The Sputterly Utter

Tim Etchells (UK)
performer

Adrian Heathfield (UK)
writer
performance workshops
professer in London

moderated by Clare Colker (Germany)

Expectations
I'm really looking forward to this talk, because I expect it to mainly be about the ways that mobile networks change the meaning of presence. What is here and what does it mean to be here.

I've been here since noon today and have been writing notes on talks the past 5 hours. I am totally knackered. It's an interesting experiment to be trying to do all of this live publishing. I've never felt more like a cyborg!

I just wish I had brought a fork to eat my salad with.

Transmediale Description

The site of the actions could be an LCD-monitor or a screen, a stage, a website, a gallery, a street or a private room. There will be an encounter in each work or project. This encounter sets off the process of an event’s unfolding and its consequences, and an exploration of the dynamic relationship between the work and the viewer. The mechanisms and economics of these processes – the process of revealing and concealing, of construction and deconstruction, of appearance and disappearance – are the focus of this discussion (Track 1). Against the backdrop of an increasingly mobile culture, participants discuss physical co-presence as a common space of mutual experience.

Notes Will present art and performance pieces to each other
social space digital and mobile media
new form of co-presence
presence in absence
Informational space over physical space
Body present here, but also present digitally elsewhere
How does it affect how we perceive presence and reality?

Tim on the right, Adrian on the left.

Tim shows the first piece.
artist: Franco B, Action 398
UK-based
video piece

each audience member has a 2-minute encouter in a closed room. You take a ticket and then you go into the space and have your encounter. The structure of the encounter is framed. Franco is seeing people for two minutes for a whole day or sometimes several days. He also uses his physicality (he is bleeding and naked and painted white).
1999(?) or so.

No sound
dog cone around his neck
Franco looks sad and exhausted. I would be too
If I was naked, bleading, painted white, and wearing a dog cone
The other person having the encounter is not filmed at all.

We constantly perform ourselves out
in a social context we are diversly situated
in this work, you go into an alien, disconnected space for 2 minutes
your bodily presence and sensory presence are the only tools through which to encounter the person
the performance space is a space of abstinence

"It's a simple encouter with another person." (WTF is simple about meeting another person who is painted white, bleeding, naked, and wearing a dog cone? That's absurd)

Every person who goes in experiences something different depending on what they are willing to put into the moment. Some will talk to him. Some touch him. Some stay by the wall. Different people construct the encounter in different ways.

There is a lot of negotiation with Franco's eyes. Even though you are in the same space, you have a hard time locating him and yourself in terms of what is going on and what you think about it.

Question to Adrian: What is the complexity of an encounter like this?

The piece is a kind of clearing out of the noise of the multiple interfacaes of contemporary interactions. Elemental copresence. Adrian doesn't see the piece exactly that way. It also brings us back to self and to simple from of two. the lingering question... the notiion of the one to one performance has been so big in the past 10-15 years. How does something that is a big part of so much performance practice (the institution of convening in a common space) be somehow avoided?

This piece, in contrary to other one to one performances, avoids the complex avoidance of the social because of its focus on pain and where it fits into subjective relation. You have a paradox of the experience of pain. Empathy and connection vs incomprehension and the impossibility of sharing. This paradox overshadows everything else for the spectator.

Adrian feels ambiguous about one to one performance.

next piece
Ching She
One-year performance
1980-81

Started the performance bald and allowed the hair to grow back to
constraints or parameters around his actions over a year
carried out his life as an art project based on these rules for the whole year.

Conditions of presence
intermediale aesthetic gesture
punched a worker's time clock on the hour every hour for an entire year
shitty sleep schedule
couldn't move too far from the punch clock

After punching clock, took one single frame of himself on 16mm standing by the clock
6 minute film=one year

meeting place btw durational performance, the photograph, and film
the piece is a converastion btw these technologies folded into each other through the work. They are all the work.

this guy's hair grows slowly
black t shirt white t shirt no t shirt

discipline of capitalism on the body
performance of subjection
monitoring and accounting
the orders of visibility
exposing the conjunction of the orders of capital and the orders of the visible

old piece, but predictive in questions of surveillance

a kind of mugshot for the order of visibility
temporarity and atemporality
the piece doesn't belong to any particular time.

I take it back. His hair is getting really long.

A feeling of excess or waste
it seems to operate a critique of capital and visibility
the multiplicities of lived duration
flux, flow, constant differentiation that is part of the experience of time

oscillating, vibrating presence and absence constantly intertwined.

Tim asks a question:
This artist's work has a potent sense of what is missing from the document. How does the duration unfold that? The performance that lasts a year puts it in another category. Talk about that

Adrian
Some of the documentary strategies were evolved late in the works. Yet in a sense they are the thing that make the works exist now.
map of his walk around NY

These guys are not very entertaining.

Adrian asks a question
what is the relation btw this kind of task based duration and your sustained spectacle and large collaborative performances.

I have to admit, it's a bit of a circle jerk.

Tim:
Uses extended duration to put pressure on and break down the community of people gathered, performers and performers. Break down the control with duration.

One of his works lasts 6 hours. Improvised work where the people ask each other questions. Audience comes and goes as they please, but the performers stay. You present yourself, try to make a good account of yourself, but that evaporates over time. Stage management, posture, diction, etc, disintegrate. Your ability to answer these questions is lost in exhaustion.

Does something with your visibility and vulnerability. Same happens when the audience stays a long time.

In this case, the duration is about pressure (me: But the same with the Chinese piece. He couldn't sleep for an hour at a time because he punched the clock. But he didn't subject the audience to it. The amazing thing that is missing from the video is the visualization of the stress and exhaustion he must have suffered. You don't see it a bit.

Next piece

Tim is now showing his own work? I guess that is easier.

Neon piece of the words "GET OUT"
Have I seen this before, or is there another artist who is doing very similar work?
I don't recognize Tim's name.

Instruction-based piece.

Everyone obeyed this sign, as everyone had to eventually leave the room.

Showing a log of a performance made for mobile phone in 2000 "surrender control"
2009 "39 or so to do"
It's the Here game on your phone

Over a fixed period, you got instructional text messages.
It's an invitation to other people to do things
the people can follow or not follow
the not being sure of whether the instructions are followed is interesting
the things are very vague, nt theatrical. Slight steers or suggestions
Take your pulse
change your plans
Give something away
Be clumsy
make things symmetrical
be the fool
disorganize
jump
look up at the sky (I should set a daily calendar alarm for that. I keep forgetting lately to look up at the sky.)

It unfolds over a long period of time but doesn't demand your attention all the time
taps you on the shoulder

Adrian
How do you convene a space of risk
testing of personal and social limits
how does it relate to different forms and conventions of media?

People are pouring out of the auditorium. I wonder if there is something awesome going on somewhere else or if they are just all bored stiff by the way these guys are going on.

language as a tool that invites the participant to unpack the language and make something (image, action, whatever) Language has a great capacity to make pictures and to make things happen.

Reading a collection of words is a creative activity. An unpacking, building You become complicit in the images you summon out of language deferred authorship. You can place something on the table with language and let others add themselves to turn it into something.

On hour into this talk. People leaving in droves.

Adrian's turn, showing a painting. I didn't catch the artist.
Now a video

the force of gesture
don't know what people are doing with their hands

me: "haptic," my ass. This is a film.

weird, floating, magical plane of representation somewhere btw a printing press and a book their complex relation to thie plane(s)

what does it mean to touch and be touched
what is copresence
we think of it as an absolute tangible contact
but in these pieces, touch is also about not touching
oscillation, withdrawel and contact

Panel conversation
bodily presence and film presence and mediated experience

I used to enjoy this kind of conversation a lot more. I wonder what happened to me. It's interesting how some of the people in the audience are also so fluent in academese. I was hoping that they were more going to talk about the definition of presence in real life, even if they used art as a jumping-off point.

Notes. Unfortunately, I won't be able to stay for the whole thing, because it overlaps with the second keynote.
Description from the festival website:

The increase in public attention towards the creative industries has moved creative enterprises and their codes of conduct from the periphery to center stage. With this heightened interest comes a rapid growth in communication between the “old economy” policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Shapeshifters sees a huge potential to install new investment models and utilize resources for the common good.

But implicit beliefs can limit opportunities to build and sustain business relations in these new business systems. For it to work, there is a need to look more closely at the complex cultural DNA of creative companies. Shapeshifters has been working on a global research project since 2006 in order to develop a new mapping of Creative Tribes and Value Zones and shape more sustainable connections between creatives and investors.

  In this workshop, the following research findings will be presented to the public the first time ever:
* A new business map: Value Zones and New Social Territories in the Creative Sector
* Social Tools: A Cultural Due Diligence for the creative industries
* The meaning of market intelligence in the matchmaking between "Money" and "Meaning"

*****************

Innovations in finance, social finance
1. Banking
2. Entrepreneurship and capital raising
3. Individual investment in art and music

A lot more people in the audience are looking for investment than people who have investors.

Shapeshifters meets artists all over the world.
People operate in diff zones
capital giver vs capital user
interesting connection between these people
big diff if they talk about money or rather passions and driving forces
we are looking for like minds that can lead to investment relations
Can be anything
How do these like-minded people meet?

That is why they started to create a map.
DNA report helps investors understand what they get out of funding creative ventures

The Bankers
Hans-Paul Muller?
Andrea?

Helped marginalized people get bank accounts.
Andrea is into electronic banking. How a bank can adress loans in a new way.
The bank they work for is Qb? Cute bee? It is way too loud in here and they don't have any supporting graphics. Could be?
started 3 years ago. Started with microfinancing and a mobile transaction system for areas where there were no normal banks.
want to finance social businesses. This is missing in central and Eastern Europe.

Erste Bank Group, Erste Foundation started in Vienna 200 years ago. Erste Ost. Sparkasse. Provide banking services to people who could at that time access banks at all (housekeepers, farmers, etc). It was a social business. Help people save money for if something happened to them.

The social dimension remains in Erste foundation.

The bank is an institution that enables things to happen in a society.

cultural or social projects are often not about profit. How can you provide financial services to businesses that are not concerned with profit?
It is hard for a bank to do that, which is why Would be (?) was established. The financial side has to work somehow. It's not a foundation or a donations system. The money has to come back to the investors. You don't have to turn a huge profit, but you have to be able to repay your loan.

Now the problem is that banks do not understand the profitability of social entrepreneurship, and that is what these guys are working on--educating banks and bankers about the benefits of financing social entrepreneurship.

They offer support on how to approach and present to banks. They also give the entrepreneurs business advice. How to know if your idea is sustainable and how to change it if it is not so that you can repay your loans. The education process goes in both ways.

Mapping
Social integration award
central and Eastern Europe
every two years

How can we connect the winners and the shortlisted non-winners? How to create a social entrepreneur's socialnetwork.

They made a map of 100 organizations. The organizations are clustered by city. (not bad)
Each point on the map has a video about the project and some contact information.
They're using open street maps for this.
The Social Integration Network
Starting with a map.

Is there any service for organizations not in Eastern Europe?
There are projects underway in Germany
Coworking space for social entrepreneurs in Vienna and all over the world
The organization is called GOOD BEE.

They're microfinancing microfinance. But of course, not only.
I gotta take a break before the second keynote... need sandwich.

What's up with the gender issues mentioned and not elaborated upon

The panel is totally male. They tried to have a woman on the panel, but failed.

DNA is passed through sperm and egg cell...

er....

DNA is for everyone. It is not a gendered structure, but what is being made use of where ethnic identity or belonging to a particular group are concerned, they make use of a very specidfic feature, the fact that one of the major diff btw egg and sperm that come from the two sexes basically the ovum contains the mitocondrium which carries DNA and this is the exclusive female contribution, You can make use of thiat knowledge in establishing geneology bc the dna come packed in cells and you only study the dna...

Beyond the gene beneath the skin treat the whole cell as a unit, not just the dna.

Problematics of Watson's discovery of DNA Vanouse problemetizes Watson and didn't bring it up in the discussion about the discovery of DNA bc he wanted to talk about him more in the eugenics conversation

In the early 90's, gender identity as a construct was a big topic.

Jens asked female panelists to join, but none of them wanted to do it. Is there a mistrust from women of genetic or biological entology? Women don't embrace it without hesitation. They feel a danger.

****

Paul Vanouse is the artist of Fingerprints

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Max Plank institute
The media blindness of science

Simon Cole
Theoretical criminology

Jens Hauser
creator of the exhibition
video maker
Paris
curator

Moderator: marie-Luise Angerer

Notes from the talk

*****

Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
Max Plank institute
The media blindness of science
the indexical is precarious
the indexicality of bioscience is different
the invisible is made visible
enhancement is used to make the indiscernible discernible

Research problems are defined by the instruments you can use to solve them, but this is ignored or played down.

digital or print representations are different from tissue imagery or sample preparations (babies in jars)

the representation of molecules
chromotography--using color
electroforesis?--the devices follow a principle of exploiting electrical characteristics of the molecules being observed

these technologies used in this art vs in forensics
two different kinds of visualizations

a peice of DNA is cut into pieces. A long molecule is cut into shorter ones using restriction enzymes. That results in patterns.

sequence gel
not cutting up into smaller pieces but a process of synthesis
one strand of double-helix dna
fragments of increasing length are produced by an enzym
these fragmants are then run through an electroforetic machine to create the sequence.
These are two very different techniques

the artist is not using the sequence gel technology, only the first one where the DNA is cut into pieces.

What are the procedures involved in these ways of making things visible?
What is behind these visualizations?
Two main strategies: dilatation and enhancement.

can't even see them with the electomicroscope. How do we make them visible to the naked eye? Tiny molecules are brought into a shape that can be seen by the naked eye. On the other hand, in order to make the enlarged image readable, you have to enhance it to show the important structures. That is where the colors come in with the sequence gel project.

All of this is aside from Vanouse's ideological questions.

Thes basic epistemic ways of looking at the procedures Vanouse uses in his installations are also of interest.

DNA images are indexical, as the other speakers have already said, but they belong in the order of the trace. That makes the precarity of these objects more clear. A trace depends on absence and on something remaining absent. Traces can be contaminated. These technologies can identify a person if you have two good samples of DNA. Technically it is not problem. The problem is contamination. Vanouse's work depends on contamination.

Gloves are a double symbol of contamination. You are protecting the sample from the contamination of your body and protecting your body from the contamination from the sample.

Vanouse's work depends on the fact that the techniques are the same as in a laboratory in the art installation. His use is artistic and paradoxical though it is the same technique.

One sees hidden aspects of the technique or the gadget. These qualities are magnified and enhanced. ****************

Paul Vanouse is the artist of Fingerprints
role of images in art and science

Can be seen at Sharing Stiftung on Unter den Linden. There is also something here in the Hackaway Zone.

Notes from the talk.

***

Simon Cole Skyped in (cool!)

DNA
individual
seen, found, interpretated, used as evidence

Simon Cole
Global governance of
Theoretical criminology
wrote about Vanouse's installation "Fingerprints"

hidden truth is supposed to be readable by surface traces
latent print trace of the source finger
It's not only the author of the crime, but also the narrative of what happened at the crime is the forensic fantasy.
Revealing a true identity of an imposter by actively taking the imprint is another use of the tech
Revealing the character of the human (by reading faces, bumps, etc)--criminal types--is another promise of such technologies throughout history.

1990s "crime gene" conversation

art is also discussed as something that is revealing
resonances between art connoisseurship and forensic identification

It is in the small gestures that a forger reveals himself
There is a forged Pollack that has a faked fingerprint on it. But it is recognizable as fake.
Essence vs surface

essence can be surface
surface can be essence

intention can be revelation
revelation can be intention

mechanical objectivity (from scientific history)
scientists claim objectivity in imaging. Lack of intent. But this is a very shaky claim.

The technology has changed but the goals and the conversation around the essence and the traces have not. We still have eugenics, race, revelation, etc. Nothing has changed since reading head bumps.

The search for the essence of race has not been discredited. Diversity is the same as racism. Race to the finish=genetic diversity project.

Race as a race. Race as a hierarchy. Evolutionary competition.

Racial categories are still created by physiological characteristics, even with DNA

The problem is not that the technology is not good enough yet to read the body, but that the reading of the body is in itself problematic.

****************

Paul Vanouse is the artist of Fingerprints
role of images in art and science

Can be seen at Sharing Stiftung on Unter den Linden. There is also something here in the Hackaway Zone.

Just the quick notes!

****

Jens Hauser
creator of the exhibition
video maker
Paris
curator
Arte collaborator
radio guy
interested in art and tech connections
contextual aesthetics
art science philo
microbiological performativity
biology uses its indexicality to hide its representativeness
forensic fingerprinting and photography realationship

Only make scientists responded to inquiries from the artists for this research about biology and crime molecular identity
media blindness inherent in how bio systems are being thought of

history of fingerprints
code of patterns was translated into letters, just as DNA has been

Vanouse has a lot ot do with dna in crime
OJ trial where DNA evidence was not taken as admissible
racial issues on a molecular level
how does race matter
new stereotypes
race beneath the surface of the body

Vanouse
professor in Buffalo
Buffalo and Carnegie Mellon
emerging media
cinematic biological experiments

Counter Laboratories
Inverted Suspects
latent Signs

PCR
RFLPs

OJ Simpson's trial made DNA evidence familiar to the US
90 million watched Simpson be caught
real life media spectacle (dismisseed as... why do you want to dismiss a media spectacle?)

There has never been a case with more DNA evidence.
The defense team had enough science to find the flaws in the DNA evidence
The use of DNA as an exoneration tool
the defenders went on tho create a foundation to free wrongly-accused men on death row using DNA

"The crown jewel of the forensic world order"=DNA image

research helps your art make itself.

One DNA image from OJ's trial came up over and over again. It was a promotional image from the lab that did the work, not at all an image from the trial. Called to ask if the images were available (privacy violation?) But in fact, the journalists were offered the real image that was in question, but they preferred simpler stuff

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit."

Got the images
what to do with these images?

Suspect Inversion Center
particularized lab
reconstruct and thus deconstruct the OJ DNA image (document)

decisions innovations hacks and interpretations are part of creating DNA images

using techniques to make the artists DNA look like the trial DNA
copying a master's painting
plagiarism
fakery
forgery
appropriation

all of these have very different roles in art

for him: reverence, parody

image represents audacity of subjectivity (Kafkaesque) the rendition as process

opening the black box of DNA fingerprinting

The place of race in the OJ trial
Time making OJ look blacker
This is usually the big part of the discussion about the case

The place of htis case in genomic tech
but race also has a place in genes
Eugenics
Davenport-American Eugenecist Race crossing in Jamaica

Relative Velocity Inscription Device (and velocity of the relatives)
first human genome title was neo eugenics, but James Watson said they needed something else
2000 the human genome project stated that there was no such thing as race, that it was

Artist suspected racism could exist even if race did not
eradication of specific individual genes could be new eugenics

dna test that measures how fast dna moves through a gel
raced skin-color connected genes from his jamaican mix family in the dna gel experiment

Watson claimed that melanin caused erections. That darker skinned people were more libidinous

Individual genes could be labeled as sexual deviants

The fact of calling it DNA fingerprinting made the technology. Before it was not used.

The DNA image is a cultural construct, depending on the lab
It tells us as much about the techniques used to segment the DNA as it does about the subject
The DNA fingerprint is not natural

Vanouse did the fingerprinting process live for audiences to explain it to his public

SIC SUspect inversion center (anagram of CSI, but really an inversion)
DNA lab work made public and accessible
notes
intermediary images
CSI builds tech fiction SIC created demystification

DNA is a constructed image

Art forgery of OJ's DNA

simulated imprint vs real imprint.
Ressemblance by Contact Georges Didi-Huberman

Symbol-tablets bearing a contract that was broken in 2 and each had a half. Convention, association
Icon- greek image or likeness. Convey ideas of what they represent by imitating them
Index-pointer or finter. more direct than symbol or Icon.


Photos try to pass as an imprint of reality

what a genetic fingerprint intends to do
chromotograms
sine components

destabilizes the indexing by showing that it can be manipulated into iconic images (copywrite symbol, etc) He can use DNA as pixels.

The DNA fingerprint is a subjective portrait

Francis Galton created composite photography when he failed to established a racial theory of fingerprint reading. He used composite photography to create typical faces of various races

Cell vs gene. Not only the gene but the entire cell must be considered the source of genetic difference. This is the same problem as form vs matter.