A structure is beginning to emerge….
Magnetism
Mess
Modify?
So far we have talked about magnetism and mess but we havent covered edit yet. What does it mean to edit or not to edit information/to modify or not to modify?
We found this “how to” de clutter film. The rules:
Have you used it in the last year?
Is there a way you can use it in the next week?
Does it have sentimental value?
Do you have more than one?
If you can contain it keep it.
Generators convert energy into electricity.
One thing goes in and another comes out. What comes out can be made in one place and used somewhere else, once it is produced you can store it and use it days, weeks, months, or even years later.
How do we unpick this metaphor? The generator only makes one type of thing, it is sequential again but the thing it generates gives power to numerous other more chaotic things.
The generator is also used when something else is broken.
On the very first page of Richard Sennett’s Together this image is printed. Having only read a few pages, I can’t do justice to the text itself and it’s something we’ll need to look at but Tash and I were both drawn to the picture of the staircase as a staged image of co-operation. It’s difficult to articulate why it feels so relevant – the object in the image, still under production is beginning its life as a conveyor, a passage, an elevator, a descender and all hands are committed to different aspects of its manifestation. Alice posted a comment yesterday reminding us of the importance of the object – desks, working spaces and furniture. Can stairs be added to the list?
6’52” – 8’21” (Ingold Thinking Through Making)
“In “thinking through making” we can no longer regard making as a projection, as the projection of a ready made thought or concept on to raw material, or a projection of thought on matter as the traditional hylomorphic[1] model of making proposes. Rather, making is an ongoing binding together of material flows and sensory awareness. This is to think of making as a kind of weaving and to think of every artifact as a knot, something bound together out of lots of materials that all get scrunched up together or come together and all get tied up. That incidentally, is why I don’t use power point. There is a rational for this: I don’t believe in PowerPoint. When we use PowerPoint we project images on the screen; PowerPoint is the epitome of the logic of projection which I am arguing against. The reason why I like black boards is that the black board is the epitome of the process of creativity that I am arguing for. You stand at the black board and you scrape a line. Then your movement, your awareness, the trace of the materials are all bound up in that one performance and what you see is the outcome of that performance. That’s why I like blackboards” (Ingold, T)
In thinking through making Ingold suggests that the artifact cannot be understood as an idea simply projected on to a material.
Does this support our thinking that the learning resource cannot be a tool for projecting knowledge onto an artwork?
[1] Hylomorphism from the greek hyle (matter) and morphe (form). Whenever we read that in the making of artifacts, practitioners impose forms internal to the mind upon a material world ‘out there’ hylomorphism is at work.
We are sitting at the table right now. We are exciting by how the blog is working but struggling with its lack of simultaneity/equivalence. The problem is its linear reading, its sequence. We want to see the thoughts, ideas and references piled up, laid out, swapped round. There is equivalence here to e (the resource produced for the Boetti retrospective) but did e do something that this blog can’t do? Can Noticer do it?
In Thinking Through Making Ingold talks about some of the concepts from his recent book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art & Architecture
He says we should have a world of loose ends. We should have meshwork, rather than network, a tangle.
Thinking on from Fischli & Weiss’s can of worms or Hannah Arendt’s pandora’s box, the convoluted tunnels of the philosophers stone or the crest of Huberman’s wave…is there a necessary messiness to the anticipatory, curiosity driven Noticer; a Messwork ?
This reminds me, we must post something on our thoughts around editing…
I made some notes when i was reading I (not love) Information by Anthony Huberman.
We have at times referred to the Noticer as a machine. Why have we considered it in these terms?
Jo’s reservations about the machine as ordered (sequenced), not allowing for chaos seem relevant. The Noticer has to allow for chaos.
According to Raunig in A thousand Machines the machine used to be conceptualized as a “complex composition and an assemblage that specifically could not be grasped or defined through its utilization” p19 The machine as a technical, ordered object only emerged later.
Noticer – a machine for noticing
Curiositer – a machine for being curious
The machine is produced, it produces and it draws labor to it in its construction and its upkeep.
Marx in the ‘Machine Fragment’ doesn’t see the machine as purely technical or as purely a non-living thing but as consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs (A Thousand Machines p22). The machine is not simply a way to ease humans working conditions. Marx suggests humans become a “means” to the machine. Humans preserve the machine from disruption, they use their intellectual and cognitive labor to make it and they operate it.
Does the noticer keep noticing whilst we are not there?
The machine moves from being a tool (an aid) to the machine as a composite apparatus that dominates the labor force. The machine becomes an object that objectifies all knowledge.
The Noticer as a machine – pulling knowledge towards it, producing it and questioning it.
But if there is too much knowledge then curiosity is lost – according to Huberman. So does the Noticer simply generates another question?
Generative – generator – seem important here.
The Noticer is not mechanical, but the machine cannot be seen as simply mechanical either, for Marx it is not limited to its technical apparatus but instead it is a mechanical, intellectual and social assemblage. Knowledge and skills and people are accumulated to it.
‘I presume few would argue that the experience of art thrives at the top of the bell curve in a place of speculation (and not consensus), hypotheses (and not conclusions) and belief (and not knowledge). To stay at the top of the bell curve, as Buergel and Noack might say, the best art must make us not understand, which corresponds to a state of sustained curiosity that provokes us to change something about ourselves in an effort to understand. To stay at the top of the bell curve, as our diagram clearly shows us, requires stopping information.
Now more so than ever: the efficiency, quantity and immediacy of information and information-systems has placed art and the artistic gesture at risk of being identified, categorised, digested, cannibalised and made into information before it has a chance to begin being art. Curiosity is being castrated by information’.
Anthony Huberman, I (not love) Information, Afterall Issue 16 – Autumn/Winter 2007
We found this through Lizzie the Huberman pusher at Tate. In the context of art school I wonder if it can help us and our students to handle the demand for information and knowledge with care, so as to ensure we’re all surfing at the top of the curve and making great art as a consequence?
In Summer School we are also attempting to stay at the top of the bell curve – yes? If so, how do we maintain curiosity and avoid ‘understanding’? And how do we justify this? How do we avoid a great big fat belly full of information?
Is the clue in the object?