“We are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write literature for a machinic audience of artificially intellectual peers. Is it not already evident by our presence at conferences on digital poetics that the poets of tomorrow are likely to resemble programmers, exalted, not because they can write great poems, but because they can build a small drone out of words to write great poems for us? If poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among our own anthropoid population, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that must inevitably succeed our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it.”
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Photos by Jason Fulford
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“An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Antonio Gramsci called for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”
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“If philosophy does not produce truths of its own, it certainly has something to say about truth: it reaches it through eternity, by formalizing the production of universal patterns of thought. Art, on the contrary, produces truths of its own, but it does so through oblique means, by dealing with sensible images, objects, bodies, or the material dimension of language, the finiteness of which seems to stand in contradiction with the infinite nature of truth.”
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“Within all great art is a wild animal: tamed… All great art has man’s primitive drives as its ground-base”
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“To romanticize the artist as a creative genius who requires a horde of facilitators to help execute his or her artistic vision seems shortsighted; so does the idea that curatorial endeavors must respond after the fact, so to speak—to what artists are producing. This mindset carries with it the implication that artists are creatively and intellectually superior not only to curators but to pretty much everyone else, which is of course not the case. There are as many untalented artists as there are untalented curators, untalented writers, or untalented cooks.”
From the Exhibitionist #2
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Rancière’s “aesthetic regime of art… is premised on the paradox that ‘art is art to the extent that it is something else than art’: that is a sphere both at one remove from politics and yet always already political because it contains the promise of a better world.”
“Groys argues that all artistic projects are visions of an alternative future, and thus the more successful the more they maintain the gap between the present and future.”
Both from Claire Bishop’s Artifical Hells
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Photo by KB
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In the film La Nouvelle Kahnawake the French duo Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin zoom-in on a Mohawk tribe of Canadian First Nations people, located on the south shore of the St Lawrence river across from Montréal (Québec, Canada). Yet the film is as much about the artists research and presence in Kahnawake as it is about the Mohawks who live there. The artists appear throughout the film, embedding and acknowledging their own position as outsiders noting, “If this is a documentary then the subject is us.” But it’s not just a documentary, nor a critical analysis of the legal loopholes, business practices and cultural histories of the Mohawks. It’s a poetic and performative investigation of relationships in the global sphere, impacted by a cluster of forces so multiple and complex as to become abstract, almost metaphysical.
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“In a certain sense, all my books are co-authored. I am the sole author of none of them, I might not even be their author at all. They give me pleasure only in the measure that I do not feel myself their author—or at least their sole author. Virtually all of my books are born of the desire—no, the need—to continue the work of authors I love.”
Giorgio Agamben (From Cabinet #45)
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Reading of The Senses, by Lydia Davis
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During the siege of Leningrad (1941-44), all the artworks in the Hermitage were removed and stored safely out of harm’s way, but tours continued with guides describing the works that used to fill the now empty galleries.
“Hermitage guides gave soldiers from the front tours of empty picture frames, describing in elaborate detail the paintings they had once held. Most audacious of all was a literary conference held at the height of the blockade, to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the birth of the great Uzbek poet Alisher Navoi. Hundreds of starving people gathered, in the depths of winter, to listen to a poetry recital as shells shook the building to its foundations. The museum had been fortunate in having a store of lumber with which to make its evacuation crates. Afterwards, the surplus made coffins for its dead.”
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