This month we were fortunate to have Brett Bloom from Temporary Services (Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer) who conducted studio visits on Thursday. About Temporary Services: ‘We are based in Illinois, U.S.A. and have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public. Temporary Services seeks to create and participate in ethical relationships that are not competitive and are mutually beneficial. We develop strategies for harnessing the ideas and energies of people who may have never participated in an art project before, or who may feel excluded from the art community. We mobilize the generosity of many people to produce projects on a scale that none of us could achieve in isolation. We strive towards aesthetic experiences built upon trust and unlimited experimentation.’

On Friday we kicked off our collaboration within the multidisciplinary project The Object Lag at Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem where DAI participants have been invited to make presentations from May until July in the The Outlet Inn, which opens every Sunday afternoon from 14:00 -17:00. The Outlet Inn offers a window for visitors and participants to interact on a more informal setting, each Sunday the program will be hosted by a different participant of The Object Lag. On Friday morning DAI alumna Emily Williams and curator of Nieuwe Vide for 2010 introduced The Object Lag as an extension of her art practice. The Object Lag is an open self-evolving structure conceived to counter the ever-present tendency to focus primarily on the material presence of the (art) object. The Object Lag instead seeks to place the emphasis on the often invisible and intangible interrelated contexts that orbit around the object. Seeing the object and its experience, as something that is constantly in movement and so open to an infinite amount of possibilities and readings, The Object Lag transforms the common curatorial practice of organizing and arranging into the very material itself, open to the interventions of the artist and visitor alike. Over the year, The Object Lag will take place in five parts (Hubs). Each hub consists of a two-month collaborative working period and are entitled: Form & Content, Translation, The Archaeology of Autonomy, Cross-Reference, and The Intangible.

Friday afternoon we screened Negotiating Equity’s showreel edited by Frederik Gruyaert and recently broadcast at Be at the Media on Salto1, then from 14:00-17:00 was the Art Work public workshop.

Brett showed us selected publications from Half Letter Press and discuss their conception, making and distribution. We first discussed Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, a newspaper exhibition, and website organized by Temporary Services. The paper culls together writings from artists, curators, critics and theorists, from across the United States and Puerto Rico. Contributors were asked to reflect on a range of topics: the country’s (USA) economic situation, how conditions are in their locations, what they are willing to fight to change, and more. Included are historic examples of artists’ projects, initiatives and other efforts to find money for their work or to create broader infrastructural support for others.

DAI participants were asked to bring along images and texts they wish to contribute in making a newspaper modelled on Art Work. At the end of the afternoon we all worked together on making a ‘dummy’ that is directed to the local economic situation for artists.

Please see the website for participants projects and presentations of The Object Lag.

Last month we viewed and discuss the installation, ‘If You Lived Here Still’, an archive project by Martha Rosler. Organized as part of Casco’s year-long programme ‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’, the years 1989-1991, artist Martha Rosler organized her project ‘If You Lived Here…’ at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City. Yolande van der Heide gave us a tour of the show. ‘If You Lived Here…’ was a seminal group project on housing, homelessness and the systems and conditions underlying them such as gentrification, bureaucratic complicity or non-compliance and increasing privatisation of the public sector. It took a radical approach toward art and institutions of that time, in a mode that might be called cross-disciplinary and “participatory”. Besides the archival materials that expose the organisational and research processes behind the project, more research documents that Rosler has assembled or solicited others to contribute over the last 20 years are installed for close reading at Casco. These also include new materials gathered in Utrecht. We then worked on our ‘showreel’, it’s coming along.

Frans-Willem Korsten then gave us a guided tour on bikes of the phenomenon of Leidsche Rijn. Continuing his discourse on ‘Reading the city’ he presented last December, we will now venture outwards and into the city, thinking about putting tools such as narrativity, theatricality, lyric, spectaclicity and gamistry into practice. ‘Leidsche Rijn, now Utrecht, has been and still is the biggest expansion project in Europe. In just a decade an entire city has been added to the already existing city body. We biked to the newly built city parts and travel around there. The question at the back of our minds will be how to think of city limits. Have they become non-existent? What are the implications of this limitlessness? How can the urban landscape be transformed and what are its spaces for negotiating equity?’ We also had the chance to swing by the most happenin’ spot in all of Leidsche Rijn, the Emmaus second hand store. Most of us were able to find something we liked. See Frans-Willem’s full text here.

Evening lecture and dinner was with our guest Marina Vischmidt who was also invited to ‘User’s Manual: The Grand Domestic Revolution’ by Casco. Her lecture used ‘domestic work as an optic to examine structural and political transformations in the social roles of work and art in the past several decades, starting with the exemplary case of Modernist design and its drive to rationalize the space of the kitchen. The general analysis of how the escape from work, and the extension of work — or the commodity- to all realms of social life, is central both to the development of capitalism and the politics that contest these developments, principally feminism, Marxism and the post-Marxist ‘immaterial labour’ discussion. The key role of the ‘domestic labour’ debates was to concretely analyse how any political revolution needs to start from the basic relations of day-to-day life, and abolish the distinctions between private and public, work and non-work that kept women in the ‘domestic labour ghetto’. Politicised art practices too tried to overcome their separation from work, a separatuon that was grounded in a naturalized, boundless ‘creativity’ that ignored its social conditions of possibility. But ‘work’ is no longer central as a social identity, and those strategies are historical. Or are they?’ Please see Marina’s full text here.

Prayas Abhinav from n.e.w.s. joined us all week at DAI. On Monday night he gave a workshop/lecture introducing some concepts that are in vogue: physical computing, rapid prototyping, generative systems etc. He also introduced some tools for organizing and cataloging personal research online, sharing work, open licenses, syndication feeds, etc. and showed examples culled from the internet about how we can come up with ways to question and critique projects and seek out the personal and relevant from them. Individual conversations with DAI participants filled the week about their representation on the Internet. What are the parameters of understanding the tools and the context of being visible in the virtual world? On Thursday evening he showed some of his recent projects and opened them up for discussion.

On Friday we were in Amsterdam at the NIMK (Nederlands Institut voor Mediakunst) where Jaromil showed some of his work and gave us a tour of the exhibition ‘Versions’ and the mediatheek at NIMK. In the spirit of this month’s research we looked at video works in their archive that address issues of movement, or standing still. Selections included: Alicia Framis, ‘Secret Strike Rabobank’, Yael Bartana, ‘Trembling Time’, Sebastian Diaz Morales, ‘Lucharemos hasta anular la ley’ and Guido van der Werve, ‘Nummer acht (Everything is going to be alright)’. Jaromil then gave us a tour of some squats in Amsterdam near the Spui.

After lunch Rick van Amersfoort from Buro Jansen & Janssen delivered his ‘City of Discipline’ lecture. Buro Jansen & Janssen follows the developments within the field of security in NL and Europe and the past 25 years has conducted investigations into police, justice and secret service activities, dealing with all sorts of restrictive, preventive and disappearance measures against those in the margins (fringes) of society. ‘City of Discipline’ uses the antithesis of standing still or moving along as a guide for policy and action. Not only is the government no longer stagnating with its overflow of measures and laws concerning security. Also the citizen no longer remains still – people take action and discipline themselves. Being inactive leads to not only volatility (escapism) but also to not seeing, or better yet, not being seen. Each practice, each society, each action has a downside and we know that civil rights are being violated but we don’t really know because it’s not in the media or it’s just a news flits so we don’t notice. Buro Jansen & Janssen works on the interface of not knowing, but actually does know and shows its work through the ‘City of Discipline’.

This past month we focused on reading and rhetoric as forms of presentation. On Thursday Frans-Willem Korsten introduced some tools with which to read the urban environment. In his lecture ‘Reading the city’, the idea that we can read our environment, which in our case is predominantly an urban environment, is as old as the study of rhetoric. In the last decades the ability to read the environment has been defined generally in terms of coherence or orientation. So far none of the studies concerned considers reading itself to be a political act. Reading is self-evident and has to be facilitated. During the day’s discussion we dealt with reading our environment and considered reading as perhaps the most basic political decision one can take. ‘One has to choose sides first before one starts reading. Or reading should open up the possibility to switch sides.’ In that context we gained clarity about tools such as narrativity, theatricality, lyric, spectaclicity and gamistry and then each participant described a known space, using one of the new tools mentioned above.

Friday we met at De Volkskrant building in Amsterdam and seeing that we will be working on making contributions to this website, I explained how n.e.w.s is organised and the direction of this collaborative online platform. N.e.w.s. contributor Stephen Wright did finally arrive from Paris and after a late start he gave a marathon lecture on the direction of our forthcoming book, along with citing some key art historical paradigms.
‘Art, incidentally, is redundant… but that should not be seen as its doom, but rather as its great fortune. It is redundant in that it has, bit by bit, done away with all material and perceptual externality with respect to other forms of human activity; it has sundered itself from everything – all the generic, geographic and other essentializing moorings that continued to fetter it throughout the twentieth century – except it own histories and self-understanding.’ This user-friendly presentation focused on a cross-section of contemporary, incidentally artistic practices, whose coefficient of artistic visibility is deliberately impaired, situating them with regard to earlier conceptual practices of the 1970s, drawing some conclusions about the prospects of art after spectatorship.’

Afterwards we reviewed participants contributions: videos, audio tracks, images, powerpoints, whatever and briefly discussed our collaborative plan for a one-hour ‘showreel’ for televison broadcast. More on that in the upcoming posts.

On Thursday the 12th n.e.w.s. contributor, Branka Ćurčić was our guest lecturer for the evening programme and during the day, Branka and I did studio visits. Branka is member of new media center_kuda.org, Novi Sad, Serbia and the editor of the recent publication, Reader ID: Ideology of Design, published by AUTONOMEDIA, which she will discuss along with past projects. In what way are design practices perceived and understood today and in what way can one follow their crucial development during the last decades of the 20th century and their connections with artistic practices and critical discourses? The issue is raised about meaning of contemporary design as one of the main proponent of creative industries which, refracted through an ideological prism of neoliberal capitalism preserve the exploiting relationship regarding creativity and the creative personae. Today, there is the question of possibility to practice design outside dominant functionalist principles and the market-dictated production and consumption, i.e., is there a possibility to conduct politization of design practices today? During her evening lecture Branka also gave an overview of autonomous spaces in former Yugoslavia, the ways in which artistic projects were carried out and understood, offering the potential for deregulation and critique. Nowadays times have changed and places and spaces like Kuda and Youth Center CK13 are supported by outside investment along with setting up internal models for sustainability (music concerts, selling books, lectures, etc). It still begs the question whether cooperation with neoliberal art institutions is possible.

Friday we were in Amsterdam visiting a ‘secret space’ proposed by Brigitte van der Sande, free-lance curator. Her project 2030: War Zone Amsterdam is an exercise in imagining the unimaginable: civil war in your own city in the year 2030. A cease-fire has just been announced, and a group of international artists, theatre makers, filmmakers, journalists and intellectuals go out into the city to investigate what the war has done to Amsterdam and its inhabitants. 2030: War Zone Amsterdam names no enemies, provides no answers, but fires questions at a possible future. The artists occupy public space, infiltrate exhibitions, festivals and publications, or seek cover in underground spaces. Brigitte introduced DAI participants to a former bunker in the south of Amsterdam and asked them to think about ways to communicate without the usual means- Internet, mobile phones, etc.

In the afternoon we visited Planet Art in De Volkskrant building and Simon Ferdinando presented his current research project: Rotten Cinema (Rotten Cinema – false sun and the new dawn – no time to think, just gotta keep moving….in several contingencies (or wolves) where he showed You Tube excerpts, culled from his archive that rethinks cinema in terms of light and dark. The Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan taught that ‘Luciferian Light’ is light that has become dislocated from the ‘divine source.’ Using a series of sub headings Simon ruminated on and illustrated some of the possible means of approaching Luciferian roots and routes of cinema. Including George Bataille, George Jackson (Soledad brother) +Deleuze and Guattari on Anti Oedipus.

Rotten Cinema excerpts:  Repo man trailer-Alex Cox 1984, Lumière and Company 1995, The Falls- Peter Greenaway 1980, Schwechater- Peter Kubelka 1958, Adebar -Peter Kubelka 1957, Bedazzeled- Stanley Donen 1967. Recommended to watch: The bed sitting room -Richard Lester 1969. Recommended to read : 1000 plateaus (1914 One or several wolves) Giles Deleuze  and Felix Guattari 1987. Visions of excess writings 1927-1939 George Bataille.

Negotiating Equity kicked off at DAI this past week with the introduction of the project to the new participants. We were thrilled to have Ade Darmawan and Reza Afisina of ruangrupa from Jakarta make the first of a series of upcoming Thursday lectures at the DAI, as they are in NL for their project at Casco and Impakt Festival. Though the name has not changed the context has- no longer using condemned flats in Delft this year’s project looks at curation as artistic practice and will be played out through TV broadcasting, web-based online curating, publications, print and interventions in Amsterdam. Notions of self-organisation, aspects of the performative, distributions of responsibility and terms of repossession will comprise our field of operations. Guests from all over the world will come and lecture, virtually or physically, along with contributors from n.e.w.s.: Branka Curcic, Stephen Wright, Prayas Abhinav, Lee Weng Choy and Community Museum Project.

Here is my Keynote introduction: NegotiatingEquity2009-10.ppt

Sunday was another presentation by 4 DAI participants at FLAT_land (Bij wijze van Spreken) organised in collaboration with id11 and STeC in Delft. Here are also some photo’s of the presentations and installations on view.

Julio Pastor’s residency in apartment 603 focused on collecting ‘Evidence’ from the previous inhabitants. Combining watercolour paintings, Polaroids and printed digital photographs Pastor created a map that serves as an investigation into the personalities of these people, their ways of living and how their daily lives might have been affected by the environment of the neighbourhood. All of the work that was produced during his stay was left in the flat, in this way becoming ‘evidence’ of his own living experience in Delft.

When Jimini Hignett heard she would have an empty apartment to work in for 4 months she knew straight away what she should do. Upon receipt of the key to the apartment she would offer it to a family of refugees so that they could live there! Unfortunately, logistically none of this worked out. Instead Hignett met Barbara, a homeless woman from Washington D.C. who left everything behind and came to the Netherlands because God sent her a message through a dream! In apartment 636 she talks (and talks) about her life in the video ‘Godsend’.

Suzanne van Rest’s installations combine sculptures and photographs that address the subject of light. In ‘Overexposed II’ one installation incorporates sculptures and photographs that capture a certain moment and quality of ‘Delft’ light. The second work consists of a photograph, taken of an ‘overexposed’ apartment. In this way van Rest makes her presence visible in Delft through the use of strong, artificial light.

In contrast to light Raymond Huizinga explores aspects of darkness, mentally as well as physically, through his use of a blackened plastic apartment. No light enters and only foreboding sound emanates as one approaches. In his installation ‘The Shape’, Huizinga constructs plastic, blow-up figures that he manipulates, flagellates and terminates during a series of performances in this closed-off and sealed apartment. The audience was offered the opportunity to experience another side of life.

This past Thursday June 4th we met at the apartments of id11 in Delft, for some the first visit to the space and neighbourhood. Only two of the participants, Veri and Marina, had started working and living in the space. Yet the past two weeks they completed not only their individual projects but began a collaboration. This project Donations Delft, involved acquiring household wares and goods from the neighbours and turned into a whole panoply of social relations. Stephen Wright from n.e.w.s. joined us from Paris as guest docent and the participants presented their works from the past months as well their proposals for Negotiating Equity. In the coming weeks everyone will use the spaces in different ways and their projects are found above under their respective titles or under the participants names to the left in the side bar.
On Friday our group along with Florian Göttke’s Ruffles and Fray project visited Open Source in de Bijmer. Starting at the Bijmer Arena we travelled along the route Straat van Sculpturen or Street of Sculptures. 13 international and local artists were invited to create a temporary or permanent work within an area of 3 kilometers, between Bijmer Arena and Kraaiennest metro stations. The curator Helga Lasschuijt gave a short talk about the background of the project and how it came about, originally an initiative of a few residents. We then visited Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bijmer Spinoza Festival, his latest installation that is called a festival, in order to be, in his own words, transplantable. After months of research Hirschhorn was invited by the local track coach Sammy Monsels to set up his installation right near the running track. Typical Hirschhorn in material choice of ducktape, cardboard and cheap wood, this bricolage of rooms contains videos of the Bijmer plane crash, his older work, ‘Dancing Spinoza’, ‘Believers’, a computer centre with Internet access, a snack bar with Surinams food, a Spinoza carmade of plastic bottles, an oversized book of ethics on top and last but not at all least, a specialized library dedicated to Spinoza. A copymachine faciitates photocopies posted everywhere and there is a newspaper published everyday which can be read on the website or taken home. Hischhorn then talked to us about his project, his methodology and practice. Manifold readings of Spinoza’s Ethics are constant sources of inspiration along with interaction of the local readers, users, of his ‘festival’. We ended the day with a rehearsal for Child’s Play, by Guillaume Desanges, in collaboration with Frédéric Cherboeuf, whereby art historical images of artists in performative action are then performed by local children- brilliantly, coached by Muriel Monsels. A lecture on philosophy and evening theatre of Spinoza are not te be missed as well as delicious food and ginger beer. Suggested reading by the Ambassador of Art History, Vittoria Martini: Monument-Re

During this month’s artists talks at FLAT_land (Bij wijze van Spreken) organised in collaboration with id11 and STeC, Suzanne van Rest, Marina Tomic and Veridiana Zurita made presentations of their works so far and future installation proposals. Suzanne showed her research that focuses on light, man-made as well as natural, sometimes in competition with each other. Her upcoming project, Overexposure references the light of 17th c. Delft through the images of Johannes Vermeer. Veridiana’s When I was the Environment uses her body to literally crawl through the apartments of Delft while being videoed. Marina’s project All day long also incorporates the ‘living’ aspect of the residency in order to test redundancy, habit, as a way to rethink or daily activities and our relationship with time. Having nothing upon arrival Veri and Marina organised gifts and reciprocal relationships with their neighbours. While living together for two weeks, ‘Donations Delft‘ was based on interaction with the neighbourhood and a means of survival tactics. Three other artists, Liset van Dommelen, Pavel Forman and Matthijs Kiel presented their works in progress and afterwards we were able to take a tour _galerij_loop_02___ of the studios or lived in apartments.

Good news, DAI has received another apartment for the participants until the end of July. Curious to see the projects and how they differ from their original proposals.

Then on May 7th we received word that we would not be obtaining 11 apartments as originally promised, but only two. In the following you can read how the situation was resolved and what came out of it.

Initially we are told that we’ll each have an apartment with all facilities – water, gas, electrics – for 4 months, from March until June.

Within weeks this has changed and we now have two months – May and June, and 10 apartments between the 11 of us.

March 24th – email from Renée:
Dates are tentatively May 7th-until end of June.
There will be only 6 apartments, not 10.

Saturday 9th May – Oh dear…
Emails from Rik and Renée

‘Some very bad news from Delft… We now have only two apartments that we can use: one in perfect condition, with gas, electra and water that can be lived in and used, and another one that is stripped: no water, no gas, no electricity, but still usable for projects… Both apartments will be available from this Monday until the end of July.
We should allow two people to have each apartment for about a week…’

May 9th Practical problems…

Veri has nowhere go between 15 of May and beginning of July, her plans were living in Delft as a project and using the video documentation as the body of project.
‘I would like to propose my project as a virus as a permanent body that will interact with the projects while the process of changes living. So, for that I need to live the whole period there and completely open to adapt based to the necessities of the next two people. So as a virus that is permanent but could adapt.’

And Suzanne writes: ‘I am sorry but I rather not live together for this week with the homeless person, because I don t know him or her and if I only have one week I have to be very concentrated.’

Jimini’s email to group:

Though I’m sure no-one will succumb… I still feel compelled to ask this -
How about we ALL just share the flat with nothing somehow and I find a (real) homeless person and let them live in the other flat for the whole time. And they are asked to co-operate in any way they/we feel okay with?
Any takers?

Negotiating…
Email from Marina:
…or we can all work in may and homeless person can be there in June…

Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 13:20:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: marina tomic
Subject: bad is Good
To: Renée Ridgway
X-Virus-Scanned: ClamAV 0.94.2/9349/Sat May 9 13:17:56 2009 on pelikan
X-Virus-Status: Clean

dear all,

…this becomes more and more interesting. I opened my inbox and found seven mails about changes, and reactions push me to think farther about these project.
Looking at the big picture of these project from the beginning till now-it is not important now “my plan-work”…it is about us, how we are planing, what we are expecting, how we are talking (writing, presenting) our idea, what do we do when we have the opportunity to work in some space five months, then one month, and finally one week, did you think how work is changing, and how flexible you have to be to accept that, and to think about plan B,C,D at the same moment-
I found these questions very interesting and very,very useful in the sense of organizing my work because this is something what we can always expect in out future work.
Thing which happened is only way that we learn about curating our own work. I can be just thankful for these and I can say that I learn a lot- how much I am ready to do for work, to plan to move to the other city, to write plan, to correct, talk and present to the group, to quit apartment, to pack all things and take just basics (and thinking what is basic, what do I need when I am going in to empty space just to record my every day)…for me all these process is project. And just documentation of the development or our ideas for this few months is work enought to be in these space and to talk about -nagotiating, planing, expecting…etc.

And now-we can just think how to use these time which we have, for already existing plans-works. I made again word doc. where (if you like) you can put a time, and space (related with planed work). I also agree with Jimine that we can meet on the 15th to decide who, when and where?

See you all soon,
best,
marina

From:Hidenori
Hi All,

This is really pity to hear for me. But it is still possible to work with new situation for me. I’m planning to work on there just couple of days. I can also use the space which they don’t have life lines. But I prefer to use shower, gas (cooking) or something from another apartment. That’s mean I prefer to work with someone who can also share the life line with me in the same week.

kind regards, Hide

From: suzannevanrest@live.nl
Subject: RE: what to do?
Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 17:59:08 +0200

Dear all,
that is a big change indeed. If I prepare everything good I can work with one week full time in the space. If I will come back from Crete I will first finish my thesis till the end of May, then we have a DAI week and after this I would like to be able to work in one of the two appartments in one of these three weeks. To me it does not really matter which appartement. My idea was to make an installation with the photo of the scene based on the light of the dutch artist Vermeer. But of course I can photograph that again, maybe it will become a new work or just documentation. In the end I will have the photo of the scene and maybe another one of the scene made into an installation et cetera.
And Veri if I will be in the appartment with electricity and water I don t mind if you live there, but of course I need some space to make the scene and I think near a good window spot of where the light is good. But I rather not if you interfere in my work, but living there no problem. And Jimini I am sorry but I rather not live together for this week with the homeless person, because I don t know him or her and if I only have one week I have to be very concentrated.
To be short I hope to be able to work in Delft one of the last three weeks.
Hope everybody can find a solution!
Take care Suzanne

Date: Sat, 9 May 2009 07:34:51 -0700
Subject: what to do?
From: veridianazurita@gmail.com

Hey dear all,

negotiating negotiating!? me too me too….

So, Once again I have a practical problem….I dont have where go between 15 of May and beginning of July, my planes were living in Delft as a project and using the video documentation as the body of project. Now things are different, we need to give the keys for the next two people who will interact or not with the projects left in the space. I would like to propose my project as a virus as a permanent body that will interact with the projects while the process of changes living. So, for that I need to live the whole period there and completly open to adapt based to the necessities of the next two people. So as a virus that is permanent but could adapt.

WHAT TO DO??? MY VIRUS IS IN+PERMANENT

veri

and then Jimini continues