{"id":1186,"date":"2019-10-28T11:59:36","date_gmt":"2019-10-28T15:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/?p=1186"},"modified":"2019-10-28T13:12:53","modified_gmt":"2019-10-28T17:12:53","slug":"five-fragments-on-collaboration-by-way-of-claire-bishop-fred-moten-hito-steyerl-and-brad-troemel-by-tom-leeser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2019\/10\/28\/five-fragments-on-collaboration-by-way-of-claire-bishop-fred-moten-hito-steyerl-and-brad-troemel-by-tom-leeser\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Fragments on COLLABORATION by Way of Claire Bishop, Fred Moten, Hito Steyerl, and Brad Troemel – by Tom Leeser"},"content":{"rendered":"

You just have to get together with people and try to do something different. You know, I really believe that. But I also recognize how truly difficult that is to do. <\/em>\u2013 Fred Moten<\/strong> (1)<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a01. <\/strong><\/em>Networked Dependency<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe art field is a space of wild contradiction and phenomenal exploitation. It is a place of power mongering, speculation, financial engineering, and massive and crooked manipulation. But it is also a site of commonality, movement, energy and desire. – Hito Steyerl<\/strong> (2)<\/em><\/p>\n

Writing is collaboration. The marks on this page (or screen) spark a biological and neurological occurrence causing an experience. I\u2019m joining with you, the reader, in an exchange\u2013\u2013 a collaboration with four unsuspecting writers and artists. Consider these five fragments to be situated somewhere between verse and prose, shared through our immediate imagination and future memories.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin \u2013\u2013<\/p>\n

It is impossible to step outside of collaboration, given the networked dependencies that constitute our survival. We can move between collaborators, however all art (and life) depends on a constant condition of sharing and kinship.<\/p>\n

This condition makes art, technology and knowledge creation possible.<\/p>\n

Collaboration is a process not a fixed space. It is not an object. It is an \u201cintra-action\u201d between nature and all the planetary species, engaged in being and becoming.<\/p>\n

We are all in the same boat \u2013\u2013 together.<\/p>\n

2.The Sixth Sense<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Shock, discomfort, or frustration\u2014along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt or sheer pleasure\u2013\u2013 are crucial to a work\u2019s aesthetic and political impact. <\/em>– Claire Bishop<\/strong> (3)<\/em><\/p>\n

You, the individual reader is silent. Outside of this virtual space, lies physical collaboration\u2013\u2013 sound, sight, smell, taste and touch within each body and in an ever growing digital-body politic. Collaboration then is our sixth sense\u2013\u2013 somatic, conceptual, passive and active.<\/p>\n

We arrive at the crossroads as intersectional participants generating social transitions of disruption and continuity.\u00a0 While in this alliance we are oblivious to the act of collaborating. The self becomes the thing that is negated. The \u00a0process comes to life through the development of intuitive activities carried out by entropic bodies.<\/p>\n

3<\/em>. Education and Gesture<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It\u2019s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal\u2013\u2013 being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory\u2014there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it \u201cstudy\u201d is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.<\/em> – Fred Moten<\/strong> (4)<\/em><\/p>\n

The body\u2019s gesture is the interface; discourse occurs through interdependent multiple identities establishing collective knowledge, provisionally. As artists, we reconfigure the cultural regime into a series of turbulent events, and hopefully, in the process we can make this world a better place.<\/p>\n

The collaborative impulse grows within individuals through the desire for a new social dynamic. It is an act of one\u2019s own survival, driven by common and uncommon tendencies. It is a \u201cstudy\u201d that is realized and yet unrealized, eternally sought after through an invisible network.<\/p>\n

4. Aesthetics and Politics<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Aesthetics and politics overlap in their concern for the distribution and sharing of the sensible world. \u2013 Claire Bishop<\/strong> (5)<\/em><\/p>\n

Rather than a restriction, collaboration can foster a different realization of liberation, a freedom from the tyranny of the individual, the market and the romantic ideal of the rebel.\u00a0 We traverse the polis as creative mendicants, digital vagabonds and \u201cbirds of passage.\u201d We collaborate by necessity, we share because we have to, like breathing and eating, etc.<\/p>\n

We live and work in the \u201csensible world\u201d and we make art by cribbing from life\u2019s unwritten cookbook. Subsequently, collaboration can be a recipe for both disaster and joy.<\/p>\n

Since collaborations are not static objects, they rely on impermanence and entanglements.\u00a0 Therefore conflict and crisis are ultimately resolvable. Politically, we should not simply initiate acts of condemnation; together we must discover new sites of commonality.<\/p>\n

However there are no guarantees.<\/p>\n

5. Forgotten Media<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The underlying promise of Rate\/Comment\/Subscribe! culture is that viewers can engage in a more direct form of fandom, in which their tributary comments and reblogs are directly acknowledged by artists and eventually become an element in their creative process. Audiences can now believe they are co-creators, collaborating with artists by appreciating them.\u00a0 – Brad Troemel<\/strong> (6) <\/em><\/p>\n

We are continuously attracted to transgression, jumping the fence of each other\u2019s \u201cautonomous zone.\u201d As an aesthetic practice, media can mutate into participation and common authorship.\u00a0 It sometimes passes through solid material like a ghost inducing ephemeral currents of exchange and at times, spectacle.<\/p>\n

However we need to be on the lookout as Claire Bishop warns\u2013\u2013 sentimentalizing collaboration can lead to the \u201creinforcement of art\u2019s autonomy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Social Media can appear as the activities and actions of art, but through endless looping and mundane repetition, it\u2019s at risk from becoming overly transactional, a deadening process of hyper-commodified production\u2013\u2013 a performance that undermines collaboration by colonizing it as mere personal branding.<\/p>\n

Radical collaboration consists of complex ventures where authorship is co-dependent and communication is horizontal both online and offline. Each collaborative initiative needs to mine its own unsettled territory with an acute critical awareness.<\/p>\n

Histories within these territories are precarious temporalities that should be\u00a0 continually activated since media is now written in real-time, spatially distributed, and then quickly forgotten. Aesthetic action can serve as a buffer to this precarity\u2013\u2013 rendering \u00a0collaborative practice as creative activism\u2013\u2013 a life sustaining bio\/geo\/political event.<\/p>\n

Sources<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. David Wallace, Fred Moten\u2019s Radical Critique of the Present<\/a>, The New Yorker, April 30, 2018<\/em>
    \n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      \n
    1. Hito Steyerl, Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy<\/a><\/em>
      \n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n
      1. Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents<\/a><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
          \n
        1. Fred Moten, The Undercommons<\/a><\/em>
          \n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
            \n
          1. Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents<\/a><\/em>
            \n<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
              \n
            1. Brad Troemel, Athletic Aesthetics<\/a><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

              — Tom Leeser<\/a> is a media artist, curator, educator, and writer. He is Program Director of the Art and Technology Program and Director of the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts<\/a> (CalArts).<\/p>\n

              Tom received his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). His film, video, online work, interactive installations, and public performances have been exhibited at Navel, Harvestworks, Eyebeam, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Echo Park Film Center, The Alabama Center for Contemporary Art, Machine Project, The Mount Wilson Observatory, MassMoca, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum, Redcat Theater, The Kitchen, The Millennium, Siggraph, and film and video festivals worldwide, with support from Art Matters, Creative Time, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.<\/p>\n

              Projects and Exhibitions include: The Scream Project<\/em> at Navel, Heard in LA<\/em> at the\u00a0 Electronic Arts Festival at Harvestworks, DryRun<\/em>, a public art and sound\/poetry project for the City of Santa Clarita, CA, History Refused to Die<\/em> and The Futures Project<\/em> at the Alabama Contemporary Center for the Arts and the Los Angeles Filmforum, Alternative Projections<\/em>, Filmforum at the Getty\u2019s Pacific Standard Time, Artist Resident for a Day<\/em> at Machine Project, Radical Cosmologies<\/em> at ISEA2012, Indirect Intention\u2014A Home and Garden Intervention<\/em> at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Future Imaginary<\/em> at the Ben Maltz Gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design, The Lament Project<\/em>\u2014An Evening at the Manual Archives, Underground Cinemamachine<\/em> at Machine Project and Object Lessons<\/em> for Gigantic Artspace in New York City.<\/p>\n

              He is an editor and producer for the web-based journal and curatorial project viralnet-v4.net.<\/a><\/p>\n

              Tom Leeser<\/a> will be curating an art and technology group exhibition at the George Segal Gallery at Montclair State University<\/a> in 2021 titled Tech\/Know\/Future<\/em>.<\/p>\n

               <\/p>\n

               <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

              You just have to get together with people and try to do something different. You know, I really believe that. But I also recognize how truly difficult that is to do. \u2013 Fred Moten (1) \u00a01. Networked Dependency\u00a0 \u201cThe art field is a space of wild contradiction and phenomenal exploitation. It is a place of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":1188,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,24,26,41],"class_list":["post-1186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-creative-research-center-guest-essay","tag-california-institute-of-the-arts","tag-collaboration","tag-media","tag-tom-leeser"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1186"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1186\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}