<nettime> Cartography of Excess

["brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr" <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

The twofold power of maps: envisioning the world, navigating through it to
reach our goals. But who grants the power, and how to usurp it or elude it?
I'm posting this bit of art crit on the occasion of a show by the group
Bureau d'Etudes at Kunste-Werke in Berlin, and as part of my general work
on mapping. Comments, critiques or references are welcome. - BH

****

Cartography of Excess:
Bureau d'Etudes, Multiplicity

Utopian ideas – like "Spaceship Earth" – are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions. Fuller based his politics on this map: at the '67 World Expo in Montreal, in the dome of the U.S pavilion, he wanted to lay out a vast Dymaxion projection, and animate it with the most up-to-date statistics, so visitors could watch the flow of resources across the earth – and identify the patterns, the inequalities, the most wasteful and efficient solutions. Dele!
gations from different regions would meet for cooperative sessions, in a problem-solving process called the "World Peace Game."1 The idea was simple: radical democracy. "Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone"2

Gerardus Mercator was a Protestant scholar from Flanders; he published his
map in 1569, to help European merchants plot routes to distant shores. The
ability to sail in straight lines led to a capitalist world-economy. Oyvind
Fahlström was a Swedish artist who spent his childhood in Brazil, and died
in the U.S.A. His World Map was painted in 1972, not long after Fuller
imagined his utopia. Fahlström's map recalls the Mercator projection: but
the oceans have practically disappeared, the continents are crushed or
swollen by the political pressures that the world-economy brings. Space
overflows with clashes between the wealthy and the downtrodden, the CIA and
the freedom-fighters, the capitalists, the communists, the revolutionaries.
Fahlström was interested in resistance and excess: by which I mean politics
plus overflowing subjectivity, figurative invention. For him, a map was a
flat, rule-governed space for a strict social game; but it also was an open
territory for imaginary play.3 In the early seventies he created a series
of Monopoly sets (CIA Monopoly, World Trade Monopoly, Indochina, etc.),
where political and economic information provides inflexible rules,
whatever our passion, whatever our creativity. Yet a work like his Pentagon
Puzzle – including a detail of a square earth, wrapped in chains – could
also be taken apart, dispersed, its pieces reinserted into another game.

Fuller's utopia was not accepted for the U.S. pavilion in 1967: at the
entryway, officials placed a huge golden eagle. But today, Internet access
has brought tremendous information within our reach. Now everyone can play
at mapping resources. "The communications aspect of my work can be vastly
augmented by the use of computers and by the use of television, video and
the miniaturizing trend of cassettes of video communication…. millions of
people and multi-billions of dollars are at work in developing just such
equipment, personnel and know-how," wrote Fuller in 1970.4 Part of Bucky's
heritage is "osEarth Inc.," a think-tank and data-base compiler which
organizes World Game sessions on a huge Dymaxion map, as a learning
experience for youth. However, that experience is also sold to negotiating
teams from Fortune 500 corporations. "Global civil society," with all its
complicities, is squarely on the map in 2002.

Does anyone doubt that Fahlström's Monopoly paintings, with their focus on
political confrontation, come much closer to the games the world really
plays? Yet the recent round of counter-summits and global demonstrations
still recall Fuller's basic idea, radical democracy. And one begins to
wonder: where are the artist-cartographers of today?

Power Lines

The Paris-based conceptual group, Bureau d'Etudes, works intensively in two
dimensions. For a recent exhibition called "Planet of the Apes" they have
created integrated wall charts of the ownership ties between transnational
organizations, a synoptic view of the world monetary game. Against a black
ground, shield-like forms are emblazoned with the names of states,
regulatory bodies, think tanks, financial firms and corporations. Texts on
privatization and flexibilization are posted among the circuit-like arrays.
A few spots give way to blue zones, humorous and surreal, like
word-balloons or psychic oceans: these hold counter-information from
autonomous groups, manifestos, constitutions, calls to action...

Instead of a catalogue, the visitor gets three "Wartime Chronicles," single
sheets that divide the power players into overlapping regions. One is a
finance pole, with pension funds, portfolio managers and banks, plus gray
zones of legitimating foundations. Another shows telcoms, media groups,
networks of consumer distribution. So you want to call the police on these
criminals? Military institutions, intelligence agencies, weapon makers and
satellite companies complete the picture A few quotes run along the sides
of the sheets, like this one from the artist Fabrice Hybert: "My first
collector, well, big collector... was a mediator for NATO and the big
structures like that, NATO and the African or South American countries,
something like that, another one is a mediator for all the arms industries,
well, you know, it's horrible but he has this capacity to abstract himself
in that scene... Me, I like people like that."5

There's a wager here: paint a totalitarian picture, crystal clear, and
people will look for the cracks in some other dimension. Another giveaway,
the eight-page text called "Potentials," explores "autonomous
knowledge/power" – i.e. the deconstruction and unconventional
reconstruction of complex machines – with a political analysis of
different anarchist positions, as well as maps or figures listing dissident
knowledge producers, squats and hacklabs, and a chart that relates various
forms of non-capitalist exchange. A non-price (0 euros) and a contractual
note figures on each of the sheets: "The present publication cannot be
acquired, sold or destroyed. All persons may nonetheless use it as long as
they please, with an obligation to give it to others if no longer desired."

This last detail has its importance: as Bruce Sterling recently put it:
"Information Wants To Be Worthless" – worthless in monetary terms, that
is.6 And far beyond the computer logic of Open Source, the great
alternative project of the last decade has been mapping the transnational
space invested primarily by the corporations, and distributing that
knowledge for free. This is the real power of "spontaneous cooperation," in
a global information project like Indymedia. Across a decade and more, from
the early '80s to the mid-90s, the rules of the neoliberal economy were
hidden in the back holes of offshore operations. Today, a multitude of
projects like "Planet of the Apes" are making them increasingly visible.7
To the point where a new resistance means we can start imagining – or
exploring – a radically different map of the planet again.

Fuller would have loved the design of the Internet, which makes
information-sharing possible for the World Game. Fahlström, the admirer of
cartoonist Robert Crumb, would have loved the crowd at the Days of Global
Action: autonomous and wild, intelligent and quick on their feet. Bureau
d'Etudes is in that crowd: by collaborating with squats, jobless people and
sans papiers, by operating a self-organizing space in Strasbourg, the
"Syndicat Potentiel," and combining it with "Université Tangente," a
project for autonomous knowledge production, they have begun quietly
broadcasting a pragmatic intransigence to the younger artists on a French
art scene, dominated by the likes of Fabrice Hybert. This summer, they will
meet the No-Border Network in attempts to subvert one of the strongest
power-lines: the Schengen Information System. Activities like those simply
can't appear on the walls of the art world. In this sense, half the work of
Bureau d'Etudes remains underground: the refusals and denunciations are
clear, the cooperation and subjective play remains almost invisible. And
maybe it's better that way: how could you successfully represent an
alternative, radically democratic experience?

Uncertain Uses

A sophisticated mapping project has tried to answer just that question. The
screen before you shows a purple-black mass, spangled with mesmerizing
constellations: slowly you realize it's a night-photo of urbanized Europe,
with white rectangles marking zones of potential activity. The scene
breaks: music plays, letters dance and roll, spelling out words; and you
begin to wander within a matrix of slightly elevated, freestanding screens.
You find yourself surrounded by distinct sets of imposing, static
black-and-white images of architectural arrays; then snapshot color pics of
people mingling freely in a everyday scenes; then sustained interviews in
black-and-white with huge talking heads; then lyrical video strolls through
some personal warp in the urban terrain. Stop in front of one screen, and a
specific, localized story unfolds: architectural setting, actors,
individual story, subjective path through the city. Until the scene breaks,
the language rolls, the music plays, and the permutations begin differently
again. On the fringes of the art world, a group of urbanists has created
one of the most impressive systems of visual representation to appear in
recent years: USE, or the "Uncertain States of Europe," a project by
Stefano Boeri and Multiplicity.

Multiplicity is a networked research team, exploring the European territory
as it changes, in twenty-six different sites from Athens to Espoo, from
Porto to Bucharest or Moscow. The basic premise is that borders are
ungraspable, that architectural programs and urban limits are unstable –
but everywhere, the subjective excess of "autopoetic innovations" creates
recognizable patterns of change, at least for the observer who mingles with
them. For Boeri, whose aim is to deconstruct an outdated urban planner's
gaze, what we are seeing is "the triumph of the multitude": consistently
mutating but thoroughly unpredictable patterns of self-organization,
niching in built environments that have increasingly lost their
predetermined function. Thus one of the sequences (keyword: détournement)
recounts how the uses of the Chinese community have the completely
transformed the ideal program of a huge modern housing slab in the 13th
district of Paris. Another (keyword: eruption) deals with the careful
organization of chaotic raves, "nomadic flames": "The paths of the millions
of ravers and tribes that invade Europe's streets every weekend bring us
ever further away from a precise, functional destination"8

The reference to the multitude in Boeri's text, and indeed, on the screens
of USE, recalls the political thinking of Italian Autonomia, with their
central theme of "exodus," or conscious withdrawal from modernist planning
and salaried labor. Obviously it's a dilemma for the traditional urbanist,
or for any politician wanting to exercise control: "Escaping this condition
of powerlessness simply implies accepting the ungovernability of a great
deal of the contemporary territory," writes Boeri. This in its turn would
mean "learning to act in a context directed by different, highly variable
subjects."9 Or in what I'd call a situation of radical democracy.

But the big question that remains is how to use an installation like USE,
and how to use the operational model of a networked, collaborative research
group like Multiplicity. The exhibition device itself, elaborated outside
the typical gallery-museum circuit, is the best installation I've yet seen
on interactive social process: with its extensive matrix of screens, it
opens up a real-and-imaginary territory, a multidimensional, interrelated
world of subjective freedoms. But to what extent is it effectively
political? "To resist is not to be against, any more, but to singularize,"
writes Suely Rolnik, reflecting on the changing meanings of artistic
practice since the Great Refusal of the 1960s. "All and any acts of
resistance are acts of creation and not acts of negation."10

Beautifully said – but I'm not certain. The great theoretical swing of the
past three decades, from critical negation to use value and subversive
affirmation, has left "progressive" practices wide open to every
complicity. Despite the autopoetic processes that an installation like USE
so brilliantly lets us see, the entire planet – Spaceship Earth – is prey
to a resurgence of repressive authority, within the perfectly legible game
of the capitalist world-economy. Berlusconi's Italy, where the project has
been shown, is hardly an exception: and yet it is also one of the
laboratories for new forms of political mobilization. Can we imagine
artistic representations of self-organizing processes, in open
confrontation with the economic game? "Rules oppose and derail
subjectivity, loosen the imprinted circuits of the individual," wrote
Oyvind Fahlström. Only then does a deeper territory emerge, a more complex
interplay: power lines/radical democracy.

Brian Holmes


Exhibitions:

– Bureau d'Etudes, "La planète des singes," was presented at La Box,
Bourges, France, January 30-March 12, 2002. A new version of the
installation, with texts in English, shows at Kunste-werke in Berlin, from
May 4 to July 7. The full set of diagrams has been published in the journal
Multitudes, no. 8, Paris, March 2002.

– Multiplicity, "USE (Uncertain States of Europe)," was first shown at
Mutations in Bordeaux, and then presented at the Milan Triennial, January
16-April 22, 2002, among others. The installation will be part of Documenta
11 in Kassel this summer.

Notes:

1. “The common assumption of ultimate war by the major political powers of
our planet brought about the development of World WAR Gaming Science by the
great powers’ respective military strategists. World War Gaming Science
involved all terrestrial resources. My World PEACE Gaming Science changes
the basic assumption of fundamental inadequacy of total life support and
applies total capability toward the success of all humans.” Buckminster
Fuller, “Preamble and Memorandum to those interested in playing World
Game,” in The World Game: Integrative Resource Planning Tool (Carbondale,
Ill.: Southern Illinois University, typescript, 1971), p. 2, available at:
<www.bfi.org/worlddesign/WG1_Title.pdf>. Fuller is, of course, the coiner
of the expression "Spaceship Earth."

2. Quoted in Medard Gabel, "Buckminster Fuller and the Game of the World,"
at <www.worldgame.org/info/fuller.shtml>. Thanks to Hubert Salden for
putting me on this track. 

3. I use Suely Rolnik's distinction between "playing-the-game" and
"just-playing," in "Oyvind Fahlström's Changing Maps," exhib. cat. Oyvind
Fahlström: Another Space for Painting, MACBA, Barcelona, 2001.

4. Buckminster Fuller, “Preamble and Memorandum," op. cit., p. 6.

5. Interview on May 2, 1996, with Fabrice Hybert, artist representing
France at the Venice Biennial, in Bureau d'Etudes, Chroniques de guerre 2,
brochure, February 2002.

6. Bruce Sterling, "Information Wants To Be Worthless," distributed free
over Nettime, March 6, 2002, archive at <http://nettime.org>; let me recall
that one of the richest Nettime threads over the years has concerned "the
high-tech gift economy."

7. To stick only to the art scene, Mark Lombardi’s sketch diagrams and
index cards on banking scandals, or the website “TheyRule” by Josh On and
Futurefarmers (www.theyrule.net), are close to the recent projects by
Bureau d'Etudes. “TheyRule” introduces a DIY side to corporate tracking:
users can build up diagrams of a single CEO’s participation in
interlocking corporate boards. However, neither project has the synoptic
ambitions of Bureau d'Etudes.

8. Paolo Vari, "USE.04 Raves," in exhib. cat. Mutations, arc en rêve centre
d'architecture, Bordeaux, 2000.

9. Stefano Boeri, "Notes for a Research Program," in Mutations, op. cit.

10. Suely Rolnik, "Oyvind Fahlström's Changing Maps," op. cit.


This article was published in German in Springerin

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net