Recent art projects employing locative media and "radical cartogoraphy" have helped us consider the ways in which maps, city plans, and roads function as vehicles for ideology. They are technologies, in their own way: systems designed to facilitate the transmission of messages, the flow of goods and services, and the formation of real-life social networks. The School of Missing Studies (SMS) has formed their own "network for experimental study of cities marked by or currently undergoing abrupt transition." The group is led by Katherine Carl and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, two artists and academics currently based in the United States, but working primarily in Eastern Europe, along with a large group of active collaborators. Their projects tend to linger, going through new iterations as they move nomadically from venue to venue, taking on a site-specific element as they are shaped by the perspectives of local participants. For their Manhattan Shadow Project, a group of citydwellers with diverse backgrounds gathered with architects, artists, and writers from New York and Belgrade to create "a database of occurrences of Manhattan shadows--physical, metaphorical, and digital." Their explorations delved into the tools that have been used to draw lines in cities--from stenographic chalk borders to skyscrapers' ghostly silhouettes--and the social implications of these new forms of organization and building. Perhaps SMS's best-known project, the Lost Highway Expedition is a resuscitation of the unfinished 'Highway of Brotherhood and Unity' in the former Yugoslavia, a throughway constructed by volunteers of the republic, in the 1960s, to connect its major cities and cultures: Ljubljana, Zagreb, Beograd, and Skopje. SMS moved through these towns and other smaller ones along the way, working to initiate new art projects, ideas, and cross-cultural collaboration. The fruits of this work have been presented in shows, symposia, and a publication entitled Europe Lost and Found. Their newest effort--Stadium Culture--is similar in its rethinking of retired political initiatives designed to artificially stimulate cultural experience. Instead of retracing the course of past endeavors, Stadium Culture proposes to, "create an identity that engages some positive elements of the socialist past while defining urban future on some new terms". Working in collaboration with the Normal Architecture Office, and on commission from kuda.org, the Novi Sad-based Center for New Media, the group is working to build a stadium that becomes a focal point for "the difference between the two central agents for youth activity: sports and electronic media, lingering at loose ends in today's transitional society." This major undertaking is one which draws parallels between the state of public space in Novi Sad and the state of political participation by its youth, based on its historical social initiatives and current unique socio-political situation in relation to the European Union. By holding spaces up as a lens, in this way, the School of Missing Studies makes transparent otherwise invisible discourses about the lives of individuals in often overlooked places. - Marisa Olson
Image: Architectural Proposal for "Stadium Culture", Novi Sad
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Hi All,
The sides of the site are still missing, so I'm going to post here as a way to keep posting until Jan. 31 which is fast approaching.
On a side note, there will be a networkism.net site in the next month or two which you can visit for more info specifically on Networkism.
As Philip stated in the other thread, there are probably some differences between his idea of Complexism and my idea of Networkism. I think these might derive from the fact that networks are only one of many forms of complexity–a subset if you will. They are also a subset comprised of both individuals and system, each of which basic portions has aspects of complexity to it although not identical to the other. For example, there is the complexity that gives rise to individual cognition, the single human, and the complexity that results from the interactions of many single humans i.e. the polis or culture. Networkism of the High type also takes great effort to include history and politics, i.e. everything, whereas Complexism might or might not choose to do that. The character of an art-historical period is after all, we must never forget, partly a matter of choice or free will.
Thus Networkism engages history, all of history, as the subject of its operation, because art or aesthetic evolution is a historical process, one that occurs over long periods of time in moments strung together. Being woven into history and having its own history, art has to deal with all the winds and storms thereof, including politics, economics, religion, science, war, biology, psychology, and technology.
It may be enough for any art-period to just say it is aloof from politics. This may the be best plan, but it also may not be. I think that High Networkism should try, with its free-choice element, to support globalization of liberal democracy and the U.S.-led One Superpower Option for the 21st century. This is as opposed to the other choices, i.e. to oppose it, or stay neutral/aloof.
This is not "silly" as Eric said, I don't think, though it certainly may be and definitely seems so. But we have to choose among neutrality on globalization, opposition to globalization, or support of globalization. I don't think it is an option to simply stop and/or reverse globalization. That would leave an untenable power vacuum into which something certainly would appear, probably chaos and warlordism. Then the choice becomes to oppose or support. I think that aesthetic evolution, i.e. art, will do better overall if globalization is supported rather than obstructed. Opposition would also be more likely to make globalization more horrific and destructive, not less. All these are of course debatable but after studying a lot of stuff I think they are correct, so I infuse them into High Networkism by choice.
Yet it may very well be unnecessary for High Networkism to say that it favors U.S. power. Be that as it may, I feel that the argument is better said than left implicit. This could also be a wrong choice, who knows.
Certainly most people will probably decide to practice some other art-historical period besides Networkism. That is certainly the likely future. However, those who are on the fence can think about Networkism and see if they think that Postmodernism really makes more sense on its own terms, or if viewed as Low Networkism. Once one is convinced that Postmodernism is really just Low Networkism, then it is easier to see why one should try to work at High Networkism. But all teaching jobs and the like are based on Postmodernism, and none on High Networkism.
What this means is that "ye cannot serve God and Mammon." When a new art-historical period is at hand, the previous one is mature and all of the jobs in the culture industry are based on it. None are based on the new one. Therefore to work on it is to work for no pay, to work only out of a fondness for aesthetic evolution in its pure form.
This relates to any new development in business. The new development is new, people are not yet paid for it or paid to do it. Therefore not only will High Networkism be very difficult when it is new, it will also be totally unpaid! To this must also be added the hostility High Networkism will be met with in those occasional instances when it shows early promise, since as the better mousetrap it will be unwelcome to its predecessors.
Therefore only persons with a very strong sense of allegiance to aesthetic evolution will adhere to it. Moreover, High Networkism is the most difficult and "farthest out" aesthetic-evolutionary stage for any technological species. It is the "orbit" or level of globalization, of unification as a species across the planet i.e. universally. All art-historical periods prior to it are partial, local, fragmentary, diffuse, and the penultimate aesthetic-evolutionary period, Postmodernism, struggles to present itself as the ultimate and final, and to make the fragmentism permanent and stable. But this doesn't work out in the end.
Hence if you would like acclaim and to have featurettes written about you, you are much better off not doing High Networkism or even trying to figure out what it is. But if you like the invigoration of what you might call "the Way and the Life," of aesthetic evolution in your own direct individual experience, and are as Shelley so aptly phrased it "to the tempest given," then you should try High Networkism because it makes all the sense in the world.
Whether the School of Missing Studies does that I can't say. My sense from the featurette is that it is too academic and wireless picturesque to get past map-ism, if charming and presentable to some degree.
Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
Le Cafe online now
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000
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A huge amount of Low Networkism burgeoning on the site today. Certainly no need at all for things to be any other way.
Arrivederci! Unless I can think of something to post tomorrow.
Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
Le Cafe online now
http://www.geocities.com/genius-2000
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