mezomian community?

Text by Hans Dieleman about our joint project

The Flowers of Sustainability at the Venice Biennale 2007

“Flowers of Sustainability” is a sympoïetic event that takes place on September 6, 2007. It is part of the "Joseph Beuys: Difesa della natura, the Living Sculpture, 100 days in Spazio Thetis, Venezia. The aim of the event is to move the discussion of sustainability from a very general and abstract opinion, to more direct prisms of interaction between people. In that, the experiment is in watching the move from problem calling to solutions, creations, or expressions. The main element is the “flower of sustainability”, a visual and textual aid to bring out reflexion and ideas on how to live with sustainability.(check out!!: www.cultura21.net/venezia.htm)

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10 flowers with a diameter of 1.2 m are placed on tables or on the floor, to allow for easy access to express the ideas of participating citizens. The petals are filled out by the citizens around the flowers, free to move between flowers, enter or step out as they feel. During the session, the petals of the flower (5-12 petals for each flower) will be filled, with words, pictures, symbols, or things.

The event is devided in two sessions and is guided by a simple written statement describing the intentions and thoughts of the team behind the event. At the centre of the first five flowers, a concept sets the initial evocation. For the second session, another set of flowers is laid out, this time with no concept at the centre – only the call for expression regarding cultures of sustainability. All 10 flowers will be filled out in 2 hours and posted on the walls of the Spazio Thetis.

The event is accompanied by two open calls for citizen participation, a postcard call and an internet call. A month before the event, 1000 postcards will be sent out, figuring an empty flower on one side and a call to fill it out on the other. These can be returned to the team, and will define the ‘citizen concept’ – or they may be brought to the event, where a poster will be constructed with all the postcards that come in. Simultaniously an internet call is launched. The internet call has the same purpose as the postcard call. For the internet call the postcard with its two sides can be downloaded from the internet and be returned to the website.

These calls mark the Venice event as being a singular experience, yet also part of a bigger movement, in which we invite citizens of other localities to take part and join the sympoïetic movement of the flowers of sustainability.

The final product is created by the open system of citizens, flowers, space, time, and everything that is brought onto the flower. The aim is to see how the flowers offer themselves as experimental roadmaps, for initiating projects, other exhibitions, new networks, and the sustensions of co-creation / sympoïesis. All 10 flowers will be photographed to include in future events and on the website www.sustainability.eu

This sympoïesis is conceived by:

Insa Winkler, artist, Oldenburg, creator of the Flowers of Sustainability (www.artecology.de)

Oleg Koefoed, philosopher, Gravitations Centre for Action Philosophy, Copenhagen (www.gravitations.org)

Hans Dieleman, sociologist of art and sustainability, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico-City (info Hans on this site)

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Flowers of Sustainability takes place within the context of a series of activities coordinated by CULTURA21, during a one day presence at the Venice Biennale, with the name: The Cultural Dimension of Sustainability; Towards an Ecology of Culture. See for more on the Cultura21 participation in Venice, the international page of Cultura21:(www.cultura21.net/venezia.htm) VIA THIS PAGE YOU CAN GET ACCES TO THE CULTURA21 WIKI PAGE SO PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PARTICIPATE!

Germans and German readers may want to read the German site of cultura21: (www.cultura21.org)

Hommage à JB

"In transparent, homeostatic or homeofluid systems, there is no longer a strategy of the Good vs the Evil, there is nothing but the Evil against the Evil - the strategy of worse. It is not even a matter of choice, we see it unfolding before our eyes, the homeopathic virulence."

idun.sandsgaard.dk

"So, the extreme phenomena serve, in their secret disorder, as prophylaxy through chaos against the extreme rise of order and transparency."

Jean Baudrillard: La transparence du mal. Paris, 1990.
My Translations.

A letter from a Copenhagen activist

This was sent to me this morning. I still shake a bit, because I know it is real, and because I know it's not over. What will happen next I don't know. All I know is that the world has changed a little once again. Changed back? No, i guess not. But changed. Another veil has been lifted, and maybe that is for the better. But for all the force of the nakedness of eyes seeing each other as they are at last, there is also the gap between eyes that do not see anything else, they do not feel the force of the space of virtuality between them that will allow for freedom. They see nothing but doubt, spite, anger, rage, dispair, and violence. Welcome to the 21st century. Thomas, the word is yours.

If you have no idea what this is all about, open your eyes and have a look at politics today, at indymedia.dk. Or look at the picture below and wonder what that may be.

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 Dear everyone else who cares.

My friend. I want to tell you about the events taking place in Copenhagen, right now. Please check out indymedia.dk , modkraft.dk , ungeren.dk or just indymedia.org to learn what is happening, because I'm not going to give you details. I am going to tell you another story.  These days, one particular image is ceaselessly haunting me.  

Christiania in the Virtual?

 

Arrhhh, in this country nothing ever statrs in the rain, at least not revolutions. And for the past three days it has been raining, so there are only tourists here, nice Italians with their cameras and laid back attitudes, but no revolutionaries active in the rain.

When the picture was taken, the grand project of Forny Christiania or renewing Christiania was still young, and the sun was still beating brightly on this 'fristad', home of one of the longest lasting social, political, and economic experiments in the world, probably, to be still alive, now, after 30 years of fighting and playing, of internal struggle and external doubt and curiosity and fascination with a place insisting upon their own rules, even when these started to be infected by the rules from the world that they has denounced. For so many years, the sign saying "You are now entering the European Union" swayed over the exit to Copenhagen, upon leaving this old naval and military zone, squatted and habitated illegally by the Christianites-to-be - reminding every visitor of the insistence upon illegality and autonomy when necessary.

A lot of these years have also been dominated by the non-legalisation of hash distribution, wars between drug dealers and the other habitants, or between fractions of drug dealers with one another. And fights with the police, again and again, today, they patrol the area permanently, 20-30 cops wait just on the outside, always ready to move in on anything remotely similar to trouble. The winds have turned, the political majority tipped some five years ago, and Christiania's move towards normalisation started once again, this time apparently for good. In two weeks, the official plan for the continuation of Christiania will be published, a plan that is the result of 3 years of negociations with the locals here, but it will not be met with happy faces all the same. The plan is not a detail regulation of the place, it's an archtiectural and city planning initiative, presenting mainly how to normalise the conditions of living and building in Christiania, where so many self-made houses have shot up in the past decades.

But the plan is still a turning point, like the harder police strategies have been since last year. So it has to be met by a counter-plan, a revolution from the inside, showing that Christiania is not only the frightened island of a few hundred people in exile from society, but also a source of change and experimentation, a place to begin the new and try out possibilities that could show the rest of society that the new is here, that other worlds are here, that history has not stopped or become a duel between fundamentalists on either sides of the religious divide.

So this is what it's all about, 100 days in Christiania under the title *Renew Christiania* - but will it? Will it be new? Some of the locals are optimists already, saying things have already started moving; that the very fact of inviting people in from outside the freetown to help create development from the inside, is already proof that nothing will be like it was before. Others say that it will be noting but 100 days of fun under the tent and in the old Grey Hall, fun, but no changem no revolution. Revolution will only happen if the Christianites want it, they say, and they don't want it. They want to be left alone, and they have been against the world for so long they don't know how to be for anything anymore.

Thus, for now, the revolution of Christiania is in the virtual. It is here, but it is not actual, it's in the sparks of joy and experimentation that show something else behind the smiles, a belief at least, that something else is possible, that it is still essential to be trying to move society beyond the stupidity of making moeny for buying bricks and tires and petrol and for keeping the enenmy outside. The next weeks will give a sign of the virtual unfolding or dying away here, under the tent and in the house, but also inside all the houses of the free town trying to wake up once again. And I will be here every now and then, palying along, trying to give them a small slice of revolution, and trying to bring some of the results to the outside world.

So far, revolution is virtual, and Renew Christiania is mostly food, drinks, lounging, dancing, music, and words. On Friday, the political salons will start, and the real talks of what the people want will start with them. Then, we'll see.

Popping up between texts and other babies

Just got a comment published in "Art'ishake" journal for art and global development - check out the text at the gravitations site. It's called "Intuitive Politics, Art and Devleopment" and is easily or at least quickly read.

Funny thing is, I have no idea how many people actaully read this journal, but if the subject is of any interest to you, go have a look at the organisation publishing it, Arts for Global Development.

Philosophy is begin to take another step these days, into the wicked and tricky land of actually going active - to a certain extent, it's a matter of what interventions the world will let you carry out. But of course, there are many ways - becoming a vortex that places enough weird, attracting points of disappearance in the quasi-public landscape may be a useful way of intervening as well?

Otherwise, the presencing of 3 weeks old Mai is rather imposing, she's not the first one, but I guess I'm older and less preoccupied with myself, so there is more space for true contemplation and meeting somewhere out there between not-yet-language and becoming-many that she's in. Yeah, my older boys always laugh at the fact their dad is a philosopher - "Is that philosophy, dad?" they say, when a particularly strange sounding sentence crosses my lips. She'll get the hang of it, too, now she's got two coaches to help her, the teenage philosophy crew..

Recognition tools and the Philosophy Game

One thought I have had in mind for a while (actually, since 1991, when a Lithuanian philosopher friend and I started talking about this), is how one could develop an interactive game that would enhance the philosophical power of the broader population - i.e., the ones that find philosophy unreal, boring, and totally irrelevant to the quality of life.

Since 1991, I spent a lot of time studying philosophy, and today of course I know that there is no such thing as "philosophy", but a variety of philosophies that are so different that one might hardly gather them under one designation. Still, the idea remained in my head.

Recently, it has become coupled with another idea: how to develop an interactive surface (a P2P application is what it would be called today, the word clearly did not exist at least not in my mind, in 1991) that would allow for the development of philosophical ideas across cultures, individual and institutional barriers and languages.

This idea has been nourished lately by the development and growth of fora that allow for people to exchange their social networks (sucha as LinkedIn), business identitites (BC), travel plans (WAYN and the like), ethical (actical) reputation (Actics), or even, on a preliminary stage, political propositions (ideologi). However, what strikes me, are two factors that are more or less dominating: one is the focus on individual identities. Obviously, this is the reason for being of services such as LinkedIn, but the funny thing is that they are called "social" - yet, the definition of social is not the integration of the individual into collective patterns of movement, but in almost all cases, the differentiation of the individual through recognition, measurement (who has the most connections on LinkedIn?), the identification of individual actors' ethical reputation through judgment called by others (Actics), etc.

Birth of a diary

This blog will be taking on a somewhat new function: as of today, it will be the location for the diary of our experiment in space, place, people, and time: Gravitations, and the network building around the ship HV Ravn. The ship was a café and restaurant for some years, following the end of its active career as an inspection ship. Now, its daily leader, Tine, is trying to create an environment that will host all sorts of activities: utopic organisations like our own, a business club for the socially and culturally responsible, neighbour groups, etc.

More space for the vampires

Vampires are eating their way out of the diminishing rainforest; the end of the earth has been predicted by astronomists to somewhere between 400 and 100,000 years from now; the Danish defence minister complains that his political opponents use poetry to express their opinion: "He who sows wind, reeps storm" (in Danish, though); in Paris, everything is L.A. again, and the prime minister calls the rioters "a bunch of losers" (in French, though). It's raining outside, and it's a beautiful thursday morning.

Outside, the international conference on the living thought of Gilles Deleuze is starting in Copenhagen today - drop by, if you're in town, there are a few notabilities coming (paul patton, kenneth surin, akseli virtanen, anne sauvagnargues, to mention a few), and the arranging committe have promised the doors will be open for all who desire - check out the program!

And in hay-on-why, a small town of about 2,500 souls, they were wondering what to do about the fleeing population and dull outlooks. So they decided to become the book town of England - check out their site, this is fun, hundreds of book shops and people queuing all over the place, some will love it, some will know where not to go for their next weekend. But is had an edge, a vision, courage, and realisation.

Culture rules, war stinks.

No, seriously, I mean it. So don't give me "In the serious situation in which we are, there is no other alternative but to fight terrorism on the battle field". 40 years ago, Nixon said: We have to teach the Vietnamese about freedom, and the only way we can do that is on the battle field. Dos it echo?

Go, Hay-on-Why, go all of us, make art, make philosophy. Make space for the vampires.

After the Moving Mind (2)

Second thought after the Moscow-Beijing trip to find.. love? peace? cooperation? one of the interesting aspects of this "conference" was how the organizers had chosen very heterogenous ideas, projects, and papers, to participate in the event. Also, while we were on the train, there was no particular assignment of roles to the people or the projects: there were seminars held, in train compartments, partly in corridors, rarely in restaurant cars - there were smaller, informal meetings, all gathering artists, theoreticians, analytics of the new forms of work and life, with no speficic role to play for one or another type of approach.

The advantage of this approach admittedly lies in the versatility that one might suppose that it would give to every event. Whether what was going on was called a seminar, a workshop, or other names such as story circles etc., noone could decide before hand how the form would define the moment. However, what happened was that most encounters tended to turn into seminars, into more or less academically defined discussions of the right to truth. Truth and its place came before the right to change it - which, incidentally, doesn't necessarily work this way for the artist. Art is involved not olny in seeking the truth, but in changing it. So its necessity lies more in achieving the right feeling, the right substance, the right drive or process to what is undertaken. So why does the academic or scientific claim to truth get priority over the artistic attempt to change truth by creating affects and working with its own affective taste and tonality? We witnessed a number of micro-wars (one of the attempts at creating a theme by the organizers was the term "war", used more or less stringently on a number of events taking place in this world), of positioning and defending positions, of upholding dispositives of truth-making, rather than ones of creation beyond knowing or beyond power and into unpredictable force-games. these micro-wars are hard to dis-fight: you can disengage in a truth-war, but then you lose the right to speek, at least in this setting. Your right to expression comes back, as an artist, in the performative space between the seminars and discussions, not that you become a "pauze-klown", but the centre of the truth-space is held by a certain discursive dispositif.

What did seem to speak for this, and maybe less for an attempt to change such conditions, was the position revealed bit by bit by many of the artists themselves: they do have truth-conditions under which they operate (surprise..); they are often concerned with documentary or otherwise truth-unconceiling acitivities - and thus, they accept the division of time-space-slots of expression. Even though this means that the two institutions, of art and science, remain divided and apart, there is a scission allowing for each to speak. The war is turned into a truce - which is probably the state in whcih art and science have been for at least most of the past centuries. This modern relation does not really question or experiment with what art and science would become, if they broke down the circulation of one another and started crossing each others tracks and bodies. Now, there are other examples of activities trying to cross these boundaries - so why did it not happen anymore than it did, on board the otherwise so free and searching transsiberian train conference?

(to be continued..)

After the Moving Mind (1)

Guess what I posted yesterday disappeared in cyberspace. So I will try again. Came back from Beijing last night, after two weeks of experimentative conference on board, and around, the Trans-siberian Express, from Moscow to Beijing. Check out the program for what happened as it develops on the links that you can reach at the Ephemera site. Presumably, a creative commons-based archive of pictures, sound, video, and texts will be created, exactly where is hard to say, but I will try to keep news posted here.

So, first impressions after this attempt to create a moving laboratory for minds working with questions on work in the post-fordist age, on new media and new globalities, localitiesm and subjectivities; through the channels of art, philosophy, political theory, socialogical studies, and other interventions on various levels.

The variety of the projects has been rather high. All in all, this may have been both the strength and the weakness of this event, as far as it has come so far. And of course, it is impossible to say, where it will go from here: links have been tied, friendships have emerged, but anything else? Movements have been mentioned, networks too, there was a fragile, but building sense of being part of something. A community? Hardly - or at least only in the sense that I have been trying to evoke here, the moving one, the community which only exists when it is in the making, not when it stops to change and create itself anew. But the variety of commitments, expressed by the many voices and eyes and hands involved, mainly, in their own projects, was both a richness, and at the same time, a weak point, as they tended to create some obstruction for what was able to emerge out of the presences and interactions. Was work dominating over playfulness, defense of territory dominating over liberatory expansions? Dangerous ideas, but nonetheless. This may have been the case. Subjectivities and institutions can form very hard bodies of resistance - and resistance was a word said quite often on this train.

I won't try to conclude anything just now, just state that I am going to be re-working the event over the next couple of weeks, building up texts and links, as they form in my mind and in others. Right now, I will just throw in a link to a site on Oulipo - study that, and you will have an idea on the tradition that formed ideas like the one around this train journey and conference. The new thing is that someone tries to build creativity through obstructions in an academic setting (if this was one - yeas, it was, mostly) - where normally, the obstructions used in the academic sessions are about the dispositives of disciplines controlling the mindds that could be moving too fast and too far away from the root of the tree. (another link to artistic obstructions, by the way - Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth playing around in "Five Obstructions", 2003).

Will return with more - on the possibilities of multitudinal formations, on complexing, on folds and events in the working train, on non-human interactors such as spaces, time-zones, and vodka-bottles. Google Cpturing the Moving Mind, there are already a feww links. And join the plans for going north-south in 2008..