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Matteo Pasquinelli, "An Assault on Neurospace (Misguided Directions for)"An Assault on Neurospace (Misguided Directions for)
1. A libidinal geology of media spaces What is the field that media art and media activism are meant to occupy today? What is the place of the creative act? From the modern 2. The becoming-net of space Utopias and religious sagas have often been based on the evocation of spaces radically other. Religion, as an intimate semiotic device, works on the projection of an after-life or a Promise Land (and the idea itself of a Soul points to a non-directly reachable interior space). Modern political utopias, indeed, have often been linked by direct genealogy to the ultra-mundane spaces of religion. On the more pragmatic level of history, capitalism was born privatizing Mixed Reality was defined by Paul Milgram as the "merging of real and virtual worlds somewhere along the 'virtuality continuum' which connects completely real environments to completely virtual ones." It is a sliding scale of complete virtuality on one end (Virtual Contemporary philosophical thought as well developed new models of space to cover the information society: from Teilard de Chardin and Pierre Levy's noosphere to cognitive capitalism9 by Italian and French post-workerist thinkers (postoperaismo), knowledge and 3. Neurospace as an immanent plane of desire Close to the notorious pair cyberspace and mediascape, there is another family of concepts trying to arrange a spatial paradigm with respect to the dimension of desire and psyche, also called by Bateson "ecology of mind"11. As we have shown above, the issue of space cannot be separated from the field of desires and conflicts producing it: on the contrary, many technology-based approaches still consider space as a neutral background, an implicit and unconscious a priori. Within the history of emotional spaces we cannot forget concepts such as situation, drift, psychogeography and Unified Urbanism conceived by the Situationists in the 50's. But the spatial evolution we are following, indeed, has extended beyond the urban and architectural fields to establish the immaterial spaces of mindscape and psychosphere. Guattari claimed that "an ecology of the virtual is just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world"12. It is thanks to such an awareness that today we talk of an "ecology of media", the Adbusters magazine claims to be a "journal of the mental environment", and new strategies of media activism and cultural Dr Nathan limped across the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman form the billboards he had seen near the hospital - the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the film actress and the audience who were the distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives intersected at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.14 Ballard's vision is not that hallucinatory after all: just think of the gigantic advertising hoardings that cover some of our city buildings with superhuman-size celebrity endorsements. Even the original definition of cyberspace itself was deeply connected to a neuro dimension. First, according to Gibson cyberspace is not a virtual reality but a space of metadata: "A graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system"15. Around that information space or metaspace a "consensual hallucination" rises up, i.e. something at the same time more abstract and more physical than a computer-simulated reality. Cyberspace is inserted into bodies and nervous systems of Gibson's characters: it is already a neurospace (in his novels altered states of mind caused by synthetic drugs cannot be distinguished from the experience of cyberspace). In his 2002 Vancouver talk In the visegrips with Dr. Satan, Gibson finds again the best words to shape a post-cyberspace age. Cyberspace is quite physical indeed: The electrons streaming into a child's eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child's optic nerves. As physical as the structures and chemicals those neurons will encounter in the human brain. We are implicit, here, all of us, in a vast physical construct of artificially linked nervous systems. Invisible. We cannot touch it.16 In last Gibson's books, cyberspace carries on its evolution crossing the boundaries of technological biosphere and engaging the star system in Idoru17 (rock star Rez is meant to marry Rei Toei, the most popular musician in Japan, that doesn't exist, as she is an idoru, "an artificial celebrity creation of information software agents" designed to perform music in concerts) and the brandscape in Pattern Recognition18 (Cayce Pollard is a coolhunter with an intuitive gift for telling whether any logo will be a commercial flop, the downside of her sensitivity is an allergic reaction to logo overexposure). 4. Forms of life in the neurospace: new political animals. Imagining a new space of action for art and activism means to trace new and probably wrong directions, because we don't have a techno-determinism to trust under our feet. We head for the neurospace like Hunter Thompson23 and Dr. Gonzo on their convertible towards Las Vegas with the boot full of psychedelics. Gonzo-philosophy. From that perspective the matrix of neurospace has not the appareance of digital geometry, nor of fashionable biopolitics, but of zoopolitics, that is not about the power on life but about political animals capable of indipendent existence. This time we are not interested in taking measures of power dispositifs but in watching how autonomous forms of life create their own vital room and reproduce themselves. For instance, the movement of temp and precarious workers that every year organises the Euro May Day event (www.euromayday.org) re-engineered the role of the leader and spokesman and created in Italy a new saint for the precariat: San Precario (www.sanprecario.info) is an open-source pop star that (as its forerunner Luther Blissett) merges archetypical figures of italian collective imagery (saints) with the latest social figures (temp workers). After his triumph as the icon of the movement, San Precario generated in 2005 its anagram Serpica Naro, an anglo-japanese virtual stylist at the center of a historical hoax against Milano's Fashion Week, where she managed to get a catwalk and media coverage as a real stylist. Serpica Naro (www.serpicanaro.com) was useful to condemn the conditions of precariuos workers within italian fashion industry, but especially to create an open meta-brand that any stylist from the "radical fashion" can use. Serpica Naro is no anglojap stylist officially listed for Milano's fashion week. Serpica Naro does not exist: everybody can be a stylist. Serpica Naro is the anagram for San Precario, radical patron of precarized temps. Serpica Naro is a metabrand. Serpica Naro is a generous version of the Trademark. Everyone who identifies with Serpica can be part of it. Serpica Naro is a place where alternative imagery, style and self-production, creativity and radicalism meet. Serpica Naro declares the end of the status and role of the fashionistas and their ideological creations. She asserts a social networking method and punctures a hole thru the fashion business by which you can express social production and conflict. Serpica Naro is an independent production of the senses, the opening of a public code opening, the collective liberation of skills and minds. Serpica Naro is a platform from building relationships, an open network constantly growing and thickening. Our grannies taught us how to knit without asking nothing for it in exchange. Serpica Naro is our new "collective granny" sharing her knowledge and experience on the needle trades. Serpica Naro is a website that expresses a precarious style lab, gathering selfmade production together so to enhance the sharing of work, knowledge and information. Existential instability and social precarity are turned into active resources are made part of a work in progress that pushes to us move and create new styles. Creativity and experimentation meet the agitation and representation of social conflict. Serpica Naro as metabrand of self-production is our way of declaring that the fashion week is over and the season of precarious conspiracy has started!24 Before Serpica Naro's masterstroke the spanish collective Yomango (www.yomango.net) developed the concept and the idea of the meta- brand. They created the meta-brand Yomango (that in spanish means "I steal") to hit the popular fashion chain Mango by shoplifting performances. Yomango is a brand name whose goal is not the sale of products but lifestyles, just like with all the other big brands. However, in the case of Yomango, the lifestyle is based on shoplifting as a form of disobedience and direct action against multinational corporations. Just as the market captures desires, expectations and experiences and sells them back as products, the Yomango style promotes the "reapropriation" of what was once part of the commons. In the field of brandscape as well we find Guerriglia Marketing (www.guerrigliamarketing.it), a Rome-based agency that follows the slogan "Fucking the market to enter it" rather than the moderate and social-democratic "Entering the market to fuck it". Guerriglia Marketing applies the media strategies developed by the global movement to marketing to create very unstable and radically uncorrect media hybrids. Such an agency was born to reclaim the innovation capital and the imagery produced by global movements that has been recuperating by corporation and big brands to upgrade their marketing strategies (see for instance the Diesel campaign after Genova G8). On the same level but by opposite means, the french collectives antipub are active. They are anonymous and acephalous informal groups that jam billboards and any kind of outdoor advertising in french cities, as a form of protest and urban ecology for a new attention economy. At the end of this short overview, among the media strategies of Euro May Day we put also Molle Industria25 (www.molleindustria.it), a collective of game designers that produce "political games", where the typical shut'm'up narrativity, gender division and science fiction set of commercial games are deconstructed. For instance Tamatipico is a sort of Tamagotchi where the virtual pet is replaced by a temp worker. Instructions say: "Tamatipico Is Your virtual flexworker: He works, he rests and he has fun when you want him to! Raise his productivity but pay attention to his energy and his happyness because he could get injured or strike". The result is the videogame format as a brand new political language and the inscription of new social subjectivities and narrations into technology. 5. "People doing something with your nervous system" San Precario moves into the space of popular imagery, Serpica Naro and Yomango into the fashion and shopping imagery, Molle Industria engages the Play Station generation, Guerriglia Marketing and the antipub assault brandspace and ad media. Well, are they really new forms of art and actvism? Compared to american and european pre-internet counter-culture (from cultural jamming to neoism), those projects seem to be more network-oriented than performance-oriented. They are more keen into the public sphere, even if they look like more mainstream aesthetics. Such examples show a new generation of post-internet activism, where the net brainframe is applied to the production of new subjectivities, where tecnologies turn into semio- technologies. It's no more about a vertical assault on the Code, but about a reengineering operation into the horizontal net constituting reality. Activism, art, marketing share by now the same grammar and work on the same networks. As Guattari noted, the role of media in general is about the prodution of subjectivities26 (and that is the case of collective pop stars, meta-brands, games, but even new social figures such as the precarious worker). Political activism, indeed, has been always more worried about controlling content (counter-information), Matteo Pasquinelli Paper presented in a draft version at "Utopia Reversed" in Weimar, May 2005. Reader-friendly pdf recommended: Hackney, London Translated by Matteo Pasquinelli, edited by Alex Foti. Notes 1 M. Serres, "J'habite une multiplicité d'espaces", in L'interference, Minuit, Paris 1972. 2 F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso, London 1991, p364. 3 H. Lefebvre, La Production de l'espace, Anthropos, Paris 1974; english edition, The Production of Space, Blackwell, Oxford 1991. 4 J. Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press, New York 1985. 5 S. Zizek, Benvenuti nel deserto del reale, Meltemi, Roma 2002. 6 M. Foucault, La volonté de savoir, Gallimard, Paris 1976. 7 See TMC Locative Reader, 2004, TMC
9 Y. Moulier Boutang (edit.), L'età del capitalismo cognitivo, Ombre Corte, Verona 2002. 10 J.F. Sherry, "Cereal Monogamy: Brand Loyalty as a Secular Ritual in Consumer Culture", paper, Association for Consumer Research conference, Toronto, Canada, 1986; "Advertising as a cultural system", in Umiker-Sebeok (ed.), Marketing and Semiotics: New Direction in the Study of Signs for Sales, 1987. 11 G. Bateson, Steps towards an Ecology of Mind, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1972. 12 F. Guattari, Chaosmose, Galilée, Paris 1992. 13 M. Dery, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, 1993, www.markdery.com/archives/books/culture_jamming. 14 J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibion, Jonathan Cape, London 1970. 15 W. Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Book, New York 1984. 16 W. Gibson, "In the visegrips of Dr. Satan (with Vannevar Bush)", talk, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002, www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/ 2003_01_28_archive.asp. 17 W. Gibson, Idoru, Putnam, Berkeley (USA) 1996. 18 W. Gibson, Pattern recognition, Putnam, Berkeley (USA) 2003. 19 M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw- Hill, New York 1964 20 G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, L'Anti-Oedipe. Capitalisme et schizophrénie, Minuit, Parigi 1972. 21 Ibid. 22 See www.t0.or.at/hakimbey/neurospc.htm. 23 H. Thompson, Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, Random House, New York 1972. 24 Serpica Naro's press release, here.
25 BBC interview with Paolo Pedercini, here, and 26 See F. Guattari, Les trois écologies, Galilée, Paris, 1987. 27 J.G. Ballard, "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," 1967; in Ronald Reagan: The Magazine Poetry, 1968. 28 See "Biopolitical Production" in M. Hardt, A. Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2000. 29 M. Hardt, A. Negri, Multitude, Penguin Press, 2004.
30 Dorkbot meetings motto, www.dorkbot.com. |
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