Georgia Sagri

WELCOME TO THE NEW PARADIGM or THE CRISIS OF EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE A midwinter retreat, a modular molecular seminar with Everyone

2012-01-08T16:01:00.000-08:00

the distructive character

2012-01-03T16:39:00.000-08:00

Note (replying to a mailing list)

2011-12-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

If the seriousness of the situation is not clear then a shift of one word can't change anything. What is important for a bunch of us is to understand that we don't want to replace the union leaders, or the expertize organizers, the "makers" of the student movement. What it is great and what we see every day in every corner of the world is that people are aware of the political and economic games played on their back. They recognize that the political situation-either called democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy etc- is all the way fabricated for the favor of capitalism's monstrosity and its expansion to every inch, every pore of our lives. Privatization expands to the calculation of our lives only perceived as numbers, the same with water, plants, seeds, animals and the DNA; if we are not able to talk about those issues in connection to the humiliation of the worker, the student and every profession then how we can expand our understanding of work without the power relations that entails? If we can't speak about the demolishing of money then how we are able to speak about life than survival? Words come only from the place of negotiation, manipulation when we call people "broader" audience, this is something that politicians always do, lawyers do, bureaucrats do, managers do, unions and organizers do; but our words must come from our mouths who we are amongst the people we are writing our texts- not for them but with them- and Seize the Empty Words and Speak about Life than Death.

Call for an open GA for ALL, Friday 11/11/2011, 7pm, Liberty Square

2011-12-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

Call for an open GA for ALL, Friday 11/11/2011, 7pm, Liberty Square

The past weeks OWS has witnessed rapid bureaucratization and centralization of the GA. Specific working groups, most dramatically in the context of the Operations Spokes Council, have authorized themselves as the ritual keepers (via dogmatic facilitation/process/structure rules) of the movement. This has created confusion and ambiguity in the public discourse. It has prevented each individual from empowering himself/herself to create or act in the GA without being identified as a professional participant. We have seen money issues and organizational questions ruling most of the General Assemblies, while putting aside the reasons and frustrations that led to the occupation movement. This, inevitably, means schism between the ones who authorize and the ones who are here to participate.
We call for an open General Assembly for all.
We don’t ask permission from anyone to be imbued with that authority. We continue to learn from each other the possibilities of Direct Democracy.
Theses on Direct Democracy (open document):
Direct Democracy comes as a necessary imperative act that puts priority for a radical overthrow of the system of political representation, the State and the commercialization of everything. This social organism does not leave space for any kind of hierarchies, leaders, governors and political parties. It gives space to every individual to experience and practice politics and at the same time to be transformed within it. It is for all people, who experience the joy of personal initiative, of collective try, of solidarity, as well as, of love. All resources of our common life and the means to satisfy our common needs, cannot be but common, into the hands of society itself, which, with no need of any kind of mediation, decides an equal distribution of them, for all.
1. All space is open to everyone’s participation and it belongs to everybody.
2. The equal participation of everyone shapes the making of decisions, as well as the control of their application, both in the political and the economy field.
3. All necessary representations have strictly coordinating or executive nature and not mediating, representative or decisive character.
4. The existence of many local assemblies (in neighborhoods, municipalities, workplaces, schools of education, etc.) that communicate is the cornerstone of Direct Democracy. Participation in these assemblies is not occasional, but it is as responsible and regular as possible.
5. Communication between local assemblies creates a horizontal (non-hierarchical) network, which serves to coordinate the required theses and acts.
We want everything for everyone. We are history in motion.
Now is the time to overthrow all forms of authority.

Announcement Text on November 2nd, 2011 / Direct Democracy Working Group of OWS

2011-12-07T15:15:00.000-08:00

Direct Democracy Working Group of OWS

Announcement Text on November 2nd, 2011

Direct democracy is used to describe the process and the unique character of our movement but we haven’t had any time to create substantive thoughts in that direction. The flux and the intensities of events have not allowed us a space, for thoughtful deliberative thinking on the importance of direct democracy.
There have been lots of actions but maybe we also need to think and shape future manifestations and activities of direct democracy.
Working groups in OWS are developing further the concepts of direct democracy without being able to expand our experience and knowledge of what that means, although practicing it.
What we create here in this square and in many other squares around the world is not just an ephemeral experiment. What we do today is the birth of direct political participation, passion for social engagement and happiness, passion for direct involvement to the commons. It is clear that political representatives are not anymore capable to create the political circumstances and to make decisions in our account. It is obvious that they make decisions for the benefit of the 1%.
All of us with our every day life interactions we demand direct democracy and we establish ourselves together as one person beside another person in political participation. This is a historical moment not only because it is beyond leaders and flags, but because we revolutionize our understandings of what politics is and what it can be.
Direct democracy takes democracy out of the corporate offices and the economic negotiations and political elites and brings it back to our lives and engagement. It is up to us then to direct it.
Direct democracy working group invites everyone to direct the participation process and allow its further continuation and growth. Through connection and communication with other international working groups (for example Syntagma square in Athens and Indignados in Spain) who are also discussing the concepts and understandings of direct democracy, we will expand our collective practices together.

1st NYC Anti-Authoritarian, Anarchists, Autonomists

2011-11-03T23:33:00.000-07:00

1st NYC Anti-authoritarian, Anarchists, Autonomists
OPEN ASSEMBLY

Tuesday, November 8 at 8:00pm - November 9 at 4:00am

This is an open call for everyone that feels an affinity for this Assembly

* Oakland (report back?)
* Nov 10th West Goes Inside
* Nov 17th Call for General Strike

Points of conversation:

- Spreading different forms of occupations (how?)
- Mapping the city to our advantage
- Tactical coherence
- Towards the de-census of every GA
- Distribution of communication (twitter, facebook) and its conflicts
- Media and Livestream problematics
- Future events and calls

no journalists / no cops

NYC GA / Wall street Occupation

2011-10-06T08:05:00.000-07:00

NYC GENERAL ASSEMBLY, WALL STREET OCCUPATION

NYC General Assemblies are an open participatory and horizontally organized process through
which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective
forces within and against representative politics, cultural death and the crisis of our times. NYC General Assemblies are a gathering of individuals, coming from various political, economical, ideological, cultural backgrounds. With our voices and our presence we share our problems, fears, ideas, dreams. The General Assembly is not a group. General Assemblies break through the idea of the political group by bringing together a variety of ideological patterns, old political procedures and test them in public, expose them, act upon them and transform them.There is no leadership, no representation, and no authority. We become political beings through our participation to the commons.

The process of the GA is already a fundamental action. To be able to make decisions together for a resolution, participation to an action and to have a gathering and a political conversation in the most policed city in the world is itself a political statement. NYC General Assemblies are actions that open space rather than producing polarizations. They create environments for everyone to have a unique and important role.

The General Assemblies is everyone. It is you who sees the limits of the politics of alienation, the cruelty of the economic regimes, cultural hypnosis and the standardization of every form of life for the benefits of the 1%

Who Represents You Replaces You

We are the 99%

On Sept 17th we occupied Wall Street. We have come together and crafted these principles of
solidarity, which are points of unity that include but are not limited to:

* Fighting for social, political economical and cultural FREEDOM & EQUALITY;
* Engaging in direct democracy;
* Exercising personal and collective responsibility;
* Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions;
* Empowering one another against all forms of oppression;
* Redefining how labor is valued;
* The sanctity of individual privacy;
* The belief that education, health care, transportation, culture, technology, information,
housing, nutrition and natural resources cannot be subjects of exploitation; and
* Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source.

The Occupation in Wall Street doesn't claim any responsibility or control for the spontaneous
initiatives, practices and direct actions taken by the people in the streets of NY.

The Occupation in Wall Street is not a metaphor. It is the coupling of politics and life that wasn't
even imagined a few months ago.

NYC General Assemblies is not a central political formation. It moves the bodies. Sometimes
gatherings split to exist in smaller units in the spaces of the metropolis and sometimes they
gather together again when it is needed. Who is able to predict what those bodies want and need and when? There can't be any leader or leading idea to this movement but only forces, forces of sentiment.

Coming soon.. in a square near you

2011-07-29T10:31:00.000-07:00

Note: For video

2011-07-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

I lost my camera my keys the apartment.
I'm under influential nets and affects.
My phone is off for a week now and I can't find my love my smile and my cry.
Do you like reality tv?
My dreams are turning gray and green. The fluorescent dreams of a well tuned joy.
Since I was born after the dictatorship I am searching for the tools to translate how I can place my self and what to do.
Confrontation
occupation,
a party,
the one to one meetings,
to only take care of you and just forget macro expectations.
It is the impossibility that created us.
Stop work and meet us.
We'll steal the wind and the wine and run to the edges.
I'll meet you in an hour.

Sunday -- 07.31.11 -- For General Assemblies in Every Part of the World

2011-07-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

Sunday -- 07.31.11 -- For General Assemblies in Every Part of the World

CONTENTS:
1. About Sunday
2. Some of Sunday's Contributors
3. First Resolution of the Direct Democracy Assembly in Athens
4. Conversation with Participants of the General Assembly in Athens 5. Conversation with Sabu Kohso about a post-Fukushima world
6. Useful Links

_____________________________
1. About Sunday

When: 1:00 pm - 5:00pm
Who: Free and open to all
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor
What: Meeting / Discussion

Attempt 1 : (to summarize this event into one line)
Anti-austerity/pro-democracy groups and individuals meeting at 16Beaver

Attempt 2 : A day devoted to exploring the inter-relations of recent global/local struggles through first-hand accounts

Attempt 3 : A day dedicated to create short-circuits in our imaginaries

Attempt 4 : (breaking the one line rule)

To attempt to recount the signs and cracks that have appeared over the last decade in the facade of the worlds of power would require a book length introduction. But one senses that in the midst of a crisis that has called into question the last 20 years of post-historical and
post-political proclamations, the last 7 months have catapulted humanity back into a global dimension of struggle and revolt.

One senses that at this juncture, in the midst of the revolutionary struggles across North Africa, the Middle East, and now the Mediterranean, there is renewed understanding of what non-representative politics can look like.

What does a democratic multitude look like? And how does it invent a new vocabulary for praxis? How does this general intellect, that has
strengthened over the last few decades, transform into political action?

On what grounds can this emergent politics be conjoined across disparate sites and struggles? How does one express solidarity with the events in Tunisia or Egypt, for example? How do those struggles and approaches get translated elsewhere? How were they put into play in Spain? And how did the events in Spain inspire a resurgence of political strategies in the most recent developments in Greece?

How do the euphoric dimensions of these successes hold up to the grim prospects of a post Fukushima reality? What can we learn about and from the nuclear disaster which has unfolded since March and are there
prospects to use some of this knowledge in our movements?

This Sunday is a special day at 16 Beaver, as we will be attempting to bring together reports on various struggles from North Africa, Spain and Greece, post-Fukushima Japan, and trying to connect them to contemporary struggles right here in New York and the US. The event comes together out of the interest of various individuals and groups here in New York to build upon some of these developments globally, learn from them, and put them into play here.

The event also takes place in the background of various calls to
mobilization, which include a call for a People's Assembly, in front of the bull near Beaver Street, on August 2nd, as well as a call to occupy Wall Street on September 17th, and an effort to mobilize an occupation in Washington beginning on October 6, 2011.

What can be learned from these global experiences within movements here in the US? This afternoon will begin with reports from various individuals speaking on behalf of struggles from specific international contexts and here in New York. Then we will proceed to open up to questions and allow a discussion to unfold.

As a part of the event, we conducted two conversations in preparation.

A few of the organizers of this event conducted an interview with a few of the participants of the General Assembly in Athens.

And we also recorded a conversation with Sabu Khoso about post-Fukushima Japan.

The recordings have been posted as a resource - especially for those friends who live in distant places but are nonetheless inspired,
concerned, and interested in these processes.

_____________________________
2. Some of Sunday's Guests

We are still in the process of confirming people who will be coming and speaking. And of course, we have no idea who will get this invitation and come. But we make an attempt below to give an idea of some people who will be joining us.

New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts
http://nocutsny.wordpress.com/

Antonio Poudereux Velasco lives in Madrid and has participated in the occupation of Puerta del Sol. He is a member of the World Extension Team created during that occupation. He will not speak in this event as a representative of neither that team or #acampadasol, but as an individual. He works as a sound engineer.

Georgia Sagri is an artist and non-employed activist. From early age she has been a member of the Void Network, a cultural, political and
philosophical collective in Athens Greece with the aim the radicalization of every day life, the participation to the emancipatory social struggles, the creation of social centers, self-organized autonomous spaces and the construction of situations in Public Space.

Sabu Kohso is an independent writer and translator, a native of Japan, living in NYC since 1980. He has written three books in Japanese on social movements and progressive culture of NYC in relationship with the
formation of urban space, as well as a book on the geographical and deterritorial lineage of anarchist thought across the world. He has also translated books by Kojin Karatani, Arata Isozaki (Japanese to English), David Graeber and John Holloway (English to Japanese). Being active for many years in establishing a global network of anti-authortaian movements in and out of Japan, Kohso is currently working on the blog Jfissures for the exchange of critical voices between the disaster stricken Japan and elsewhere.

Costas Panayotakis is Associate Professor of Sociology at the New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York. Originally from Greece, he has written many articles on Greece, been interviewed by radio and TV programs in the US and abroad and is the author of Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy, which will be published this fall by Pluto Press.

Luis Moreno-Caballud is a member of the group/assembly Democracia Real Ya - NYC, which is part of the Spanish May-15 movement. He also researches and teaches Spanish contemporary history and culture at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.

Larry Hales is a community activist and fighter. While living in Denver, Larry was one of the founders of Colorado United Communities Against Police Brutality, and an organizer of the Recreate 68 Coalition, organized to protest last year’s Democratic National Convention. In November 2007, Denver police broke into Hales’ house and arrested him on false charges arising from his giving shelter to a victim of police brutality who was out on parole. Months later and after a strong people’s campaign, the charges against Larry were finally dropped. Presently, Larry Hales is an organizer for the Bail Out the People Movement and the youth group Fight Imperialism Stand Together (F.I.S.T.), and a contributing editor with Workers World newspaper.

Doug Singsen is active in the movement against budget cuts in New York City and in the student movement against tuition hikes at the City University of New York (CUNY). He helped organize the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education on March 4, 2010, the Day of Rage Against the Cuts on March 24, 2011, and the recent Bloombergville
occupation. He is a member of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts and the International Socialist Organization and is a PhD student in the Art History Program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Mohammed Serbout was born and raised in Morocco from a working family, went to school and studied hard in order to have a better future, but the reality is there are no chances left there, so he decided to participate with the youth in changing the status quo of the actual regime...

Yotam Marom is a member of the Organization for a Free Society and the New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts Coalition, and has been active in the
anti-austerity struggle in New York City, most recently through the Bloombergville occupation. Yotam is a co-founder of Without Walls - a democratic, social-justice oriented educational collective - and has experience in communal living. He is also a writer and musician.

_____________________________
3. First Resolution of the Direct Democracy Assembly in Athens

For a long time decisions have been made for us, without us.

We are workers, unemployed, retirees, youth, who have come to Syntagma Square to fight and struggle for our lives and our future.

We are here because we know that the solutions to our problems can come only from us.

We call all residents of Athens , workers, unemployed and youth, to come to Syntagma Square , and all of society to fill the public squares and to take life into its own hands.

In these public squares we will shape our claims and our demands together.

We call on all workers who are going on strike in the coming days to show up and remain in Syntagma Square .

We will not leave the squares until those who compelled us to come here go away:　

Governments, Troika (EU, ECB and IMF), Banks, IMF Memoranda, and everyone that exploits us.　 We send them the message that the debt is not ours.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW!

EQUALITY - JUSTICE - DIGNITY!

The only struggle that is lost is the one that is never fought!

_____________________________
4. Conversation with 'Some of the Participators of the General Assembly of the Direct Democracy in Athens'

This conversation is an attempt to open up the process of the General Assemblies taking place in Athens on Syntagma Square, like an engine, in order to understand how it developed, and how it works. It touches on the problems they have faced, the barriers of having fixed ideological agendas, the question of restricting media access, of formulating respect, creating the form for a new political speech, drawing lots, voting, making resolutions, taking collective actions, establishing different thematic groups, working groups, allowing conflict and arguments, constructing a non-representative political agency, avoiding demands, ….

For listening to the conversation, please visit:

http://sduk.us/conversations/072511_greece_assembly.mp3

_____________________________
5. Conversation with Sabu Kohso about a post-Fukushima world

This is an attempt to speak with Sabu Kohso, a writer, translator from Japan, living in New York. Since 3-11, Sabu has been working with others to run and maintain jfissures (jfissures.wordpress.com) one of the few websites to attempt to translate pertinent texts into and from Japanese related to Fukushima and connecting it to a global context. This is an impromptu conversation which took place in preparation for Sunday's event. Sabu tries to speak about his own relation to what has happened in Japan, the reflections and fissures within Japanese society, the potential questions which emerge from that experience, and how they might also connect to other historical experiences of struggle in Japan.

For listening to the conversation, please visit:

http://sduk.us/conversations/072711_sabu.mp3

If you are interested in reading some recent texts from Sabu, please read:

Notes for Understanding What is Happening in Japan
http://th-rough.eu/writers/kosho-eng/notes-understanding-what-happening-japan

Fangs Hiding in the Green -- Impressions of Post 3/11 Japan
http://th-rough.eu/writers/kosho-eng/fangs-hiding-green-impressions-post-311-japan

_____________________________
6. Useful Links

http://amesi-dimokratia.org

http://takethesquare.net/

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=174935459243842

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=144937025580428

http://october2011.org/

__________________________________________________
16 Beaver Group
16 Beaver Street, 4th fl.
New York, NY 10004

for directions/subscriptions/info visit:
http://www.16beavergroup.org

TRAINS:
4,5 Bowling Green
R,W Whitehall
2,3 Wall Street
J,Z Broad Street
1,9 South Ferry

Note: Thursday July 28th, At the Grand Openings Return of the Blogs, MOMA

2011-07-28T16:09:00.000-07:00

July 28th
At the Grand Openings Return of the Blogs, MOMA

There isn't so much going on today. The lounge with the
leather sofas and the left overs from past events perhaps are here to
point out some kind of process. I call it the vip community lounge.
the planks blogging the blogs so none can really read them. the
security is here. mostly the security. The hypnotized visitors. The
tickets are moving around. Recognize the tempo of screen saver and
stay for a while to watch. Promotion. Sam's signature. I look how they
raise their heads to look at the balloons. Museum. The security
doesn't let people to sit on the sofa and watch the video. Confusion.
Seems that the sofa is part of the installation and no one can sit on.
Good job.

Live Portfolio 2007-2011

2011-07-25T11:45:00.000-07:00

Live Portfolio
Saturday, July 23, 2011, 3:00 p.m.- 6:00 p.m., MOMA, The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor.

Georgia Sagri makes a live mix-tape of performance pieces she has presented in NY from 2007-2011. Invited by Sagri a group of friends develop a code ouji demonstration while her brother and activist Tasos Sagris will be answering questions about the current uprising in Greece, addressed by everyone present.

It is the making of the portfolio, its format, its banality of duration by adding the real and the live, like the leaking juices of fresh fruits, sticky fingers, too much nature, smelly and weird. The sounds of pain/ the cracking of fear/ the whispers of pause/ the abominable posture/ hand/ arm/ neck. The expression of the remembering of an incident but not the incident itself. Is that possible? Squeezed among some languages you know, you pretend you know, you want to know. Scratch it, suck mediations, which that could be a type of mimesis. Doing from directions coming from elsewhere. Rather unexpected than improvised. There is no 'as if'. It is the design of the portfolio. Making portfolio and forgetting portfolio. This was only a draft, some other things will come up and you will be noticed. The power point presentation will be totally and extremely burst with lying. "I wasn't expecting something different." Of course nothing will be placed in the correct chronological order. Are you accusing me of narcissism Apple > ?
"I love my i-phone." The i-pad portfolio and the fingernails' padpads on the keypord. Work in the mid of the summer and wonder what social class is. Hot is slow. Touch, skin and the right jeans. As always at the corner with the smoke in the mouth. An electric cigarette. The taste of look. How she moves her eyes when she is trying to be convincing, and how she stretches her neck every time she

2011-07-13T21:11:00.001-07:00

Note

2011-07-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

Crazyembarrasing
Superuncomfortable
Mindheartfuck
She is allergic to authority and carrots

W.I.P for Women In Prison and Work In Progress (First Episode)

2011-07-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

W.I.P for Women In Prison and Work In Progress (First Episode)

The head turns. The arm touches the ground, stopping violently. Movement comes out of the speakers. It starts from zero on the timeline and leads to the end of the loop, its beginning.

Is it the machine that’s in question? Do you obey? Do you try to exist within it, against it, around it? The machine--machina in ancient Rome, mechane in ancient Athens--is still what we call the apparatus of war, all the weapons bought and sold, used and lost during battle: the armor, the gas masks, the Molotov cocktails, the cybernetic networks, prohibitions, negotiations, settlements and the camps (office camps, party regulations, yoga memberships, etc). It is the theater and its apparatus: the entertainer's tricks and special effects, the lights going on and off, the curtains opening and closing, the fake blood, the props and costumes, the fluorescent paint on the masks that pin down the characters, the strings that hold ex-machina gods up in the air ready to turn various histories upside down whenever they settle, finally, for just a second on stage. It is the dubbed sound in Italian Spaghetti Westerns, the actors counting “one, two, three, four, five” instead of speaking sentences. It is Pier Paolo Pasolini adding sound to the film while editing the recorded images. It is Godard's subtitles, his obsession with texts on film and the way he reduces cinema’s speed. It is Roberto Rosellini's remote control gadget for zooming in and his preference for working with amateur actors. It is Maya Deren's cuts and the way she worked with film exposure. It is Jacques Tati’s mime routines, his micro-gestures and their connection to comedia de l'arte.

The machines of theater and the machines of war: they are interchangeable.
“How did it go?”
“Was it successful?”
Machine and tool are one and the same.

There are a million ways to compose and re-articulate a smile, a cry, and the hand holding a glass. A million ways to rehearse and present a cry, a smile, and the hand holding a glass in real time.

They are modules: “the principle behind the distribution of breaks and intervals.”

There is no representation, only presentation and the analysis of the symptom’s mechanisms existing at the moment of the performance.

The tool I use in the performance is my female body. I was born with that body. I could resist it. I could change gender for the performance or pay other people to perform for me. Instead, I insist on presenting myself as I am. The female body with its texts, imagery, history, pain, criticism, revolt. With my female body I can do the gestures of a man and be that. I can be the lion and the fish and the tree and the woman again, another woman perhaps, another posture. I can't pretend I am a non-smoker but I can look like I am a non-smoker. I can't hide my rotten teeth but I can smile in such a way as to camouflage them. That is what I have, simulations.

The women in prison told me that they have learned the techniques and the sensitivities of the State. They told me: “You must move from one point to the other and then back and forth without end.” I do what they told me in their letters. Is it cinema, then, and not performance? It is the war of the war machine, but not the war machine alone. The architectural plans, the social definitions, the prisons, the schools, the asylums, the houses, the offices, the pavements, the public spaces with their park security. It is life under the constant control of the structural, behavioral and moral architects, with their pose of authority and calculated plans. And then there are the ideal citizens, the syncopated rhythms among thousands of them on the streets.

During a riot, though, different politics arise. There are expectations of change, forgotten demands, and the repressed imagination of the lower class. What does it mean to pretend to be a citizen? What does it mean to shout phrases that you don't believe in? What does it mean to shout together with a group of workers? Who are you when you are doing that? Are those your machines of survival your survival kits? Were you born with them or did you just get used to them as you grew up? The Father, the Mother, the Teacher, the Emperor and How am I to obey? When is the right moment to put up the poster and when is the time to go home? Do I want to go to my place or do I want to live at our home?

This is not the end of the text.

Georgia Sagri, New York, 2011

The performance W.I.P (First Episode) was presented as part of the exhibition Skin So Soft, organized by Josh Kline at Gresham's Ghost, 401 Broadway, NY, 6/22/2011, photo by Linda Norden

what I understand that you suggest about space of ease

2011-05-28T18:23:00.000-07:00

As far as I can understand what you suggest by space of ease in connection to friendship could be habitus, but maybe we want to avoid the sociological connection of this word. We can use the word's origin which is hexis (έξις in greek) which means possession or disposition (διάθεσης in greek) power to use. The actual translation tends to be too pragmatic which suggests something that could be forcefully learned and then easily forgotten. I think Aristotle's refers to this notion as a having but it is always very controversial of how it is perceived this having. For how I understand it, is a topological, potential and formal term, but when we refer to it in relation to something else outside of himself then it is more as a state of action. An act can be good or bad and that's i think why friends are crucial. Because a friend for good that includes pleasure and benefit but it is not only one or the other, will express the good or bad of your act of the having. Isn't then space of ease the space of friendship that is cultivating truth? Certainly urgency isn't a pleasant feeling but in a moment of urgency wouldn't be urgent for something to be addressed ? For example if I feel sad because something needs to be said, happen, change, I need to say it. If that saying is articulated in a clumsy way it is because perhaps we haven't created a space of ease, space of comfort and pleasure where we don't feel like criminals as you said or we don't feel in survival and I think we both agree on that: I don't want to make you feel bad but I want you to feel free to address the good or the bad of the having.

x
g

David Hammons Toy

2011-05-28T17:54:00.001-07:00

100%ad (sleep cat)

2011-05-28T16:51:00.000-07:00

The advertisement 100% (sleep cat) was created in March 2010 and was hosted for six months at the site of the publication company 100%. Georgia Sagri as the advertising girl, the producer and the crew of her advertisement company, used here smiling styles and voice temperatures of 80's advertisements.

2011-02-20T02:59:00.000-08:00

http://burntbookmobile.wordpress.com

2011-01-31T16:29:00.001-08:00

http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo/

Note- Yesterday and Today

2010-12-15T13:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday a new labor law passed urgently from the Greek parliament. It annules several fundamental labor rights as we knew them in Greece for decades.
For example:
- Each business can make a special contract-agreement with it's own workers, paying them less that it is required by the contract-agreement between businessmen and trade unions of workers of a whole sector. Practically the agreements between businessmen and trade unions of each sector are annuled. Practically there will be unions only (apart from the general confederation, of course) at a level of each single enterprise (where the workers are fewer and less powerful, than the total of workers in a whole sector of economy). This will have an immediate effect at wages in the private sector.
- The provisional period of work is raised from 2 months to 12 months, 1 year. That means that a boss can fire a worker after 1 year without giving him any redundancy pay.
And several other harsh neoliberal changes both at the private and the public sector.

So after London and Rome, today, in Athens, Greece, at the General Strike, we had wild clashes between protesters and police.

They are maybe the wildest clashes since the "troika" lenders (IMF, European Commission, European Central Bank) took over the control of the economy of the country, this spring, because of the debt crisis. Although the participants in the demonstration were probably less, the clashes were harsher than those at the 5th of May demonstration (when 3 employees of a bank were accidentally killed by rioters).

Molotov bombs were thrown to the anti-riot policemen guarding expensive hotels, close to the parliament. Similar attacks occurred in many places in the center of Athens. 2 police motorbikes were destroyed. An ex-minister (of the opposition right-wing party that ruled from 2004-2009 and destroyed the economy, while changing the statistics to deceive the people and the E.U.) was beaten (video) (photo) by people who saw him in a street in the center of Athens. Workers and anarchists, returning from the demonstration, tried to occupy the offices of the General Confederation of Workers (which is controlled by well paid professional "tradeunionists" affiliated to the ruling "socialist", but extremely neoliberal party), but were prevented by the anti-riot policemen.

The police made extensive use of chemical gases. (bought by Israel). Lots of people have been beaten.

Till now we don't know the exact number of people arrested and injured.

You can see some images and videos here:
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=1237676

http://www.babylonia.gr/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1296%3A%CF%80%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%B5%CE%BB%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%B1%CF%80%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B3%CE%AF%CE%B1-15-%CE%B4%CE%B5%CE%BA%CE%AD%CE%BC%CE%B2%CF%81%CE

These were the second clashes of this week. Residents of Keratea, an area outside Athens, are clashing with anti-riot policemen for 4 consecutive days, protesting against a new waste dump in the area. Not only molotov bombs but also gunfire (at the air) was reportedly used by the local residents. The Greek Police for the first time made use of a water-cannon vehicle.
Some photos ot these clashes here:
http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=1236686

Meanwhile scores of prisoners are on hunger strike in Greek jails because of the conditions there.

One @ http://www.sotoso.org/a/a/imgboard.htm

2010-12-04T16:29:00.000-08:00

I was not offended when you looked at me and I realized that there was no one in my place to look at you back. I comprehend. Seriously, I have strange feelings about the different wars that are going on in the universe and I am ready to take some action, very serious action. No jokes. This is not some kind of whatever mechanism that you find in a shopping mall or you fish from the pockets of extremely annoying weirdos while they’re sleeping. Flowers in the middle of the unspeakable, caramelized news behind curtains in front of other curtains and all of them become layers and some kind of onions that all my friends talk about; it’s over for my cup of tea. It is empty talk. We got used to talking with our fingers or pretending that if I wink, you will get what I mean, but I want you to get something and if you think this is a problem then you have an issue, which a dentist can take care of. First of all it is about the dogs. Something went wrong with the dogs in the mastermind cities and all of them have their own leashes. The parks are brighter, too many lights to keep any secrets, the smoking is not permitted and all of us we have one particular something to take care and especially ourselves. Then, I missed all my friends in a well-established university. I’m bored and I don’t know why. I never have enough money to go up and down anywhere. The issue here is that no one, I’m telling you no one, is going to take care of you. Just think about it when you look at me;

Georgia Sagri

One

Opening and Performance Dec 11th 2010 8-10pm @ SOTOSO, Brussels http://www.sotoso.org/a/a/imgboard.htm

Note

2010-10-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

Violence is not taken, is acted up at the moment of the oppression. In order to take it back you need to be a part of violence at the moment of the oppression. If you are not a part of it you are in a life in which you don't have any desire to take anything back.

Community in a state of civil war is a false community. What that means? It means that a subject in a state of civil war can’t be part of a community. A subject in a state of civil war will always be in a state of emergency. The community in a state of emergency is always formulated within the community for reasons of survival. There is a distinction then between the subject of survival and that of life. The subject inside the community for reasons of life is to create the conditions of forms of life and not the conditions of survival. Life forms are not waiting from someone to name them as such. So, in a way life forms only exist in the presence of non-identity. How we can talk about a political subject without identity? How we can name a party when there is no one to identify it as such? A community for reasons of life owns such complex regions that it will be hard for someone to give them a distinctive name. What would be then interesting here is not to focus on the question of name but how that community can maintain its complexity so no one will be able to name it. Complexity here is not a construction or a refusal of construction of an identity but the creation of life forms that can maintain their particularity. On the first book of Plato's Republic, Socrates says that injustice causes civil war and by a civil war even a single individual is incapable of achieving anything, because he is in a state of civil war and not of one mind; second it makes him his own enemy, as well as the enemy of just people. How then we expect the creation of community in the state of civil war? What kind of community that would be? Are we interested to examine, to follow strategies and to create community in a state of civil war when we know that even as singularities we are enemies of ourselves, even when we know that our communities will fall into patterns of survival by creating them in a state of civil war? Are we interested to imagine forms of life outside the environment that creates them? Is it useful to think of that ? why ?

civil war

humanity against economy
economy against technology
technology against nature
nature against the earth
earth against the galaxy.

The governmental politics is a construction. Construction is representation. In order to have something out of the state which is a stage of the image then we need to realize that the subject is part of that stage as well. The subject although in display must be able to create life forms. What is that outside the image? Is it creative to think outside of the image? What about virtual reality and telepresence ? It is interesting to consider cross-sensory explorations between stereo visual imaging and auditory dimension. After images. Thresholds. Physiological resonances. Acoustic spaces of felt sound phenomena, experienced eithersubliminally, or making recognizably direct physical resonances to the body. Composite mental images of immersion in space, as in stereo vision; direct physiological experience of an acoustic space, as distinguished from the perception of an acoustic space, aurally, as "image."

Those thresholds inside the image are images. The thing that makes them different is that they don't exist topologically and they are constantly changing dimensions and users. There is no separation between who is producing and who is consuming. Composition (production-consumption) throws a party every night and there will be soon no institution to prevent where, when and by whom this may happen.

Time issues might sound banal for some.

Real and symbolic become the same in this variety of praxis. Ideas become commons and exist in multiple spaces. Can still mathematics count the flow of those different spheres? Free mathematics, counting systems and pressure measures will be the next important concern.

Note

2010-10-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

For rhythms

If you don't know the way

you can clap your hands and

figure it out.

Then maybe you can set

patterns.

Design

a song

Make a beat

loop it for millions of times

and sing words

Things you see around

Two snickers

A hug

The appliance electronic giants

and a backpack

You let the sound be

and you can just leave.

Note- I thank the city who

2010-09-19T22:37:00.000-07:00

My friend Stefanos died and I thank the city that remains the same. I can walk on that corner we talked this dream and argument and I can stay there for a while and it won't be so hard to say bye.

why are some people hot in clothes? - for Stefanos only-

2010-09-16T20:38:00.000-07:00

wHY aRE sOME pEOPLE hOT iN cLOTHES?

animal nudity are not going to address this issue, instead they are
going to celebrate the once (scantily) dressed kelly lebrock this
saturday at cakeshop. a FREE concert for ALL ages with 25 bands being
all geeky and amazing. at the strike of midnight get ready to
experience "weird science" as you've never seen it before with sounds
provided by hells hills.
the international KELLY LEBROCK'S bday invitational w/ 25 bands, each
playing 10mins.

animal nudity coming on stage at 10.50pm.
see full lineup at
http://www.cake-shop.com/calendar/calendar.php?year =2007&month=03

animal nudity currently consist of stefanos tsigrimanis (guitar) and
performance artist par excellence georgia sagri (cello). the two of
them have never played together before and have vowed to destroy any
evidence of their upcoming performance so that they can claim the same
thing for future events. they are both theoretically entrenched in the
concepts of amnesia and improvisation. expect nothing less.

cakeshop
152 ludlow st.
kelly lebrock bday celebration, sat 3/24, 8pm - midnight

cAPITALIZATION kILLED tHE lOWERCASE sTAR

set yr alarm clocks, mark yr calendars, tattoo yr forehead if you will: animal nudity at club midway, next thursday, 4/26 at 9pm.

ear-splintering moments of ritualistic silence and sprawling improvisatory excess for guitar/cello/voice.

animal nudity are stefanos tsigrimanis (guitar) and georgia sagri (cello, vox). they promote forgetfullness and they advocate the institutionalization of sesquipedalian verbiage as the next step towards amnesia. they like reading and being read. expect nothing less.

a video of their last performance can be found at: www.myspace.com/animanudity

club midway, thursday 4/26

25 avenue b, btw 2nd and 3rd

sean mccaul, 10pm

animal nudity, 9pm

top down, 8pm

animal nudity's final appearance for this year at one of nyc's most celebrated dens of iniquity: siberia.

guitar/cello/vox+freemprov+coordinated+randomness+amnesiac+differentiation

a video of a recent performance of theirs can be found at www.myspace.com/animanudty.

animal nudity, 10pm

siberia

356, w40th st,, btw 8th and 9th

$8, 21+ w/ID

Exodos- 13/9/2010

2010-09-16T18:28:00.001-07:00

The demand is made by the movement of the mirror reflecting the parliament, the city, the passers by and the faces, the buildings' details and the streets.

Note -exit, virtuosity and revolution: the political theory of exodus, Paolo Virno

2010-08-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

"Nothing is less passive than flight. The "exit" modifies the conditions within which the conflict takes place, rather than presupposes it as an irremovable horizon; it changes the context within which a problem arises, rather than deals with the problem by choosing one or another of the alternative solutions already on offer. In short, the "exit" can be seen as a free-thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game and disorients the enemy. One has only to think of the mass flight from the factory regime set in motion by the workers of North America halfway through the nineteenth century as they headed off to the "frontier" in order to colonize low-cost land. They were seizing the truly extraordinary opportunity of making their own conditions of departure reversible."

ok, but is it possible to act as if you are outside the action? how can you construct action already being outside of it? To depart from, means that you are already part of something or you are somewhere that you depart from. The possibility of the action of exit cannot create space which you can depart from. The question is who makes the space that you depart from. Is it the same one who makes the space and he/she departs from it? Is it a different kind of departure when it is a space of your creation or someone else's ? When is the right time of departure when the space you have made it's already made as a space of exit?

Note

2010-07-09T04:56:00.000-07:00

we want to be part of a conversation. i don't want to be part of any conversation. it is not about i tell you something and then you buy it or sell it at the end. it is about you tell me something and then i sell it at the end. it is not about closed dialogues. it is only about closed dialogues. as artists we can't still think we are out there just to sell our stuff. as artists we are out there to sell our stuff. collaboration is just simple as that. collaboration is complicated and tiring and by the way i hate this word. collaboration is beyond ego, creativity is owned by everybody and not only from creative people. collaboration is only about ego and creativity well we are going too far. you have to get over yourself and stop assuming you are some genius and that everybody is an idiot and you have to collaborate with everybody, with peers, with people you have no common language, with groups coming from different cultures and fields. i don't want to collaborate with anyone and you are an idiot. art can't be outside of the conversation and artists can't still think of themselves as special people. i am more special than you think i am, do you want a kiss? reality runs faster than any artist's idea. reality doesn't exist anyway, do you want a kiss? i can't waste more time to think of another art-project, i prefer to participate in terms of reality not art. Buy all my wasted time and i will not care if you participate or not.

Note

2010-07-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

Landscape with Diogenes, Nicolas Poussin, c. 1647, Oil on canvas, 160 cm x 221 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

"According to one story, Diogenes went to the Oracle of Delphi to ask for its advice, and was told that he should deface the currency, and Diogenes, realizing that the oracle meant that he should deface the political currency rather than actual coins, traveled to Athens and made it his life's goal to deface established customs and values." The difficulty of the prophesy to Diogenes lies in the fact that the alter of the currency, refers to the change of the political currency and state currency but also to the actual face of the coin. With the current socioeconomic chaos seems that the prophecy is solved because the currency has no face anymore. Economy acts out through fiat money, let it be done money. Money counts time and only, time of exchange, time of investment. The central image on the coin doesn't exist, the superior face is gone and we don't believe in it; and if we have any memories or symptoms of belief they count nothing. We are sure now, more than any other time that capital exists in its own world, in its own time, acting out capital. Diogenes was a living example of another possible political currency but he didn't amend the face of the actual coin, the currency itself. I wonder at the current political and economic situation without thinking the "coin's" altered symbolic, material and representational state we will end up talking and acting politically although there is something more drastic to be done. In order to alter the political currency we need to think of it in connection to the changed currency. We cannot distinguish those two. If the face is already destroyed then our work is to make time, separate of the entropy of capital and political examples.

Note - The Open, Man and the Animal by G.Agamben

2010-07-04T06:59:00.000-07:00

"..Every environment is a closed unity in itself, which results from the selective sampling of a series of elements or "marks" in the umgebung*, which, in turn, is nothing other than man's environment. The first task of the researcher observing an animal is to recognize the carriers of significance which constitute its environment. These are not, however, objectively and factically isolated, but rather constitute a close functional- or as Uexkull prefers to say, musical- unity with the animal's receptive organs that are assigned to perceive the mark (Merkorgan) and to react to it (Wirkorgan). Everything happens as if the external carrier of significance and its receiver in the animal's body constituted two elements in a single musical score, almost like two notes of the "keyboard in which nature performs the supratemporal and extraspatial sympony of signification", though it is impossible to say how two such heterogenous elements could ever have been so intimately connected.."

*the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series in which we see a living being moving

GOLD, 2010, Athens

2010-06-10T09:47:00.000-07:00

Gold hath these Natures: Greatnesse of Weight; Closeness of Parts; Fixation; Pliantnesse, or softnesse; Immunitie from Rust; Colour or Tincture of Yellow. Therefore the Sure Way, (though most about,) to make Gold, is to know the Causes of the Severall Natures before rehearsed, and the Axiomes concerning the same. For if a man can make a Metall, that hath all these Properties, Let men dispute, whether it be Gold, or no?

Note of 2007 / HYMBRO, 2007, performance, installation, video, sound, Fisher Landau, NY

2010-06-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

HYMBRO / Featuring: Eric Angles, Ronnie Bass, Kerstin Bratsch, Mira Dancy, Debo Eilers, Allison Katz, Adele Roder, Davis Rhodes, Sara Stracey, Nic Xedro

The installation stimulates a company’s booth. The performance tendency is to use and connect two notions, which underline the big crash of the 30’s and the oil crisis at the end of the 70’s in order to come up with a new character that corresponds to those two but at the same time formulates it’s individual need at the present moment. The installation consists of a small concrete stoop that is two steps high, an 8’ vertical wooden panel, a table and a chair. The panel, table and chair are painted light green. This installation is intended to provide the space for several actions and characters to exist. The main character first presented the fictitious company HYMBRO during the opening of the 2nd year MFA show at the Fisher Landau center for the Arts. This character was a sales person who was 'as if' hired by the company HYMBRO to expand and sale time. The following is the sells person’s script: We expand the time There is no visual there is only time And we expand it for you, with you We know it We all know it That there is no visual There is only time And we expand it For you With you I know it You know it We all know it That there is no visual There is only time Who expands the night Expands the time And we do it For you With you We expand the time Inspired by musical cinema of the 30s, punk attitudes of the late 70s, and selling gestures of Wall Street, I composed a series of movements that were mostly focused on the hands. The sales person’s slow clapping could signify the expansion of time. A fast repetitive movement of one finger could signify a sale. During the performance the action was split into two parts. The first was of the character producing music and recording the predominant lines of the script. The second aspect consisted of the composed song looping as the character moved about the installation with gestures and rhetoric of sales. As the performance progressed, the monologue became more assertive of the company’s aim and philosophy. Some aspects of the speech began to loop in the recording as well. During the performance the character would reposition a video camera, recording details of the set and cropped images of the particular repetitive actions and hand signals. This documentation was edited with textual graphics and was later used as a promotional video for HYMBRO. It was projected on to the standing wall of the HYMBRO installation and played throughout the duration of the exhibition and consequently during the other performances.

First is the idea of exchange and how this idea can take various forms starting from a symbolic exchange, to a wishful function of commodity, to the absolute abstraction. Marx noted that money, liberated from the metal in the form of paper currency becomes a pure sign. “Scientific reflection” gave rise to an information technology that enabled the abstraction of the money sign even beyond paper; in becoming software that can be sold over and over again, the concept itself becomes currency.
Second is making up a word, which will signify, a company without character, and that will be the fiction of this project as I ( hired by the company) will be responsible to find its character.
Third will be to create a set or a meeting point where those activities of investigation will take place.
Fourth will be to make notes and come up with a final element or conclusion of this research, which it may happen during the process of the whole event.

The third section, which is the visual aspect of this project, is an installation that includes stairs made out of concrete, a panel that it will function as a place of display/projection and a table where several operations of recording, reading and making of music for the actions will be produced.

1930
stock market crash
1973
Oil crisis
2007
'whatever' crisis

Minute
Story telling
The steps
Why asking to receive a tiny object, tiny friend’s object
Make up a story for them
It’s almost impossible to ask
Possessed by the gesture and the object itself
Making of a story
What is reminding me
Wim Wenders
When the world looses its storytellers
It looses its childhood
A child’s play
The moment that something is signified as such then it becomes this, and it’s real.
IS This work about reality, realities?

Probably is a stupid idea, when you follow a specific strategy over another form, the possibility of coming up with something that stands for its own is almost impossible.
Through constant observation and then reconsideration
there are more than one plans in any structure
In order to come up with something that will effect those different plans and reformulate the structures, understand them, read them
What kind of stories/objects you can bring to the world?
Unmonumental, at the New Museum, a show of the pedestal. Again a reminding of an ended history. Being at the archeological museum Props of the no-revolution Hugging from the ceiling To paint is to touch the touch. How much effort your gesture has?
How much do you want to make a move? Probably there is not only showing up of technique (what performative is) of the constant tourism, the consumer of 9,99 cent shops
Material has lost its effect.
And really doesn’t matter
Are there any Politics of action?
Arendt’s point, crucial to understand how human freedom is experienced and can be preserved is that there are two fundamental types of thinking about politics, of defining politics. On the one hand, you can think of politics as government, domination of some people (one or a few or many) over other people, requiring the threat or use of violence. On the other hand you can think of politics, as the organization or constitution of the power of people have when they come together as talking and acting beings. Here her emphasis is on preserving the peoples’ power in a constituted government: potestas in populo
For the concrete steps
The between space of building’s front steps
Not yet public
Not yet private
I would think that as a mode
The front steps is a meeting place where any kind of situations exist between public and private is the opportunity to wait to watch to hear
To imagine Imagination is possibilities Hope is a word that I like to think of
No more comments

NEW TASTE
NEW FRESH
NEW WAYS

Can I tell
Can I be with you, a minute
Can I talk a language when comes to
Action?
Instant action
The Hysteric

Voice
The voice

YES

The objects I received for the making of the performance are not for display.
They function as propositions. The making of a company. HYMBRO, no meaning word, as all companies it will underline what kind of gestures the subject, the character has this ready made subject, at the steps, will have.
Artaud’s idea of language on the stage:
The code language and the musical notations in order to compose symbols that will be precise and immediately legible. The idea of attitude, the gestures can be found in those objects.
A piece of paper with lines, forms and colors can inscribe a way of moving fingers or saying a word a tone higher or lower.

Similarity, the ten thousand and one facial expressions captured in the form of a mask.

Correspondences

Different extensions
The painting, the miniature, the gesture, the action, the singing, the lights
We are not free and the first thing that theater can teach us is first of all, that.

I asked for contribution.
I don’t want any other text than the text that has already given to me.
Those miniatures are texts.
The instant translations are also part of the text.
They are made for this translation and it was about time.

I will agree at this point with Kaja Silverman's statement on analogies. An analogy that is not logical but ontological relationship. Its not a correspondence from 1 to 2 but a correspondence to one thing with another thing. It can involve two things together in an ontological kinship, or overwhelmed similarities.

The objects base
And the platform
The story is before

SUKU LIVE 12/6/2010

2010-06-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE by SUKU

DON'T TAKE KINDNESS FOR WEAKNESS

INTO THE LIGHT
INTO THE FIRE

WELCOME YOU
TO THE CAMP

SUKU
ARE SU AND KU
BUT YOU ARE JUST YOU

PianoWhale

2010-06-04T03:32:00.000-07:00

Note- Pier Paolo Pasolini

2010-05-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

No desert will ever be more deserted than a house, a square, a street where people live one thousand nine hundred and seventy years after Christ. Here is solitude. Side by side with your neighbor, dressed by the same department stores, clients of the same shops, readers of the same newspapers, viewers of the same TV shows, it is silence. There is no other metaphor, for the desert than everyday life: and its silences are internal. It is one blessing of peace. But peace is not always better than war. In a peace dominated by power, one can protest by refusing to exist(...) (p. 35-36)

Note

2010-05-03T07:31:00.000-07:00

I hate vampires

Lately there have been bunch of them around

I don't mean to be aggressive but

Sometimes it just happens

I don't believe in the spirituality

Of anyBody

I am not vegetarian either

I was once

and it felt I was thinking too much

The body

is movement-image

Four dimensional

So, it is not flat

It is changeable

It travels

And it

breathes

So, I don't need to exercise a lot

Copying

Miming

Writing again

From what it was written

Speaking again

From what it was said

And later finding something

to work with

With the facebook friends

Invisible qua visible in the moment

Surviving and vulnerable

As it can be

What its skin is able to sensor?

Urban environments

Network communities

Exiles

Wars

From what the body is made of?

Holes

Abstract signs

Translations

Upon translations

Voice

Rhythms

Intensities

Pitches

Volumes

Speakers or microphones

Both

Center

made by

Its

Exits

Marina Abramovic Toy, 2010

2010-04-15T16:16:00.000-07:00

Note to NY

2010-04-15T13:11:00.000-07:00

Hello NY,

You look very very pretty today
I like the way you smell, some kind of a perversive sticky little thing in the air
and the trees are greener and the chicken ready to go
I like it here on the bench when i lean on the side and i catch a side of yours
returning home, one or the other, closer is a dog, further away a black bird
one's plastics left over, nails holding dirt

If you promise me you'll stay pretty i'll stay more

Note

2010-04-13T13:39:00.000-07:00

When I use the I in my notes it doesn't mean that my notes are personal or refer to me.
Also, that I doesn't mean one I, my I and only. The notes are texts that carry a certain function because they depend on another text in order to appear. In comparison to any other form of written text the note can be found stuck on a fridge, it can sometimes be a doodle, one sentence, fragment of thought written parallel to a printed text inside a book, in a magazine, on a receipt, on a staple. Notes are peripheral texts that add, erase, make comments and file. The underlined text in a book is also a note. When you read and you exclude a passage from the whole by underlining it, most times you are using a pencil or a pen or these fluo markers which I remember liking when I was little, but at that time I was underlining everything. Anyways, similarly when I have a fragment written here, it is an underlined text taken from a book or a magazine or it is a text I found somewhere, maybe I can call it underline instead of note. Well, hm, I'll keep it with this name for now. The note name.

Note/ Guy Debord/ Howls for Sade (fragment)

2010-04-11T09:12:00.000-07:00

Voice 2: We were ready to blow up all the bridges, but the bridges let us down.

Voice 1: Twelve-and -a-half-year-old Madeleine Reineri, who under the stage name "Pirouette" starred in the Alpes-Grenoble radio program Happy Thursdays, threw herself into the Isere River.

Voice 2: Mademoiselle Reineri of the Europe Quarter, you still have your wonderstuck face and that body, the best of promised lands. Like neon lights, the dialogues repeat their definitive truths.

Voice 1: I love you.

Voice 4: It must be terrible to die.

Voice 1: See you later.

Voice 4: You drink far too much.

Voice 1: What are childhood loves?

Voice 1: I knew it. And there was a time that I regretted it very much.

Voice 4: Whould you like an orange?

Voice 1: The beautiful breakups of volcanic islands.

Voice 1: In the past.

Voice 4: I have nothing more to say to you.

Voice 2: Once again, after all the untimely answers and the aging of youth, night falls from on high.

Voice 2: Like lost children we live our finished adventures.

Note/ if i was to make movements for this text i would love to be the door

2010-04-03T18:11:00.000-07:00

1. Configuration of the Room Entrance

1.1 Entrance to the room is made more difficult by the need to negotiate six steps.

1.1.1 The steps lead 'upwards', to a 'higher' plane.

1.2 The door is located on the stairs (second step) This poses a further, but not the final, difficulty.

1.3 Blocked by the risers, the door only opens outwards, away from the stairway, much like those pivoting barriers, at certain border crossings that are set up against concrete blocks, so they can only open opposite the direction of travel.

1.3.1Opening the door forces one to take a step backwards, down on the first step

(p.92)

The Poetics of a Wall Projection
Jan Turnovsky

Note

2010-04-02T16:27:00.000-07:00

When you are back lingering me from the point of question to the question mark I am out. Your ceiling demonstrates suffering and I can't stand watching it. I closed the door behind, it is the same morning. You are asleep and I am counting stars. Animals in diagrams, thinking ways of shrinking. Hold my throat/stab my back/squeeze my nipple/scratch my ear/bite my fingers/ lick my head/stand on your feet/fall down/ all/ tender kiss me/glue me on your chest and try elsewhere. This is how the night unfolds and now I only see the question marks.

There is no certainty, we are words; the closer i look at you, the further away you move, the closer you look at me the further away I move

Note

2010-03-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

There is a particular thing I enjoy using only my portable computer or any random computer to make something. First of all I don't need to set up again and again a kind of a personal environment in order to focus. When I switch on my computer my environment is in front of me and it is waiting for me. When I use a random computer I can very easily set up an environment by uploading files from my hard drive, from dvds and documents out of my email account. On the screen I have folders, shapes and ideas. I don't need to go to any store, wonder around, searching for what I need and what it would be useful for me to use. Archives, articles, folders, staff in general are such a complicated thing. You need at least a permanent address to own shelves and a room to have pencils, folders with images and heavy duty books. But if you don't have specific address, if you don't find it appealing to work full time jobs to pay the rent and if work is not one of your favorites, maybe you just end up hung out here and there. The other day I went to the Pearl, the art store on Canal street, and I felt so confused. All this brushes and paints and things I didn't know why I had to get even one of them to use. There was this red pastel and it was another red beside it and then another and another. They looked so much the same the one beside the other and it didn't make to me any difference if they differ even a tiny bit as they were on the same shelf with the similar uniformed labeled template, it made me nervous even to watch them. Then, I thought well, in order to spend time with them and figure out their differences and how to use them, I had to either buy them or steal them; and then on top of that I needed paper and bla bla bla and I forgot why I needed to put those reds on a paper in the first place. I will do the test on a blank document see the differences and figure out how it does it and if it does something I will save it and keep it on one of my folders. Maybe, not necessarily soon, perhaps at a particular moment, it will become something.
Possible a copy, there won't be any bricks if you wonder what is behind the curtain, it might become three or four dimensional. It could be made out of a material which possesses fast appearances and disappearances. What kind of material would that be? Digitized signals, waves, electric colorful pigments of movement; and meanwhile, until my file will shift dimensions, I can choose to do nothing.

Note (Aristotle from Poetics) and questions

2010-03-25T22:19:00.000-07:00

Story Line

A perfect tragedy should be arranged not on the simple but on the complex plan. It should moreover imitate the actions which excite pity and fear, this being the distinctive mark of tragic imitation. It follows plainly, in the first place, that the change of fortune presented must not be the spectacle of the virtuous man brought from prosperity to adversity: for this moves neither pity nor fear, it merely shocks us. Nor, again, that of a bad man passing from adversity to prosperity: for nothing can be more alien to the spirit of tragedy; it possesses no single tragic quality- it neither satisfies the moral sense nor calls forth pity or fear. Nor, again, should be downfall of the utter villain be exhibited. A plot of this kind would doubtless satisfy the moral sense, but it would inspire neither pity nor fear; for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves. Such an event, therefore, will be neither pitiful nor terrible. There remains, then, the character between these two extremes- that of a man who is not eminently good and just, yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous.
A well constructed plot should therefore be single in its issue, rather than double as some maintain. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad. It should come about as the result not of vice but of some great error or frailty, in a character either such as we have described, or better rather than worse. The practice of the stage bears out our view. At first the poets recounted any legend that came in their way. Now, the best tragedies are founded on the story of a few houses - on the fortunes of Alcmaeon, Oedipus, Orestes, Meleager, Thyestes, Telephus, and those others who have done or suffered something terrible. A tragedy, then, to be perfect according to the rules of art, should be of this construction.

Questions:

What is the role of the chorus in the drama? How does the chorus follow the character?
For performance art, the drama is already staged and the performer returns the role of the audience to the audience, by embodying different states of spectatorship.
The performer is a spectator, meaning she is already part of an ongoing spectacle that she responds to. She is a part of the spectacle, she is not outside nor inside, she is already a part of it. Does then a performance piece need a plot? No, and that's what makes performance art different to theater or any other performance (music, dance, cinema) because it mostly demands the performer's actuality and truthful response to the ongoing, present drama, life as it is. It is the way chorus responds to Oedipus or speaks the secrets of Antigone. If life as it is, it is already a spectacle, her response to the main characters turns flat. The chorus is the agora already on stage. This is how it is and it is part of the performance to show that there is a way that this body, our bodies on stage, can take responsibility for the acts of the main characters, the rulers of the drama. If there is something to focus upon now it is the making of that body, how to awaken it, how to create the language and the movements that speaks, and how they can be activated.
Is it possible to understand that there is no separation between drama and real life?
If everything is spectacle including our own bodies what she wants to show is that she still can receive as if for the first time and the gestures will be of that exact moment. The gestures cannot be fully prepared yet cannot exist without ground, without memory, a memory of reality. They can't be from something personal, as they will limit her focus, but they can't be without her heart because that will limit her expressions. The choric body, khoriko soma, which occupies but doesn't territorialise, which speaks out truth, undefined but specific in movement.
Some performances want just to add another layer of spectacle on the existing one by using the same violent, grotesque tricks. Others assume that violating the body will give examples of how spectacle can be harmed but in the end they only achieve alienation. Some want just to comfort themselves and all of those around them, to make them forget, to make them sleep a deeper sleep than they are already in.
As, I understand it, there is not an either or not, there is neither against or acceptance, but response. Response maybe replaced with the word come back or feedback but maybe it is not the right word. I am using this word without the reactionary root which it carries, but well, this come back, this response, the feedback, has nothing to do with tricks and examples. It is immediate and it is actual and it is disturbing how more actual it can be.

So when the performance starts?
Does it end?
Does it need to be good?

For the witch, ruptures come in time and out of smell.

Note

2010-03-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

Hi flower
under the shadow
there is a flower
Approach.

Note (from Cocteau to somewhere of less loneliness)

2010-03-23T15:09:00.000-07:00

From Cocteau

Free to choose the faces, the shapes, the gestures, the tones, the acts, the places that please him, he composes with them a realistic documentary of unreal events. The musician will underline the noises and silences.

to somewhere of less loneliness

Free to choose the faces, the shapes, the gestures, the acts, the places that please us, we compose a realistic documentary of unreal events. We are actors and at the same time composers and we will do music which will underline our noisy and silent acts.

Note (Cixous)

2010-03-23T15:04:00.000-07:00

She must write herself because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of he liberation has come will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history, first at two levels that cannot be separated.
a) Individually. By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more that confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display- the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. Our naphtha will spread, throughout the world, without dollars-black or gold-nonassessed values that will change the rules of the old game. To write.
An act which will not only "realize" the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength;

Note

2010-03-22T20:53:00.000-07:00

By this drop of your blood, I can see through your dynamic impulse. All the murdered lips mark hollow stars. With sparked arch and sparked ankle. This is this. If you like it. Dig me with no end, more inside. continue repeat. The thick painted red, which was always sweating by our enormous humidity, needs no detailed explanation. Zoom in. She and He speak in reverse.

Note

2010-03-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

Excuse me..
blue background
hands and feet in opposite directions

She is strange, with short hands
different when standing on her toes
whistle
the triumph of youth

Reject habits

run with me
faster than beauty

Note

2010-03-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

Constant rejection of preservation,
without others there is no survival-the ecstatic is not immanent
Not out of dialectics, out of absolutes
Letting go
To detach
Temporality
the time is the concept of itself
Dialectic without completion, a shape outside the seen, the form can only be presence
The face cannot be plastic
The otherness of other cannot be form
Self-fashioning
Strategy and hiding
At once two and in a distance

Scene
to arrive at a scene
to assume shape
shape is not matter
it derives within itself
time again that defines any given shape

Try alternatives alter alternatives

This is a party, Athens/NY, 2007

2010-03-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

Where are we my friends?
We are nowhere
And we are here again and again
I feel how real you are
Open mouth
No teeth
This is a house
No, but maybe yes
It could be a dog
A very happy dog
This is nothing
I’m here for no reason
This is nothing
And I’m nothing at all
If the party stops
It’s only depressive normality, extreme separations.
Depressive normality, lonely crowds, impossible utopias, society of society for society

This is a party
A collection of places, infrastructures, dreams, nightmares, bodies, thoughts and desires
Desires that circulate among us among the places we move and meet
What about, the formation of sensibility as a force
The sensual of the sensitive
Of the sensitive sensuality
The relationship as no way meeting from the accident to the no resisting full ending
Or starting again and again

Sadness comes when I can’t touch your face. When you think that relations are only for you and me and not for him, who I desired just for ones, in a bar
You hate my character
I hate your flat imagination

This is our party
Me, and my friends have a party
We have been raised as survivors
We have been raised with concepts and projects
An assumption that everything must be tolerated, that everything can be thought so long as it is recognized as being without direct repercussions on the structure of society, of its institutions and of state of power
Any idea can be admitted; its expression should even be favored, so long as the social and the state rules are accepted
The freedom of thought must be total, as well as the freedom of expression in principle, but we must not want the consequences of our thoughts as far as the collective life is concerned

No, this is not a house
This is not a temple
But who owns the keys?
We want the keys and no one knows where we can find them
You should have the keys
Don’t you?

We don’t have any keys and we walk on the desert
We don’t care how many days or nights
We don’t need the keys
Because
We shall see
Two or three comments for the design, please
It really has two plans

with Allison Katz, 2008

2010-03-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

A.K What is your understanding of the difference between Desire and Pleasure?

G.S Desire is an unspeakable essence that exists outside of me and needs me to complete its purpose. Desire exists for me without me. Navigates my steps and I am the where and how that doesn’t exist yet with me. Desire is not an object, it’s the impulse to make, an impulse to do something in relation to someone who you desire in order the desire to exist.

Pleasure is complete

No thinking about pleasure

Pleasure exists in the mind of heart

A.K Where is the body?

G.S

Body is earth

Earth doesn’t have any purpose to stop it’s rhythm

Layers

Archaic evidences

The skin

Holes

Surface

Digging inside the earth

More layers

Stretched evidences

Naming again

A.K What time is it?

G.S Sun on the leaves of orchids

A.K How did you know?

G.S I knew by love

A.K Do you agree with Kristeva, "Psychoanalysis tells us there is no dialogue, just desires clashing, forces colliding"?

G.S

I knew by love

And

There

there

Was no dialogue

A.K Do you agree with Joan Didion, working through the question "of whether or not you could go home again," writing in 1967, that "Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in our thirties were born into the last generation to carry the burden of 'home,' to find family life the source of all tension and drama."

G.S

Home is blue details

on the corners of each door

I am with

You

Touching the walls

Smelling your effort to protect us

My mother

In the family

On the table

That we eat our bread every day

That’s how

I learned

I don’t know anything about Didion

A.K What comes to mind when I write the name A N N A A H K M A T OVA?

G.S A long narration/ Something with a tragic beginning and a tragic end

A.K A poem of yours, please:

G.S

Poem

A tiger mouse

A.K And in the year 2012?

G.S

Only weather reports for an entire year

Heavy rains like in the tropical forests

A.K The compliment of color is _light again_________. Bonus:

One of Gaugin's most beloved paintings is titled, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

Romance or Anarchy?

G.S

Anarchic Romance

New Seductions

1-14

2010-03-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

do you like art?

I never thought of it

Vancouver (another other place) This cold place where you need to take the car and go there, from here somewhere far away. The painting can be a place far away from the surface of the painting. You need that kind of painting as a fantasy/quilt/avoiding in order to operate painting.

Memory is different when is linear than when it’s in layers and we live in both ways of memory. Conflicted about them, collapsing in another’s ground. Well, what about the ways of creating memory with someone? In my opinion is such a rare thing to happen. We need to talk more about that.

Lots of Gods

Different temples

(that's what you said?)

No I don't read Nietzsche

Or, yes I do

For the HA!

The laughing masks can't be upside down to create another expression

It is more about the, with a common laughing cut each one laughs differently.

Super subject is the shoe designer of a huge company who dreams his shoes wore and used not only just as shoes but as codes that someone can totally identify with. Living the dream in order to continue produce interesting buyable designs. Beautiful/sexy/fast. These are some words that fit to that term.

Why you use your name easier when you are a written text and not a visual text? What's the difference?

A dead body is never a written body but a visual body

Wish you'll think of the poetry tomorrow morning.

10.

So nice to see you

would love if you come by again

except signs we’ll make toasts

Near by my house there is an indian restaurant and a cinema.

11.

don't want this to end in no 10

12.

May i come to your place? I’ve never seen your place. I would love to see it. I heard the door bell on the phone yesterday. Is there a corridor? That's how it sounded. Wooden floors for sure. Lots of staff on the floor and everywhere. Not many echoes.

13.

anyway

sad you can't make it for a drink

Next time maybe

Do you feel ill?

Make a cup soup if you don't feel like making a soup.

I love cup soups

tomato

chicken

and the etc

14.

13 is bad luck?

not anymore

Yes

sure

why not

Not

any

note book, pencil on paper, NY, 2007

2010-03-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Note

2010-03-12T12:32:00.000-08:00

#210 | “How would it feel if a foreign policeman was beating you up in Athens? (the Greek uprising is truly going European!)

(article written by an Occupied London author for our friends at Last Hours, on the eve of tomorrow’s general strike. Continuous updates and photos, on both websites, tomorrow!)

It is early in the morning of Tuesday, March 9th. Bemused audiences tuned in to an Athens news station to listen to an evidently uncomfortable police spokesperson. How could he not be? He must explain a rather embarrassing incident: days earlier, on March 5th, the police had tear-gassed Manolis Glezos in the face for trying to prevent a youth’s brutal arrest [photo]. Glezos is 88 years old today; it was almost 70 years ago, on May 30 1941, in Nazi-occupied Athens that he and Apostolos Santas climbed up the Acropolis and tore down the Swastika – an action for which he was arrested and tortured the following year.

Trying to justify the police’s action and to show that things must stay under control at any cost, the spokesperson made quite a revealing statement: “if the local police fail at their task”, he claimed, “the EU and the Greek government are ready to dispatch a 7,000-strong European police force to repress what might seem like an upcoming revolt”. “Imagine it!”, he added, “how would it feel if a foreign policeman was beating you up in the streets of Athens?” A funny question, that one. You would imagine police baton blows feel similar regardless of the passports of those holding them. Whether or not his statement was a slip-of-tongue, it definitely seems to hold some validity: a supra-national police force, the “European Gendarmerie Force” (EGF) does exists already and is prepared to take operations in countries where local governments invite it [http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/oct/eu-gendarmerie-treaty-sept-2007.pdf]. The Greek government have so far declined to answer questions on the issue in parliament. I don’t think Manolis Glezos was expecting to see German public forces on the streets of Athens again in his lifetime. But then again, if they tear-gas the way the Greek cops do, there won’t be that much for anyone to see…

General strikes are more common in Greece than in most European countries – but still, they tend to come in the rate of one or two per year – not per calendar month. Thursday’s general strike is the country’s third (two full-day and one half-day) in the few weeks alone. Panepistimiou Avenue, part of the main protesting route – and one of Athens’ major thoroughfares – has been closed off for a week by strikers of Olympic Air; on March 10th, an attorney general ordered the police to disperse the crowd of about 2,000 who have gathered there.

The country’s official printing-house (where state laws are printed in order to come into effect) is currently occupied by employees in protest against the newly-introduced austerity plan. The general accounting office (this, ironically, in charge of monitoring the effects of the implementation of the austerity plan) is also under occupation by its employees. In the small northern city of Komotini employees at a local troubled company went straight to the source and occupied two of the city’s main bank branches.

December’s revolt had been a strong warning sign. The “700 euro generation” (in a country where everyday living expenses closely compete to the UK’s) had every reason to revolt. The death of a 15-year old boy? Cities smash and burn for days. An “austerity plan” pushing labour rights back by a few decades overnight; severe wage cuts, VAT increases, pension-freezes…

It is Wednesday, March 10th – the eve of the third recent strike in Greece. “I don’t really earn enough to get a cab to tomorrow’s demonstration”, writes a commentator on Athens IMC. “And there’s no public transport, as everyone is participating in the strike. Good for them. We are driving down there tonight, staying with a friend. And we’ll be using the car’s engine oil to wash the streets, our little gift to the thugs of the police’s motor-cycle Delta force.” There is anger building up in Athens’ streets and many expect to see it outpouring in the event that multi-national force descends in the city, if not before… Whether national or international, next time Manolis Glezos takes on the security forces he most certainly will not be alone.

Failed astronaut

2010-03-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

Failed astronaut

We had the discussion for so many times

and you’re keep on repeating

that this is the worst time

to fall in love

i say you are wrong

but who cares

i hear you are busy

sweaty like grey rat

making up new explanations

now this is now

this very moment

the moment we are talking

and we are having the conversation

this is the worst time

to fall in love

now you’re solving your life and all the conspiracies, you found the death of the fear of death, the cause-reason-effect of boring nights and numerous un-satisfactions, the below zero degree of sexual interactions tuned in neuron plastic power, it is your cock which is materialized perfectly in nicotine candies, since the last time

we had the discussion and i had sex with you

we had sex with three men after you

every night I give birth to millions of babies

who are ghostly good looking

looking at me when they depart from me

when all of those babies will arrive to mars

you will still be here on this planet.

Note

2010-03-10T09:25:00.000-08:00

Pathological Liar/Stalker
March 12th-April 3rd 2010
Fredric Snitzer Gallery 2247 NW 1ST PL Miami, FL 33127

I am a fan of places I've never been to. Where I live, nobody knows you, nobody has

met you yet. You are contingent to my screen-saver, to the thousands of headless torsos in the chat-rooms... I am your audience and as such, at some point, I felt like I was dating my father or my mother (for the impossibility of it). I find that with you, truth reveals itself in a fictional structure; and the reality of our construction depends on the relational aspect of that exchange and also on the contraband of your photo. Since I 'met' you, my reality became abstraction and like on the verge of modernism you where built as speculation while I turned into a verb. In these paintings, I have no interest in the narratives of what went down between us, but instead, I focused on how for desire to remain desire it had to ignore the very mark that constructed it as such. If I have to locate desire in your body or in mine, it will be in the head. I’m omitting it now. I’m not sure if the word representation would be the right one here, maybe yes, I rather think of these paintings as presentations. Or the discourse without text for the ads and the posters I’m distributing in Europe to find you. In any case, as I was saying, the subjects depicted are sometimes generic headless totems, rocks that look like people, unfinished torsos from bad sculptors in the 30’s, red jackets and black pants ‘walking’ backwards and forward. They sort of echo the basic premise for exchanging one’s own nude photos on the chat room: Always headless, nobody will know who you are...You’ll avoid blackmail. I only have headshots of you; you never got one from me. On our chat sessions 3 modes of exchange took place. I build you up, I erase; I attack. In all 3, there was the possibility of losing control materially, of not being able to direct that curve, or this conversation. The paintings that came from the chat room are now becoming a poster, an ad, a letter. So, in that (sort of) state of becoming, the performance that was started by your image became extra-pictorial drama, and at the end, what was left wasnʼt just a bunch of photos or paintings or letters, but rather the scene of our exchange, its process and the memory of it's materiality, whatever that was. Diego Singh. Miami, February 2010.

Note

2010-03-08T19:06:00.000-08:00

"And Counting..." Wafaa Bilal is performing for 24 hours at the Elisabeth Foundation for the Arts

“And Counting… is the location Bilal’s performance creates. This decisive, irreversible action will establish an embodied, and, as long as Wafaa Bilal is alive, timeless memorial to the nightmare of the Iraq war, with the war’s most devastating consequences engraved not only in Bilal’s consciousness but also approximated in the flesh.
Once the map of Iraq is tattooed onto Wafaa Bilal’s back and the 5,000 red dots representing fallen U.S. soldiers are met by the 100,000 green dots designating fallen Iraqis, the latter visible only under UV light, there is no turning back. Tattoos are almost impossible to erase, as many soldiers have learned. They are a constant reminder of an irrevocably decisive moment. Monuments, by contrast, although built with good intentions and designed to help us remember, often simply accelerate our capacity to forget. They inevitably become absorbed into our visual landscape. Remembering is directly connected to the body—sensual stimuli activating hidden memories all the way back to childhood, as Proust, for one, demonstrated with such elegance. So the act of engraving memory onto oneself is an attempt to secure an everlasting re-membrance of the past. " Carol Becker

Note

2010-03-04T14:15:00.000-08:00

KS: The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice provides a much more compelling account of gender than does Oedipus myth- one based on mortality instead of castration. The story is also crucial because it helps us to see the foundational nature of gender: The turn away from woman is a turn away from all relationality. Ovid gives the myth a redemptive coda as well. In Book XI of the Metamorphoses, Orpeus is attacked by a band of women who say "Look there's the man who hates us" They strip him of his power to coerce and compel nature, and they dismember his body. Orpheus is transformed by death. When he arrives in Hades, he searches for his "dear" Eurydice and, when he finds her, lovingly embraces her. They spend their time walking side by side through Hades and reenacting what happened on the slope leading from Hades to earth in a way that undoes its violence- turning it into a reversible and ontologically equalizing analogy. Sometimes Eurydice walks ahead and Orpheus follows, and at other times he walks ahead and she follows; and when it is his turn to look back, his look no longer kills. In the first part of his version of the myth, Ovid tell us what heterosexuality is. In the second, he shows us what heterorelationality would look like- if we were ever to have it.

Artforum, February 2010, George Baker in conversation with Kaja Silverman

I Formations, Design, 2009

2010-03-03T17:15:00.001-08:00

2010-03-03T17:11:00.001-08:00

2010-03-03T17:06:00.000-08:00

INPUT at the Armory Show 2010

2010-03-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

INPUT

The Armory Show 2010

The Collective Booth (L-18 on Pier 92)

March 4-7

INPUT #2: Spring 2010

Me, Myself and I (Conversations with Oneself)

Limited Edition of 300

Renée Vara, Executive Editor

Elena Bajo + Warren Neidich, Guest Editors

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS

Meena Alexander, Avi Alpert, Eric Anglès, Marco Antonini, Boško Blagojević, Daniel Bozhkov, Tyler Coburn, Jon Cuyson, Keren Cytter, Judy Dater, Josechu Dávila, Jeremiah Day, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Andrea Fraser, Vendela Fredricson, Pablo Helguera, Claire Hooper, Alexis Knowlton, Chris Kraus, Ajay Kurian, Sean Landers, Annika Larsson, Thomas Lawson, David Maljkovic, Amir Mogharabi, Anneè Olofsson, Alix Pearlstein, Falke Pisano, Angelo Plessas, Adina Popescu, Ana Prvacki, Sean Raspet, Georgia Sagri, Jakob Schillinger, Amie Siegel, Alexandre Singh, Andrew Smaldone, Erik Smith, Gabriele Stellbaum, Mathilde ter Heijne, Eve K. Tremblay, Heidi Voet, Martha Wilson

Me, Myself and I (Conversations with Oneself)

What is the role of the dialogic process in the production and construction of art?

The focus of this iteration, a project by Elena Bajo + Warren Neidich, is specifically centered on the simultaneous dialogues artists have with themselves including their associated internal conflicts and diatribes. As a dialogic exercise of self-discovery and/or reflexive mindfulness, this edition of INPUT seeks to explore how an artwork becomes a disembodied representation of an artist’s internal voice in all its contradictory and multifarious nature.

INPUT is a new aesthetic journal published by a nonprofit foundation directed under the curatorial mandate of “rotating guest editors” to produce interventions, actions and ideologies on contemporary currents and cultural conditions. Since change is the one constant in contemporary culture, INPUT seeks to capture the ephemeral and momentary visions of artistic conceptualism and free the medium from the typical monotony affiliated with commercial publications. Produced in bi-annual, limited editions, INPUT approaches the medium of the journal as an exhibition.

For subscription information please email

info@inputjournal.org

www.inputjournal.org

Note

2010-02-21T14:11:00.000-08:00

Parallel of Life and Art ICA, 1953, London

The Smithsons became in involved with the Independent Group as Peter was teaching at the Central School of Art and Crafts, London with Eduardo Paolozzi, who introduced them to Nigel Henderson in 1952. The Smithsons, Paolozzi and Henderson proposed the exhibition, Parallel of Life and Art to the ICA in March 1952 via Dorothy Morland, whom Paolozzi knew. The proposal was finally accepted in January 1953 with the support of Roland Penrose and sponsorship from Peter Gregory, Roland Jenkins, Jane Drew and Denys Lasdun. The exhibition was similar to Richard Hamilton’s Growth and Form in that it spanned science and art and created a total environment with a host of black and white images taken from a range of art and non-art sources. Curated by Reyner Banham, the show was polemical and controversial, the images shared an overall crudeness, vulgarity and rawness. This was not beautiful art, but processed images juxtaposed randomly. The exhibition also had a pedagogic purpose, and when the exhibition finished at the end of 1953, the panels were moved to the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, London where a stormy discussion took place on 2 December 1953, chaired by Banham. He referred to the debate in his seminal article ‘New Brutalism’ which celebrated the work of the Smithsons:

…students at the Architectural Association complained of the deliberate flouting of the traditional concepts of photographic beauty, of the cult of ugliness and ‘denying the spiritual in Man’. (Architectural Review, December 1955, p356)

The cover of the exhibition catalogue of Parallel of Life and Art, 1953

Installation shot of the exhibition, Parallel of Life and Art, 1953

It was by means of this exhibition and the creative collaboration with Henderson and Paolozzi that the Smithsons became involved in the Independent Group. The first, 1952–3 session of the Group had come to an end, and during 1954 the Group contributed more to the public programme at the ICA, including the lecture series Aesthetic Problems of Contemporary Art. Lawrence Alloway and John McHale convened the second session of the Independent Group on the theme of fine art and popular culture. Peter Smithson contributed to the fourth session in April 1955 on Advertising with Alloway, Paolozzi and McHale. An evening in which the Group focussed on American advertising imagery and symbolism.

The Independent Group stopped meeting towards the end of 1955, but the creative collaboration which lay behind its success continued throughout the lifetimes of the erstwhile members. In many ways, the apogee of the Group was the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in September and October 1956. The show consisted of twelve separate spaces, constructed by twelve groups of architect, sculptor and painter. The Smithsons created thePatio and Pavilion area with their old Parallel of Life and Art team, Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi. It consisted of a makeshift ‘lean to’ and patio area, strewn with random objects. Collaboration continued beyond This is Tomorrow,with Banham authoring a book on New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? in 1966. The Smithsons continued to work with Independent Group preoccupations with their design for the ephemeral, House of the Futurefor the Ideal Home exhibition in 1956 their article, ‘But Today We Collect Ads’ in ARK November 1957.

Digital Brand

2010-02-21T10:25:00.001-08:00

How do you want us to meet?

We will perpetualize ourselves

Borrowed name

And down the street

Draculaization

My dearest friend

It is a fact

It is silk hunger

All the way from the dead sea

How we will find food at this time of year?

The blood is not enough for both of us

The only solution

Dig the skin

Create a new digital brand.

No balls total equilibrium tank, 2010

2010-02-21T10:11:00.000-08:00

noetic installation

The Invisible Ones/text sound effects, 2009

2010-02-19T10:37:00.001-08:00

Saloon Promo

2010-02-18T22:49:00.000-08:00

Drop Out, 2008

2010-02-18T21:01:00.000-08:00

Color the eye/script, 2007

2010-02-18T14:32:00.000-08:00

Part I

There is no spare moon for cry
No moon
No moon
{ceremonial}
{green light from the crystal diamond}
{mouth opens in slow motion}
{sound of the falling water}
{perhaps now an alternative singing)

Part II
{feet, feet and water falling}

{mouth, close up, watching up the broken tooth}

Part III

{the same broken tooth}

Part IV

{close up,curtains,curtains folding and unfolding}

No ball total equilibrium tank, 2010

2010-02-17T22:11:00.000-08:00

noetic installation

Hymn

2010-02-17T21:27:00.000-08:00

Just a little bit of fuck
so everything will seem
just as much
unwordy
Just closer
so I can hear the breath of your branch
Also,
Don’t forget that this is not the best day
sun is forgotten
Death follows Z train
Death
hello
i know you are bad
bad
bad
bad
Grocery bag
Set price ritual
Click to download pdf
And when I click on it
i click it and continue
with the same
Clicking
Clicking
Clicking
Clicking
Clicking
Clicking

Seth Price Toy

2010-02-16T20:44:00.000-08:00

Means of operation

2008-11-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

Means of operation

Treat medium not as an issue of its history but in order to actualize concepts

History is a found object

Pleasure and survival

Survival involves tactical engagement and pragmatics/ speed decisions rather than mapping and narrativising. There is no narrative.

Being actual
Is not about reality but the virtualisation of reality

We say performative only because there is not another term

Understand that this is not a cultural product but a social product

There is no mode of address here that is particular, that keeps certain operations from taking place.

It repels like a mirror, and asks different questions in a direct way.

Do you see yourself???
DO you see yourself???

Endless rearticulation, miming (examining space and time without any knowledge), for another, not for internal process, not for the thing itself

The mirror is the center

Be present with the materials as operator of other systems

Design/advertisement/cooperation/expansion/transformation

The difference between skills, qualities that enable survival and those that enable courtship and pleasure

Replace every use of the word object with skin
There is only surface
I hate sculpture
There is no sculpture
Body, yes
But not object
Body is already texted and mapped and coded to be just sculptural
To be object - like
It is far more complex and far more direct

There is power yes
And waves
Forces
And there is a condition in which the wave has hit and which we are surviving and finding territory

Sometimes politics, are the waves (forces/the real) which are forgotten and repressed, thrown away from the conversation, under the conditions of the new function of floating and selling.

Repetition that is not a result of LACK of the efficacy of the signifier
Repeat the thing that functions
Not repeating to produce the real condition of its emptiness. Like if you say a word so many times that becomes a sound not a sign.
I repeat mechanisms, like flirting in a way that WORKS. Flirting WORKS
And you do it over and over again
Not because you want to show that flirting is empty. But because it does WORK

This is the bird showing its color and breast in the mating ritual. It is an efficient and necessary gesture that is repeated over and over again for survival.

Did you see your desires in my excess?

It is surface
Any surface
Making territory
It is repeated creation of surface and design that seduces.
In this case seduction creates territory

Territory is only ever made through the repetition of an aestheticized sign in a social milieu. A milieu of an exteriority

History is for strength not for sign
I don’t want sings and death narratives and I don’t want to massage history
I want to give backups to people who need them, not to melancholic narratives of artistic activity

And maybe I want to give seduction to other people
Things open to use by others

Relationship is here
Relationship is not here

Happy Endings

2008-09-30T07:28:00.000-07:00

It could be better if you weren’t feeling guilty
How can you ?
In every club each one waits for you
To come by
With the dirty jeans and your crappy shoes
Where are you now?
Filling holes, with news and lousy noise?
Everybody is waiting for you in the club

It could be better if you weren’t feeling so guilty
Suck a strange moment in those
Every parts of sand of yours
Point slightly the dirty point
Exactly the same than curry on
Break forms
Illusive time
Take over
Your hands and stop me
Club those lights and smoke machines
Little sugar sweat
Jump off me
I like this guy over there
Not you
Every corner of page
kissed by you
Write
Yea at this spot
Over there

It could be better if you weren’t feeling guilty
Sretch your mind
Look around
Every corner of page
Yea at this spot
Over there

Voice Mail

2008-08-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

The common is already there
I am the common
I am nothing
I am just a common
It is like I'm going to the super market
Or you get home and you make your bed
That's why I hate dirty beds

That's what you said?
That's what you said.

The example

2008-08-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

The example
Para-deigma
On one hand every example is treated in effect as a real particular case; but on the other, it remains understood that it cannot serve in its particularity. Neither particular nor universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as such, that shows its singularity.
Hence the proper place of the example is always beside itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds. This life is purely linguistic life. Only life in the word is undefinable and unforgettable. Exemplary being is purely linguistic being. Exemplary is what is not defined by any property, except by being called. Not being-red, but being called-red.

Nothing about love

2008-08-14T19:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t know anything about love
I would reinvent
Some of it
Instead of pretending to
This is what we’ve got
Passing the sugar
Three moments and stops
All over you
Since the begging
You’ve been telling stories of your past
Battles in the sea
Waves more
Waves more
Sudden distance
Acoustic my lips
Since the begging
You’ve been making marks on the ground
Down
To earth
Bones of
Light
And
Light

2008-08-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

HYMBRO, performance, installation, video, Fisher Landau, NY, 2008

2008-08-14T18:31:00.000-07:00

Note

2008-08-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

That is to say, once more, that my perception is outside my body, and my affection within it. Just as external objects are perceived by me where they are, in themselves and not me, so my affective states are experienced there where they occur, that is, at a given point in my body. Consider the system of images which is called the material world. My body is one of them. Around this image is grouped the representation, i.e. it's eventual influence on the others. Within it occurs affection,i.e its actual effort upon itself. Such is indeed the fundamental difference which every one of us naturally makes between an image and a sensation. Where we say that the image exits outside us, we signify by this that it is external to our body. When we speak of sensation as an internal state, we mean that it arises within in our body. And this is why we affirm that the totality of perceived image subsists, even if our body disappears, whereas we know that we cannot annihilate our body without destroying our sensations...
But we have to take into account the fact that our body is not a mathematical point in space, that its virtual actions are complicated by and impregnated with real actions,or, in other words, that there is no perception without affection. Affection is, then, that part of aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of external bodies;

2008-07-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

2008-07-08T18:11:00.000-07:00