a platform for brutality as well as for human-
itarian ideals.
But Mr. Weibel suggested that virtual art lends itself to ex-
pressions of compassion. Because the Internet's fluidity
encourages people to explore other points of view, positions do
not harden and become contentious. He said, "It could be a
positive space for artists and citizens to fight against war."
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*Babel Territories*
The Wall and the Eye: An Interview with Eyal Weizman
Jeffrey Kastner & Sina Najafi [excerpted]
CABINET MAGAZINE - Issue 9 Winter 2002/03
full article:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/wall.php
[Eyal Weizman is an architect, based in Tel-Aviv and London,
who has conducted research on behalf of the human rights or-
ganization B'tselem on the planning aspects of the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank. Weizman is currently developing
his doctoral thesis "The Politics of Verticality: Architecture
and Occupation in the West Bank" into a TV documentary film
and a book to be published next year.]
A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, a
catalogue and exhibition originally created by Israeli architects
Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman as their country's official entry to
the 2002 World Congress of Architecture in Berlin, is a ground-
breaking examination of the character of building, planning, and
community in the West Bank. Abruptly cancelled last summer on
the eve of the Congress by its commissioning organization, the
Israel Association of United Architects, the project has stirred
strong opinions in Israel. Although it was dismissed by the
association's president as "one-sided political propaganda," A
Civilian Occupation was praised as a "a rare work in its power
and importance for the community of architects and town
planners in Israel" by the daily newspaper Ha'aretz. Since the
cancellation, Segal and Weizman have found other forums for the
work they produced: the catalog is being reprinted by Babel
Press in Tel Aviv and a version of the exhibition will be be
mounted at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, at
the end of January and in the exhibition "Territories" at Kunst-
Werke, Berlin, in May 2003.
In the following interview, Weizman, a partner in Tel Aviv-based
Rafi Segal/Eyal Weizman Architects, discusses both the natural
and built environment of the West Bank - from the social, political,
and religious history of the area to issues of photography and
mapping to concepts of strategic building forms and settlement
growth patterns. He also asks pointed ethical questions about
Israeli architectural and planning practice and considerations of
human rights, which he says are central to the research he and
Segal continue to conduct. Weizman spoke by phone to Jeffrey
Kastner and Sina Najafi from Haifa, Israel, in October 2002.
Cabinet: Your catalogue cites a 1984 publication by the Israeli
Ministry of Housing that sets guidelines for the construction of
new settlements in the mountain regions of the West Bank. It's
very concrete: it proposes an inner ring and an outer ring of
houses, discusses the idea of offering the maximal amount of
views to the maximum number of settlers, which obviously also
allows a maximum amount of surveillance of the Palestinian
population beneath, and so on. This is interesting in light of the
interview in your catalogue with the planner and architect
Thomas Leitersdorf about towns he has built in the West Bank,
where you get a sense that sometimes the government offers no
guideline other than "We need a town built here," and the
architect is completely left on his own to do whatever he wants.
So we have this severe set of guidelines versus no guidelines at
all, apparently at the same time.
Eyal Weizman: When Leitersdorf built Ma'ale Edumim in 1977
-78 he was in effect setting the guidelines. Ma'ale Edumim was
essential in creating a benchmark standard for building settle-
ments. In general, Israeli architects and planners had little
experience of building in mountainous regions. Before the
occupation, the Israeli population was located mainly in the
valleys, except in Haifa, which is a mountain city, and in
Jerusalem. The typical new Israeli settlements were the kibbutz
and the moshav, cooperative agricultural and pioneering
settlements built mainly on the fertile plains. It is only after the
occupation, and following the political changes in 1977, that
the mountain enters the public imagination - people write songs
about the mountain, talk about it, lecture on it, research it.
Architects were starting to think about the mountain too, but
they had little experience of building there. So this publication
by the Ministry of Housing was incredibly important because it
ollected different precedents and for the first time set guidelines
for how to build in the mountains. The "mountain" is important in
understanding the ideological transition in Israel after 1977,
when a messianic religious discourse entered the political
debate with the right wing coming to power. Along with it came
a decreasing emphasis on agricultural pioneering and its re-
placement with a new typology of the religious suburb, located
on mountaintops and without agricultural space to cultivate.
[snip!] full article:
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/9/wall.php
[…]
C: You have written that the geometry of the occupation can only
be understood in three dimensions. There are questions of the
underground sewage, archaeology, tunnels, the water reservoirs,
the air space above, and so on. These are issues that came up in
the peace talks, of course. But the map you have produced is two
-dimensional. What would it mean to map this conflict three-
dimensionally? It's interesting to look at how, for example, an
Israeli highway passes over a Palestinian road or look at how the
tunnels intersect.
EW: I am currently working on a computer-based interactive
three-dimensional map of the West Bank with my colleague,
Reed Kram. The over-complication of the surface as shown on
our map-the fact that it's no longer possible to draw a continuous
line that separates Palestinians from Israelis-made clear to the
negotiating parties during the peace process that a two-
dimensional solution is no longer possible. Shimon Peres's Oslo
proposal was to give the Palestinians limited sovereignty on the
land but to retain Israeli sovereignty of the subsoil and the air
over it. So you have a kind of sandwich-Israel, Palestine, Israel-
across the vertical dimension. Peace technicians-the people
who are always drawing new maps for a solution-arrive at
completely insane proposals for solving the problem of inter-
national boundaries in three dimensions. And when you have
Jewish enclaves in Palestinian territory, you have to build either
tunnels or bridges that connect them to each other. Both typo-
logies were experimented with and proposed throughout neg-
otiations. The most obvious is the proposed safe passage
between the West Bank and Gaza that has a Palestinian road
with Palestinian sovereignty that goes over Israel's sovereign
territory-with the international boundary being the thermo-
dynamic joint between the column and the road. We get into
incredibly bizarre and dystopian solutions. Jerusalem itself,
according to the Clinton plan, would have had 64 kilometers of
walls and 40 bridges and tunnels connecting the enclaves to
each other. Imagine an urban environment that operates like
that. It would make L.A.'s highway system look flat. This is the
total collapse of the idea of territory as produced by maps.
Nationalism and mapmaking were always bound together. You
had a map and you drew a boundary. But what you see in the
West Bank is that sovereign relations are attempting to play
themselves out three-dimensionally. And that is obviously an
unworkable absurdity.
We do not think that there is a viable "design solution" to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The perfect line that brilliantly
weaves itself through the terrain and answers in its path both
national demands, the one line that everybody from Ben Gurion
to Barak was looking for, simply does not exist. Nor does it
exist in these three-dimensional boundary contortions. These
just accentuate the exhaustion and the frustration of all possible
lines on the two-dimensional plane. This territorial conflict is
such that it must be addressed in a non-territorial and thus
non-formal way. If you think of similar conflicts between a
settling nation and a native nation, there is no historical
precedent for the idea of partition. We think that the way to
manage this conflict is not through the creation of another
sovereign state but within the realm of law. Instead of thinking
of two states side by side, something that our research shows is
impossible without integration on the planning and infrastructure
level, we would like to propose the idea of a simultaneous
overlap: two states that are not lying side by side but overlap
legally across the same territory. This obviously entails a new
definition of national sovereignty, one in which a choice of more
than one citizenship is available for the same area.
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*The Non-Conformist*
Interview with Art Spiegelman
CORRIERE DELLA SERRA, January 9, 2003
as noted in France Culture:
http://216.239.39.100/search?qEche:B2AOcbtGJDgC:www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-culture2/revuepresse/index.php+art+spiegelman,+Corriere+della+Sera&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
and Di Arte:
http://216.239.39.100/search?qEche:B2AOcbtGJDgC:www.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-culture2/revuepresse/index.php+art+spiegelman,+Corriere+della+Sera&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
It was termed "a divorce of historic proportions," of the kind that
leaves a deep cultural mark, and gives rise to debate that
continues for months. Art Spiegelman, the legendary New York
illustrator who for ten full years put his name to the most pro-
vocative and incisive covers of the New Yorker, has decided to
leave the prestigious magazine, in opposition (protest) to what
he calls "the widespread conformism of the mass media in the
Bush era."
"The decision to leave was mine alone," the author of Maus, the
saga of Jewish mice exterminated by Nazi cats that won him the
Pulitzer Prize (the first given to a comic book), explained in an
interview with the Corriere della Sera; "the director of the New
Yorker, David Remnick, was shocked when I announced my
resignation. He attempted to dissuade me. But I told him that
the kind of work that I'm now interested in doing is not suited to
the present tone of the New Yorker. And, seeing that we are
living in extremely dangerous times, I don't feel like stooping to
compromise."
(Q) Do you also consider yourself a victim of Sept. 11?
Exactly so. From the time that the Towers fell, it seems as if
I've been living in internal exile, or like a political dissident
confined to an island. I no longer feel in tune (agreement) with
American culture, especially now that the entire media has
become conservative and tremendously timid. Unfortunately,
even the New Yorker has not escaped this trend: Remnick does
not feel up (able) to accept the challenge, while, on the contrary,
I am more and more inclined to provocation.
(Q) What kind of provocation?
I am working on the sixth installment of my new strip, "In the
shadow of no tower," inspired both by memories of Sept. 11 – on
that day, I had just left my apt, a few steps from the tragedy -
and a present in which one feels equally threatened by both Bush
and Osama. The series was commissioned by the German news-
paper Die Zeit, but here in the USA, only the Jewish magazine
The Forward has agreed to publish it.
(Q) Did you feel snubbed by the refusal of the New Yorker to
publish it?
Not at all. I knew from the beginning that the tone and content
of the strip – what,at this point in time, is of most concern to
me–were not in harmony with those of the New Yorker. A
wonderful magazine, mind you, with delightful and refined covers,
but also incredibly deferential (obsequious) to the present
administration. If I were content to draw harmless strips about
skateboarding and shopping in Manhattan, there would have
been no problem; but, now, my inner life is inflamed with much
different issues.
(Q) For what do you reproach the New Yorker?
For marching to the same beat as the NYT and all the other
great American media that don't criticize the government for fear
that the administration will take revenge by blocking their
access to sources and information. Mass media today is in the
hands of a limited group of extremely wealthy owners whose
interests don't coincide at all with those of the average soul
living in a country (USA) where the gap between rich and poor is
now unbridgeable. In this context, all criticism of the admin-
istration is automatically branded unpatriotic and un-American.
Our media choose to ignore news that in the rest of the world
receives wide prominence; if it were not for the Internet, even
my view of the world would be extremely limited.
(Q) Then the Bush revolution has triumphed?
Yes. In Reagan's time, "liberal" was a dirty word and to be
accused of such an offense was an insult. In the Bush jr. era, the
radical right so overwhelmingly dominates the debate that the
democrats have all had to move to the right just to be able to
continue the conversation.
(Q) Will the New Yorker be the same without Spiegelman?
The New Yorker existed long before I came on board. The great
majority of the readers who adore the warm and relaxing bath of
their accustomed New Yorker (probably, in English, a con-
temptuous illusion to the hot tub) were very upset by the "shock
treatment" of my covers. These readers will feel more at ease
with the calm and subdued (submissive) New Yorker of the
tradition which from the Twenties mixed intelligence, sophistica-
tion, snobbery, and complaisance with the status quo. Every
time that I put pencil to paper, I was flooded with letters of
protest.
(Q) Which of your works caused the most controversy?
The cover with the atomic bomb issued on the 4th of July. The
one from last Thanksgiving where turkeys fell from military
aircraft. The only one universally well-received was the Sept. 24
cover with the Twin Towers in two-toned black. The censorship
of my work began as soon as I first set foot in the magazine,
long before the 9th of September.
(Q) What kind of censorship?
Large and small. For the Thanksgiving cover with turkeys
dropped in the place of bombs, I chose the title "Operation
Enduring Turkey" to mimic "Operation Enduring Freedom" then
begun by America in Afghanistan. But David Remnick forced me
to change the title.
(Q) Is it possible that the media is more reactionary than their
readers?
I don't think so at all, not after reading in the polls that George
W. Bush is the most admired man in America. The world I see is
very different from what they see. Those who think like me are
condemned to the margins because the critical alternative press
of the Vietnam War era no longer exists. The NYT chose to
remain silent about the enormous protest marches that took
place during the summer; and the readers of The Nation, the
only newspaper with any guts, are at most 50 thousand: nothing
in a country as large as ours.
(Q) What does your wife Francoise Mouly, the artistic director of
the New Yorker, think of all this.
She thinks that I've left her at the New Yorker as a hostage, but
I don't think she wants to follow my example. Sometimes, I think
I would like to emigrate to Europe; and seeing that in America
they won't even let me smoke, the temptation is very great.
Q) Your plans after the New Yorker
In May, at the Nuage Gallery in Milano, there will be an exhibi-
tion that covers my ten years at the New Yorker. Ten is a better
number than eleven and, who knows, perhaps I left the magazine
simply because it better suited the book and catalog that
accompany the exhibition.
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*Shock + Awe*
Laura Bush Cancels Symposium on
"Poetry and the American Voice"
Rather than Hear Poems which Speak Out Against the War
NYFA Current - Weekly Arts News - Feb 4, 2003
http://www.nyfa.org/nyfa_current.asp?id5&fid=6&sid#news2
"And it's madness
to ask poets to celebrate,
when people can't even
breathe deeply
for fear of war's imminence" – Gregory Orr, "refusing"
PORT TOWNSEND, WA; WASHINGTON, DC – On January 19,
Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press, poet Sam Hamill -
who had received an invitation from First Lady Laura Bush to
attend a poetry Symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice"
scheduled for February 12, 2003 – responded by circulating an
email to poets around the world.
He wrote that "Only the day before I had read a lengthy report
on George Bush's proposed 'Shock and Awe' attack on Iraq,
calling for saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing
of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians. I
believe the only legitimate response to such a morally bankrupt
and unconscionable idea is to reconstitute a Poets Against the
War movement like the one organized to speak out against the
war in Vietnam."
Asking poets to speak up "for the conscience of our country"
Hamill called for poems to be included in an anthology which he
would present to the White House on the afternoon of the Poetry
Symposium.
"Please join me in making February 12 a day when the White
House can truly hear the voices of American poets," he
requested. Over 2,000 poets – including Hayden Carruth,
Yusef Komunyakaa, W.S. Merwin, Philip Levine, Grace Paley,
Galway Kinnell, Gregory Orr, Marilyn Hacker, John Balaban,
Ursula K. Le Guin, and Adrienne Rich – sent poems to Hamill in
response to his call.
But their works will not be heard at the White House. Laura Bush
has postponed the symposium on the "Poetry and the American
Voice", whch had a focus on Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes
and Walt Whitman.
"While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all
Americans to express their opinions, she, too, has opinions, and
believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to
be a literary event into a political forum." the NEW YORK TIMES
quotes Noelia Rodriguez, the first lady's press secretary, as
saying.
A website – http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org – has been set
up and plans "to publish every poem by every poet who wishes to
contribute as a public witness for peace."
"The war is ours, now, here, it is our republic
facing its own betraying terror.
And how we tell the story is forever after,"
Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in "American Wars," the poem she sent
Sam Hamill to be presented at the White House symposium.
ARGUMENTS + DIFFERING OPINIONS:
"With Antiwar Poetry Set, Mrs. Bush Postpones Event"
By Elisabeth Bumiller, NYTIMES 1/31/03:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/politics/31POET.html
"A Song of Themselves"
By LEONARD GARMENT, NYTimes 2/08/03:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/08/opinion/08GARM.html?pagewanted=1
LINKS:
THE ACADEMY OF AMERICAN POETS – http://www.poets.org
COPPER CANYON PRESS – http://www.coppercanyonpress.org
POETSAGAINSTTHEWAR.ORG – http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org
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*Mapping Empire*
After Ground Zero: The Idea, Again, Is to Look Up
By ANN WILSON LLOYD
NYTimes, Jan 12, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/arts/design/12LLOY.html?ex43401086&ei=1&en9bc1a496268058c
NORTH MIAMI, Fla. "TRIBUTE IN LIGHT," the twin high-
intensity beams that pierced the night sky near ground zero in
Lower Manhattan for a month last spring, was partly the work of
the New York-based sculptor and conceptual artist Julian
LaVerdiere. The light shafts were seen both as ghostly
replications of the fallen towers and as votives for the victims.
For Mr. LaVerdiere, the temporary memorial was also a tough
act to follow.
"Being part of that effort was such an extraordinary experience,"
Mr. LaVerdiere said here recently. "Most of us were feeling
pretty useless in the face of what had taken place there; finding
a way to be involved was incredibly fulfilling. But I don't think of
`Tribute in Light' so much as an art project as a situational
gesture. And it was difficult to come to terms with what my next
gesture would be."
Mr. LaVerdiere did come up with new work, however, and three
groups of sculptures and accompanying prints are currently on
view in his first solo museum show, "Time Trial," at the Museum
of Contemporary Art here. Napoleonic symbols, S.U.V.'s and
miners' lanterns figure into the artist's musings on events since
Sept. 11, 2001, but the centerpiece of the show, a 300-square
-foot black, circular canopy called "Firmament: Upon Which
Time Has No Mark by Definition," delivers the most punch.
The canopy, made of high-tech billboard fabric suspended on
aluminum trusswork, displays a map of the globe as it is drawn
on the United Nations emblem. Radiating outward from the
center are jagged lines of red electroluminescent cable that
blink in a clockwise movement around the map. They are
synchronized to a soundtrack blending sci-fi creepiness with
the urgency of a ticking time bomb.
Beyond their theatricality, the sound and lights have conceptual
substance. The spacey, ringing tones are emanations from the
NIST-7, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's
seventh-generation cesium atomic clock (used to calibrate
global positioning systems and intercontinental ballistic
missiles), which Mr. LaVerdiere asked the institute to record for
him. The ominous ticking comes from the Department of
Horology at the Royal Observatory and National Maritime
Museum in Greenwich, England, where the first successful
longitude clock, the H-4, built by Sir John Harrison in 1760, is
kept. Mr. LaVerdiere persuaded the observatory to wind the H-4
and send him a recording of it.
The two sounds were mixed and programmed to the blinking
light cycle by Paul D. Miller, the sound and conceptual artist
also known as DJ Spooky. For help with the map, Mr. LaVerdiere
sought out Miklos Pinther, chief cartographer at the United
Nations, where the piece will also be shown sometime this
spring. Mr. LaVerdiere says the courage to seek such high-
level, international collaborations came from his "Tribute in
Light" experience. "Before, I would never have had the chutzpah
to ask the Royal Observatory to wind and record the H-4," he
said.
"This was the first clock with an escarpment stable enough to
work at sea, to make global navigation possible and thus world
trade," he added. "We didn't really need time until trade became
important." The blinking lines, meanwhile, mark the time zones.
To Mr. LaVerdiere, they embody the emotional and political
content of time, while the timekeeping sounds represent the
march of imperialism.
Gesturing toward the map, he explained: "One would assume
time zones would be subject to political borders and longitude.
But China, for instance, demands one time zone. The same
amount of territory across the U.S., encompassing Hawaii,
contains six. Also, one would assume most of Southeast Asia to
be one time zone, but regions there insist on increments of half-
hour zones. And the sun never sets in the Arctic Circle, so
theoretically it could be whatever time one wants." Pointing to
some small red circles in the map's center, he added, "But these
little red circles are military bases nationalistic outposts that
can call their own time."
Typically, Mr. LaVerdiere's work provokes layered, and
sometimes delayed, responses, said Bonnie Clearwater, director
and chief curator of the museum. "Even images that seem
completely objective, like maps, are loaded with social and
political meaning," she said. "I equate the experience to
walking into a spectacular space like Grand Central Terminal.
The first impression is powerful and breathtaking. It's only when
we look closer at the images that we begin to analyze them as
symbols of power."
Mr. LaVerdiere added: "In the past year, perhaps along with
other Americans, I've started paying a lot more attention to the
balance of global power, and meditating on the map itself as a
formal exercise. It's helped me get a better grip on how perverse
things actually are. We think we are some grand democracy, but
we are an empire. I'm trying to understand what being an empire
actually means."
[Ann Wilson's Lloyd's most recent article for Arts & Leisure was
about M.I.T's contemporary-art program.]
============================
============================
*Book Grist*
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy
by Manuel Delanda
Continuum Pub Group; (May 2002)
ISBN: 0826456235
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0826456235/qid43684914/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-8261811-8510338?v=glance&s=books
"… cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of
today's science wars. Manuel DeLanda does what the growing
host of Deleuzians have failed to do - he makes sense of
Deleuze for both analytic and continental thought, for both
science and philosophy."
At the start of the 21st Century, Gilles Deleuze is now regarded
as the most radical and influential of contemporary philosophers.
Yet his work is widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. Here,
Manuel DeLanda makes sense of Deleuze for both analytic and
continental thought, for both science and philosophy. DeLanda
focuses on the intersection of philosophy and science,
explaining how Deleuze's system of thought is fundamental to
a proper understanding of contemporary science – from self-
organization to non-linear dynamics to complexity theory.
============================
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NEWSgrist: *DELVE... 'Ready for War'* Vol.4, no.3 (Feb. 10, 2003) (fwd)
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Type: discussion