In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun. 

Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?

In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

With: Azra Akzamija (INT), Elena Bajo (INT), Hank Willis Thomas (US), Heath Bunting (UK), Jacqueline Schoemaker (NL), Job Janssen (NL), Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen (INT), Paul Segers (NL), and Anikó Loránt and Kaszás Tamás (HU).

+ project specific poem by Serge van Duijnhoven

+ project specific texts by Markus Miessen, Alfredo Cramerotti and Wim Langenhoff

Regardless of the religious secularisation that took place, these models of organisation were able to maintain a base – and therefor power – by slightly adapting the range of their production. As social organisations, they found a new economic basis to empower this, by altering their products from class and religion based into a market based story, which emerged in a left and right political spectrum. At this time, due to the fading of European and globally cultural and economic borders and the emergence of new economies and media, these systems begin to erode internally. The new calls for organisation are conservative or progressive. This overlooks the economic management of the “left” and “right” culture, which should be shaped through public and private investment. There is no body that can provide a basis for the new administration.

What is remarkable is the growing gap between younger generations who are open to the necessary risks of our globalised world, and the older generations who are afraid to lose their accomplishments, as can be identified in the divide between the young and the older segments of labour unions; for example in Spain, where the youth has no future, or in the Netherlands, where a grey wave of elderly people is likely to become a heavy financial burden.

Within this context, the increased presence of purely commercial broadcasting stations – that are dominated by the state in Italy, but unprecedented in the Netherlands until the early 90’s – created a diffuse and distrustful landscape for social recognition and identification, thus giving power to a growing mistrust These commercial platforms do not hold any social representation; they are a body without spirit. Meanwhile, new media add another layer of confusion, allowing everyone to get their voice heard and use their own sources: from the populist and anti Eastern-European Freedom Party blogs, to blogs by Occupy groups. And what did Occupy represent anyway? Is it the post-political mass of undecided voters? Is that the definition of the multitude...?

Maurice Meewisse keeps iconic archaic, archetype men in mind. He creates living or work conditions for his men. He creates their tools, he digs their holes, stages their labor. His is not research-based artwork, but a performative setting in which he constructs what he imagines life was – or, could have been – like. 

Meewisse’s work can be seen as renewed romanticism, one that negates a scientific rational attitude, and favors a subjective, emotion driven course. One that puts the artist in the center of his work and leaves the audience to feel they’ve walked into someone’s private space. 

‘Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect (the critic) upon art’
states the famous North American writer, critic and essayist, Susan Sontag, in the essay ‘Against Interpretation’. She suggests that ‘we must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more’. To achieve a more sensitive reading of the work requires a good listener. Sontag therefore makes the plea, ‘in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.’

‘Abstraction is the opposite of information’
states the critic/observer Jan Verwoert. Abstraction can be a way to return to the image, whereby the formal aspects of the image determine its content and its power. This experiment is being carried out by artists who use abstraction in a contemporary fashion. They use tradition freely, but also take on pop culture – doing so self-consciously, and aiming, through abstraction, to exude their own erotics. 

Whatspace marks out the underlying game experimentally, as an extensive international poster project in Tilburg’s public space as well as in Onomatopee’s exhibition space. The starting point here is, taking things as they are, in a sensual, sensory manner, consequently freeing the image of the overload of information which adheres to it and which causes the image itself, as carrier of information, to become invisible. Fourteen (inter)national artists have been invited to develop work in the format of a poster especially for this exhibition. Not only does this elicit questions about the role and function of the media in respect to the use of public space, it also challenges the viewer, when confronted with the work, to concentrate fully on the significance of this information. 

This first chapter of our year-long Who told you so?! program focuses on the story of Truth vs. Government. The stories that construct our national identities become arguable as they are overrun by an extreme flow of global data exchanges via Internet, social media, travel and migration. Humanity has become global as the stories we deal with on a daily basis arise from everywhere across the globe. We generate our own narration through these in an eclectic manner, intuitively. Identities are configured from the bottom-up, throughout the lively narrations of the multitude. Meanwhile national and supranational governments attempt to offer identities in which we can find cohesion, just as the “European” storyline is trying to postulate something of a Jewish/Christian/humanist body.

This first chapter takes on the visual and textual narrations that are able to question the official story and help us to produce our individual narrations. They provoke us to doubt the context in which the story of the government presents itself, and allow for speculation and new relationships through which we are able to playfully recount the configuration of the narrative. It stimulates us to go beyond our own pleasantly eclectic narratives as well as the constant stream of “official” stories.

Downloads:
Persbericht in Dutch
Press release in English

Personal characteristics and alien ones show their potency – the potency of authentic doubt – at the point when the characters lose themselves in the dilemma between conservative, self-absorbed autonomy, and progressive, dynamic refinement.

‘Understanding’ in the double meaning of the word – in the sense of both compassion and of comprehension – determines the rapport of the actor, character and audience (or reader). The script unfolds as a plea for radical and shared integrity: subjective, multiform and, most importantly, loyalty to the personal point of departure.

Click here for a film of the exhibit, by Nick Meehan