ABSTRACTION AS INFORMATION


                                                    ANTIETHNOGRAPHY

                                         MAPS THAT ARE NOT MAPS

                                            REGULAR QUOTIDIEN TIME TRAVEL

      COMMUNES OF DAILY LIFE (relatedly: BORING SPECULATION)

                   

                                                         NON-COGNITIVE MAGIC


        

ABSTRACTION AS INFORMATION consists of a few different propositional strands. I am looking at the active uses of abstract aesthetics in radical politics and the politcal, poetical, and liberatory undertones of many contemporary abstractionsts' work; thinking about how abstraction got associated away from politics in the first place (through Modernism, for one); and considering why figuration and reality are conflated, in many artistic and mediatic spheres. This show and related programmes ON DOUMENTARY ABSTRACTION I organized in Miami was a small start at manifesting this research. These two pieces by Rob Goyanes and Monica Uszerowicz help to explain the ideas behind it. I also wrote this piece Notes on Abstraction, Politics, and Arts of the Real  for CAS, and did a talk called On Political Abstraction at Prosjektrom Normaans that looked at modern and contemporary art that has used abstract aesthetics to mobilize, hide, and communicate underground politics.

MAPS THAT ARE NOT MAPS is a curatorial project in process that relates inversely to Abstraction as Information. It is on one hand simply a collection of connections in this ongoing tendency among recent artists to turn maps into conduits of different sorts of material. And to make maps out of things that would never be maps, and of course to name things maps, and to disagree with the whole structural cartography thing in general, or oppose the specific type of calculative knowldge that defines the majority of the world's maps. The research on this has been a mix of the casual or incidental and the directed. The directed research is making a few lines through 70s South American art and Southern American contemporary art as a beginning. 

ANTIETHNOGRAPHY. Most of my work as a film programmer and writer centers around forms of documentary artist's moving image work, or what would be called in a cinema context experimental non-fiction or hybrid films. Core referents for these practices include mid-20th century visual ethnography (Jean Rouch,  Robert Gardner), structuralist film, social practice or socially-engaged art, and the essay film (Akerman, Marker for ex). For the past six years I've been working through whether ethnographic art is really an ethical or viable form of relation, and whether visual ethnography, in any of its expanded forms, can or should be salvaged. I've been collecting and categorizing forms of "alternative ethnography,"--reversals and counter-uses, such as in this program and others forthcoming.

REGULAR QUOTIDIEN TIME TRAVEL, and non-fantastic sci-fi. projections of mildly better conditions in small increments of time.

COMMUNES OF DAILY LIFE everything can be shared, no? more than we're doing. small pieces can go around. whats saveable and sharable or pre-salvagable: it can be a muscular, automatic activity.

NON-COGNITIVE MAGIC and politcal paganism. magic is not outwardly expressed culture/it's not an idea, if it's magic. conduct it, alongside ideas and empathy