Lunch Bytes is hosting a second London event for its European edition discussion series, Structures and Textures: Digital Infrastructures and the Organisation of Space at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) on May 17, 2pm-4pm.
Following up on the recent Medium: Formatat the space in March, Professors Wendy Chun and Boris Groys, as well as London-based artists Paul Kneale and Hannah Sawtell will examine how the invisible infrastructures of the digital world “compose and condition the platforms, devices and applications we use daily”, modifying our perception and engagement with information.
As much focussed on the human relationships around art as it the critical dialogue, Kneale and Hefti will finish up what is a two-part exhibition and group residency conducting “idiosyncratic research while nightly hosting dinners in the foundation’s ad hoc kitchen space”.
They return on the Thursday to host a concert by Anne Imhof and a performance by Bonny Poon, as well as a an off-site sound installation by Library+ co-founder Megan Rooney in Galeries Lafayette’s retail location at Boulevard Haussmann.
There’ll be a programme of talks, performances and music, poetry readings and lectures Friday through Saturday, including new additions to the original Pleasure Principles group with live musical guests Oona ft. Alexandra (Poon, Max Brand, Anna Susanna Woof-Dwight) and Paolo Thorsen-Nagel.
Researcher, writer and curator Lucy Chinen and artist Paul Kneale will appear at Berlin’s Alte Münze for a talk event, Anton Vidokle; Hedi Slimane, on March 18.
In conjunction with the Harry Burke and km temporaer-curated Surplus Living group exhibition, running at the space until March 23, the discussion, moderated by Burke, will explore the problematic position increasingly occupied by artist as critical ‘brand’, in parallel to the growth of their role as a “specialised form of human capital”.
The event will feature a presentation by Chinen and Kneale along with a discussion around “surplus information or subjectivity performance within the marketised art world”, while recognising its own complicity within that.
If that isn’t unsettling enough, try this quote from the New Inquiry‘s Macolm Harris in Al Jazeerathat’s come with the press release:
“Technically speaking, human capital is the “present value of the person’s future expected earnings”; plainly speaking, it’s a person’s imagined value at sale.”
Paul Kneale is presenting solo exhibition monet’s garden, zuckerberg’s firewall at London’s ANDOR gallery, opening March 14 and running to May 3.
Expressing a contemporary limbo between modes of art production, the show explores a “temporary architecture of subjectivity” as constructed by the artist trapped in a purgatory between the “pictorialism of the pre-modern past” and a world of immateriality still fixated on the physical.
Transposing digital language to low-grade, archaic and tactile modes of print and production -across photocopy toner, spray paint, newsprint, plasterboard, painter’s dust sheets -Kneale attempts to express its inadequacy at this crossroads of the “self-in-transmission”.
The first time I encountered Paul Kneale’s work in real-time was via Skype at Harry Burke’s Poetry Reading at Test Centre in London. After some messing around with connections, Kneale’s face appeared, large and projected on a white wall, live from Tel Aviv and reading (“Profiles unfold. Viagra online. Fuck Google.”) over field recordings of the city, to an audience warmly received and largely familiar.
With that in mind, it makes sense that an interview with the mostly London-based globetrotter, originally from what he describes as a “blighted factory town” of Canada on the US border, should be carried out live via Google Drive. In Paris to organise the Pleasure Principles group exhibition, along with artist Raphael Hefti, there’s no indication of the Canadian accent in script, just a tendency to omit apostrophes in elisions and using double sentence spacing. It gives interesting insight into the processes of the person and his practice.
“Bold, semi-bold, matt, eggshell, off-white, raised, embossed, laser-cut,” suggests Kneale jokingly when deciding whether to use italics or bold text to differentiate my questions from his answers. We eventually settle on the latter to fit the aqnb format, Microsoft Word’s ‘Replace All’ coming in handy when it comes to his preference for using two, rather than one, hyphen in reinforcing a point.
Beyond that, there’s a fluency to the way Kneale communicates through writing that one imagines is difficult to replicate in speech. That’s not that surprising considering the role of the written word in his work, from his fore-grounding text in his exhibitions to co-founding Rotherthite’s Library + art space, with Hefti and fellow artist Megan Rooney.
Not so much a curatorial project but a space for fostering “a plurality of styles and positions” from invited artists, the focus of Library + is as much on meeting new people and being social as it is on art discourse: “[It] was basically that we had a free space in this old library, so why not paint the walls and floor and invite people to do something?” That’s part of the reason the February half of the two-part Pleasure Principles –developed and executed at the invitation of La Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette –will feature Kneale and Hefti’s friends and peers from around the world making the trip to the French capital to take part. More importantly though, this set of artists, including Rooney, Max Brand, Harry Burke, Quinn Latimer, Bonny Poon, Sam Porritt, Bea Schlingelhoff and Jesse Wine, will already “have the nice bars and galleries figured out” before the second lot of participants –invited by the first –arrive in March.
As with Library+, there’s no strict curatorial directive to Pleasure Principles beyond exploring “the role of pleasure in both artistic production and communities today”. It’s a process to be considered in dialogue with its participants who’ve been largely left to their own devices: “we trust the people we’ve invited and get to have the pleasure of seeing what they do.”
Photo by Raphael Hefti. Image courtesy of Paul Kneale.
Why the plural?
Paul Kneale: Insofar as our shows at Library + have always involved performances and dinners and acted as a shared space, as well as presenting great works, I think this element is very important to keep everything from being too professional and boring. No last-train takers allowed. But especially, with regards to Paris, there is this very ripe, well-known bohemian artist history from the last century –but what’s been happening there lately?
We thought it would be interesting to explore this there, shifting the context from London. And, of course, ‘pleasure’ today can mean a lot of different things. We’re taking a critical look at things, that’s the plural, but from an embodied position. There’s no remit or assignment for the people we’ve invited. They’ll come up with something way better than we could instruct them to.
So then, do you think that that focus on ‘pleasure’ is something central to this idea of the “bohemian enclave”; hedonism as alternative to resistance?
PK: Yes. In a basic way, art is an alternative lifestyle. Or maybe the things that are involved in making art produce an alternative lifestyle as a side effect. It’s related to the time-frames and scenarios that you move through, but also the people you’re attracted to –free-thinking, fun, experimental –it’s not at all about a type, but a certain kind of openness.
I think when people who share certain characteristics get together under a shared thing, like art, the so-called ‘hedonist’ attitude might be evident. But I would like to reframe it from being a ‘resistance’, in some Marxist sense. I think it is, rather, this organic thing. I would frame a nine-to-five job and watching reality TV as the resistance –resistance to life!
Have you thought about the area in Paris and how art scenes or communities rise and fall generally? Or specifically to where you’re based in London?
PK: The area of Paris, the Marais, is of course a very upmarket area, full of shops etc. It’s also right next to the Pompidou, which I think has been a very strong institution, at least not afraid of the new. I don’t think this area was ever the centre of ‘bohemian Paris’. But the historical coordinates that did produce that period –the waning of the French empire, combined with social liberalism, are significant in understanding that area.
I think the situation in London is quite different today. It’s more of an against-all-odds struggle to persist in a place that’s a crossroads for the rest of the world, due to everything from a lot of airports, to the flow of international money, to a lot of good schools.
Our particular area, Rotherhithe, is at the excretory end of this city. It’s mostly council flats in desperate need of repair and a new condo boom, which just creates bedroom communities for the city. So I think we occupy some kind of liminal space there. It’s a little bit accidental. To me that’s a key characteristic of the scene in London –a kind of scrapping –making quick use of an opening in the otherwise hard-plated economic and urban fabric; a kind of guerilla tactics.
So, I suppose that area of London is a sort of microcosm of that intensified social stratification that’s happening on a global level.
PK: You see that here, definitely. There’s a good flow of people blowing their money at the gambling shop, just a hundred metres from some very expensive high-rises. I think we occupy, again, some space that isn’t really involved in either, but is obviously in the same fabric.
Why, because a library is a shared public space? It makes you think of the fact they’re disappearing, to a degree having been made redundant by internet usage, and what the implications are about the online’s effect on that very social stratification we’re talking about.
PK: I think the disappearance of the libraries has more to do with the fact that the current government has declared war on the poor. The building now is just a brick shell with no heating, on a street that no one wants to patronise because it’s falling apart. I think what we do here is able to happen both because of and in spite of that.
That’s a good point, especially when you consider these art hubs that are made possible in areas where the rent’s low, which more often than not are the neglected ones. Isn’t that what the ‘pleasure principle’ is in a way –‘no pleasure without pain’?
PK: The Freudian Pleasure Principle is something like that, very simply put, the drive to avoid pain. But it’s also important the ‘how’ of that drive. That’s what’s specific to every time and place. I think art is very powerful in expressing this relation, in ways that don’t have to speak the language of the corporate state or media.
It strikes me that you mention speaking the ‘language of the corporate state or media’, because it’s pretty apparent that a lot of art is and has been adopting that very lexicon in implicit critique. Even you use Clip Art on your Pleasure Principles website…
PK: I think the way this relation is negotiated is an important issue for a lot of artists I know and respect. I don’t think there is anything like a consensus, which is also good! It’s naive to think you don’t exist within all these state structures. Of course you do. Smashing the state isn’t the point of art. Or rather, it’s a very ineffective method if it is. I think the microcosm of art is much more potent at the level of the interior life of its audiences. And, of course, those people are social beings.
Image courtesy of Paul Kneale.
So it’s relevant that you’re working with friends and peers for Pleasure Principles then. Not only in relation to artists as these social beings, but also this organic emergence of art communities.
PK: It was natural to invite people we had already worked with, or that we knew as friends. Since we’re not curators it wouldn’t make sense to invite strangers just because we liked their work. But within that, the people you know has a logic –we’ve been really lucky to meet a lot of amazing people in London, often standing outside of a project space in light rain drinking a tall can.
I think if there’s some praise I would give to social media, it’s that it can help people with a shared interest to find each other IRL. So we’re building on that. But in the second part of the project in March, everyone who’s been invited for the first part gets to invite someone else again. So that’s where the network goes outwards and new people come in, with maybe a degree of remove, which I think is also very important to things growing and staying sharp.
I was going to say there’s a danger in that kind of insularity that social media can also promote, a disconnection from differing perspectives.
PK: Hopefully we have a good mix. Because of the aspect of friendship and geography that’s in play, we have people involved who do nothing but make things from clay, alongside poets and performance, artists and painters. I think it’s conscious there, to not be insular.
We’ve always found it boring when people just surround themselves by work that reinforces their own positions. I’m sure that, within the people we’ve invited, there would be some disagreements about very basic art premises. But I think that’s what keeps it interesting and hopefully it’s an opportunity for some of those antagonisms to be tested and pushed forward. **
“It’s just nice to put on poetry events,” writes Harry Burke via email, a poet, art graduate and organiser behind a title-less poetry reading at Test Centre, November 16.
As part of a month-long programme at the Stoke Newington space that ran from October 24 to November 24, Burke invited some of his favourite poets to read on the night in support of an anthology, edited by him, to launch in Spring 2014. In recognising that art and language have always been closely entwined, the project explores the multiple modes of mediation available beyond the traditional “white space” of the printed form.
As formats expand and evolve, presentation appears to have become a key focus across creatives pressing forward into a digital cultural age. Burke’s interests are no different as he aims to examine these “new poetries and new ways of presenting poetries”, across collaborations between poets and artists. Paul Kneale, Sophie Collins, Timothy Thornton, Paul Kneale, Huw Lemmey, Francesca Lisette and Diane Marie, appeared on the night, while Burke explained a bit about his thoughts on the new narratives and ways of making and expressing meaning emerging in this “shifting landscape.” **
While preparing this piece, I imagined myself (to paraphrase Paul Kneale‘s suggestion below) dabbling in a dead medium. If the essay is now nothing more than a mummified format, writing one would surely become the literary equivalent of hauntology; chasing an elusive apparition through a custom, which has long lost its relevance. But is this in fact the case?
The direct inspiration for this essay stems from two sources: the first being the radical requiem for long-format writing penned by Kneale, multimedia artist and poet, and the second –the practical journalistic necessity to come up with an annual ‘Best Albums of the Year’ list–the end of 2013 draws near, and traditional summations and rankings inevitably follow. Kneale, who admits to a fascination with Twitter in Rhizome (even though his interview replies are extraordinarily verbose), bids farewell to the essay with impressive audacity in his ‘UNTHESIS’, first published in How to Sleep Faster #4: “Wikipedia will confirm that this format, long venerated by the Western academic tradition, came to prominence by no particular necessity and is a kind of accidental regime. Good Riddance.” My initial response to this statement was to the contrary but further reflection followed.
I spent the majority of the year listening to nothing but new music, and even then I’m struggling to recommend more than a handful of long players, as opposed to singles, EPs and online releases. I’m also reading more than one book at a time these days, non-fiction rather than novels, and usually taking breaks for online browsing in the meantime. Perhaps then, there is something in the notion of culture being experienced in ever-decreasing doses?
For a few years, the concept of attention scattered and fragmented by overwhelming digital dataflow has been gaining popularity. In 2008, Nicholas Carr published the much-cited article ‘Is Google making us stupid?’ in The Atlantic (paradoxically, complaints of this kind are often delivered in essay form). According to Carr, the non-linear, meandering, forking narratives of the Web have a destructive impact on the human brain and cognition: they encourage a ‘vertical’, chopped and screwed intake of information, thereby hindering deepened reflection, contemplation and, consequently, understanding. Even though neurological research is yet to confirm or deny Carr’s hypothesis (later developed in the book, The Shallows), his metaphor of informational white noise appears to have started living its own meme-life (in the original Dawkinsian sense –a contagious thought or product of culture). Richard Foreman coined the vivid image of ‘pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button’ in The Edge. As a remedy for this seemingly thoughtless data consumption, the “slow reading” movement emerged –with the idea of revelling in the book, preferably in printed form, at its crux.
So, pancaked populace or an inevitable cognitive shift? Most likely, both…or neither. The binary opposition of ‘skimming’ versus ‘reading’ appears dangerously reductive. Even if subjective empirical experiences, mine included, seem to confirm some of Carr’s observations, this doesn’t change the fact that the zeitgeist still supports the long form, especially the essay. A brief glance back at history reveals that the views of Kneale and others of a similar sentiment are hardly a revelation: the death of the medium was already being discussed as early as 1922 in ‘The Modern Essay’ by Virginia Woolf.
These anxieties are, at least to an extent, groundless. Traditional journalistic forms don’t appear to be subsumed, despite the decreasing sales of printed magazines and newspapers: the much-feared transition to the digital world proceeds in a smoother fashion, with inventions like the Kindle Single (a mini-e-book containing an essay or novella; the literary equivalent of a 7’’ record), elaborate multimedia publications pioneered by The New York Times, in which extensive writing coexists with photography, video and infographics and popular websites such as Longreads or Longform. The widespread use of Twitter by commentators, journalists and bloggers can lead to the impression that we live under the dominion of the 140-character aphorism, in which personal wit and a talent for wordplay reign over meaningful content. This tendency speaks more about a users’ narcissism (as anyone can try and channel their inner Oscar Wilde or Dorothy Parker) and contemporary fashion more than it does of a sea-change in journalism itself. In Retromania, Simon Reynolds paints the present day as an odd, modernised echo of the Edwardian era, in which snobbish interests in mundane and relatively trivial matters like décor, fashion and cuisine prevail. The vogue for Twitter one-liners seems to go hand-in-hand with such subjects. The aphorism, whether printed or digital, coincides with other forms of expression, as it has always done.
The essay seems to thrive online partly due to its personal nature: thanks to the popularity of the blog format, one can observe the rise of the amateur columnist; an average post meeting the guidelines of a miniature essay, with its subjective character and its theme of either musing on a topic or articulating a pre-formed worldview. In the age of Huffington Post-type media and the click-based digital economy, the borders between blogging and journalism become increasingly blurred and porous, and it’s opinion pieces – those which stir, polarize, and thus generate lucrative user engagement – that are in demand.
Even as early as 2004, a few years before the ‘your brain on Google’ debate, Philip Hensher announced in The Observerthat the age of fiction was coming to an end, with readers tending towards the instant gratification of non-fiction instead. Non-fiction, even skim-read, Hensher argues, always provides the benefit of knowledge gained, while reading a novel requires the endeavour of immersion, but without guaranteed reward. This seems to fit with the idea of an Internet-driven ‘culture of facts’, which favours strict, pure data over ‘mind-flaneurism’, inefficiently deepened reflection.
If this is really so, how then do we explain the tendency towards vast narratives in mainstream readership? The popular audience chooses Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep (over 500 pages), George R.R. Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire (five volumes so far), or Dan Brown’s Inferno (400-plus pages). The prevailing phenomenon of quality TV drama adds to the long narrative trend: watching an entire series of Mad Men or Breaking Bad in close succession is a common pastime, now that episodes are easily accessible online, and with the Sky+ box or Netflix the viewer doesn’t have to rely on TV scheduling anymore. Dramas couple the popular and the ambitious (as noted recently by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian), but also combine long and short formats: elaborate stories, divided into seasons and then further into episodes, appear to feed the contemporary viewer’s attention span in the optimum manner. A brief look at the ever-expanding gaming industry will also confirm that concise formats (e.g. Angry Birds) coexist with epics such as Skyrim, without tilting to either side. Simple mobile phone or browser games fill periods of transience, be it whilst commuting, eating lunch or procrastinating online –yet this doesn’t stop the immersive, narrative-arced games from thriving. In fact, quite the contrary, the current bestseller, Grand Theft Auto V, offers 100-plus hours of gameplay and is said to have caused a worldwide ‘epidemic’ of employee sick days on its release.
So we live in a culture of long and short forms simultaneously, in almost every niche. Music, however, seems to provide a curious exception: here, the trend clearly slopes towards miniaturisation. Sales in CD format are already overtaken by digital downloads, and among those, listeners increasingly prefer to buy single songs rather than entire albums, hence the introduction of TEA (track equivalent albums), a sales measuring system in which 10 downloads are counted as one LP. In the world of widely-understood ‘independent’ music, the traditional album is gradually becoming replaced by online streaming, mixtapes, singles and, at best, EPs. Artists who astonish in these short forms are often struck by a strange malaise when it comes to recording full-length works– which, preceded by long waiting periods, turn out to be disappointing (as proven recently, e.g. by Laurel Halo, and to an extent by Factory Floor; the judgement day for Azealia Banks’ Broke with Expensive Taste has been postponed again till 2014).
The lack of good LPs doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s something wrong with contemporary music per se – but rather than its traditional medium of delivery (lest we forget, equally an ‘accidental regime’ predicated on technical invention and physical length limitation in the first place!) may be uncoupling from its content. Perhaps then, it’s time to stop treating singles and EPs as merely an announcement, or teaser, for an LP. And as for that incomplete ‘Best Albums of 2013’ list, perhaps I should try and prepare a compilation of best releases, in the widest possible meaning of the phrase, instead. **
Header image: Paul Kneale, ‘STOCHASTIC LATENCY BUZZ’. All images courtesy of the artist.
In the spirit of activism, each artist and collective explores globalisation, gentrification and artistic collusion across installation and sculpture, print and literature. Read our review of the show here. **
For a few years, the concept of attention scattered and fragmented by overwhelming digital dataflow has been gaining popularity. In 2008, Nicholas Carr published the much-cited article ‘
