Arts Research: Creating the KaChing

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¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0
The Florida Research Ensemble

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 The FRE undertook a pilot consultation in Miami, Florida, in the 1990s to test the parable form of the poetic figure on behalf of a group subject (a prototype developed extensively by John Craig Freeman, including sites in Second Life). Here is part of a summary description of the project published as an “artists’ statement” in Leonardo 36: 3 (2003).

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 The case used as the prototype for the consultancy is the “image crisis” declared by the government in Florida during the early 1990s in response to a series of tourist murders (a crisis exacerbated more recently by the presidential election snafu and the ties of the 9-11 hijackers to Florida). An analysis of news and entertainment documents resulted in a focus first on the city of Miami, and then on the Miami River, a 5.5 mile channel at the heart of the city that is a “zone” — site of every policy issue in the state. “Testimonial” is a montage of documents (journals, video interviews, photographs) by Barbara Jo Revelle made during her five-week stay at an Inn on the Miami River. Testimonial is composed using a hybrid mix of the “drift” made famous by the French Situationists, the poetic form of the “ideogram” (the modernist poetics initiated by Ezra Pound), and Roland Barthes’ obtuse or third meaning (a detail in an image triggers an involuntary memory).

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 The method reflects a “secret history” of “situation” that brings into relation Plato’s “Timaeus” (chora), the Chinese “I Ching” (hexagram), Ezra Pound’s “Cantos” (vortex), and Guy Debord’s maps (plaque tournante). The poetic ideogram, extended to photography, is used to produce an image category out of the documentation of the river region. The photograph “Crossroads” (showing a Haitian trading vessel impounded by the Coast Guard) is to this image category what the topic “justice” is to a conceptual category. The testimonial generated this image by juxtaposing Revelle’s documents with a public policy issue — “Operation Safety Net” and the Caribbean Code, intended to exclude substandard boats from the port. The result is an attunement, a cognitive map in which the Haitian trader, impounded by the Coast Guard, juxtaposed with Revelle’s personal situation, evokes the mood (“Stimmung”) of the river zone. The EmerAgency motto is: “Problems B Us.”

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 The name of the Miami chora — Miautre — refers to Jacques Derrida’s discussion of “aporia” (an intractable dilemma). Miami is treated not as a problem but as an aporia. In his Politics of Friendship, Derrida concludes his critique of the history of political theory based on the model of “friendship,” by proposing a politics of hospitality (not friend and enemy, but host and guest). Derrida’s aporia of hospitality is proposed as a replacement for the dilemma that structured the Cold War (Prisoner’s Dilemma). In this context, “Mi-Ami” translates as “my friend.” Derrida proposes the “other” (“autre”) as the guest in a new politics; hence, the testimonial works to switch the Miami River from “my friend” to “my other” (Miautre). The French terms are justified by a focus on the Haitian presence on the river (Creole). The Haitians who come to Miami are not enemies but guests. “Crossroads” becomes categorial when it is extended to cover any experience of “impoundment”.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 http://barbarajorevelle.com/miami_river/index.html

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0
Image 10: “Crossroads”

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Testimonial (Mystory)

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 The practice of consulting recommended for further development is “testimonial,” using the mystory procedure, with the goal of generalizing to an Internet practice the arts experiment conducted in the Miami River zone. [As a quick reference, here is my own composition of a mystory].

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0
Noon Star

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 The image generated mystorically is “categorial” — it extracts and holds the mood of the Problem zone, and this mood is what makes the image capacious, capable of gathering into a set the whole (hole) of the zone. The established means by which a picture holds a narrative are either that it represents the “pregnant moment” — the crisis, peripateia or turning point of a narrative; — or that it offers what is typical in terms of the everyday reality of a situation. While both of these possibilities are observable in “Crossroads,” neither is necessary since the method does not depend upon the form of what is visible in the image. The image functions rather as a “souvenir” of the triggering detail (punctum). The network of associations snapped in this shot is enhanced by the visualization technologies of electracy (recalling the research and pedagogical project, to design and test a “reading and writing” practice based on imaging).

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0
Imaging Place

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 To put into a database the flash of insight captured in the “Crossroads” photograph, involves unspooling the four threads (“ficelles”) of allegory, in order to compose a cognitive map connecting collective history with individual experience. What is the effect of juxtaposing these four scenes? If our purpose were to write a screenplay, to make a movie, then these tracks could be integrated in one narrative. “Crossroads” is a virtual film still evoking the diegesis (imaginary space and time) of Myami (a narrative diegesis is what makes a particular story recognizable regardless of the medium in which it is represented). “Myami” is “Miami” in the media spectacle. The dynamic movement of a narrative from beginning to end is managed by the contracts governing the three modes of exchange that constitute society: economics, kinship, and communication. Events become potential stories (become worth recounting) when the contracts that regulate the exchanges are violated (the enactment of such vices as stealing, cheating, lying).

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 These exchanges and their violations are at work in the scene and moment indexed by the photograph. This photograph is to electracy (the digital apparatus) what a concept is to literacy. The mystory registers each exchange, juxtaposing or blocking them into an assemblage, in order to foreground a different dynamic that is also at work in the scene: contingency, luck, (it goes by many names, each with its own nuance), chance, coincidence, synchronicity. Beyond the ordering powers of argument, narrative, and figure, there is a disruptive, chaotic operator. An “omen,” for example, is defined as the conjunction of a personal problem, an event, and chance.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 The Miami River is a port, a marketplace, literally a crossroads. The lines of our potential narrative are left untied in order to allow a figure — a metaphor or metonym — to emerge, an image, whose “event” or happening blocks the discourses into a pattern, a constellation. The point in any case is not to tell one story, but to show the ground and limits of story and concept. We assume the cultural schema, the familiarity with narrative form, so that it matters little whether we imagine “Crossroads” as a still from a movie that has been disassembled, or one that cannot be made. What are the stories?

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0
Miami Miautre

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Literal Level: History (the story of the Miami River)

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Literally “Crossroads” shows a ship docked next to a warehouse on the Miami River, City of Miami, Florida. It is not the ship we anticipated in our table work (it is not the Rose-Marie Express but the M/V Deliverance Express). The cargo is not immigrants but used, second-hand items: bicycles, plastic buckets, clothing, mattresses. It is piled around the warehouse, and some has been loaded onto the vessel. Atop a pile of mattresses two crewmen are seated.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 What cannot be seen but must be inferred is the Problem at work in each track or register. One of the selection principles determining what to include in each thread is this schema of Problem-Solution that frames the modern understanding of “Ate” (the blindness that produces calamity in tragedy). In this case the ship is impounded, caught in Operation Safety Net — the “Caribbean Code” — conducted by the United States Coast Guard, directed at “substandard shipping,” vessels under 500 gross tons. The nature of the problem depends upon one’s point of view or position in the situation. For the Coast Guard it is “irresponsible owners” trying to extend the economic life of old ships. The established policy solution is to eliminate such shipping through inspection and impounding. For the Haitians the problem is to make enough money to feed dependents back home, a goal thwarted by the opponent — the Coast Guard.

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 Allegorical Level: Entertainment

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 The place where the photograph was taken (the Miami River zone) is animated by the exchange of communication, media, language, in the sense of the circulation of stories and information that motivate or discourage tourist travel and immigration. “Problems” in the Media quarter are constructed as spectacles to be consumed as entertainment. The best representative of this register is the television series Miami Vice, with its pastel updating of the noir cop drama, several episodes of which used the Miami River as setting. Miami Vice is a kind of postmoder Eiffel Tower, holding a place for the city’s identity in an international cognitive map.

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 The policy question in this quarter has to do with “murder” only to the extent that crime statistics influence plans for the gentrification of downtown Miami, and the destinations of tourists. A more immediate concern is the physical impossibility of moving visitors continuously through the river district. “Few things can dampen an urban experience more than the realization that each stop on an itinerary requires an automobile and a parking space. Until downtown can offer an assortment of attractions within walking distance of each other or in the reach of a short ride on a convenient public shuttle, business persons and visitors alike will have no patience with the idea of spending time downtown.” So states the Master Plan of the Miami River Coordinating Committee. Solution? A River Walk, including urban renewal projects of various kinds in addition to the board walk: condominiums, restaurants, pollution controls, and the like. Thus this thread embodies the river as an object of study for the expertise of urban planners and architects.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Moral Level: Family (personal memory)

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 The photograph was taken sometime in June, 1998, by Barbara Jo Revelle, an artist and member of the FRE, during her five-week stay in a tourist Inn next to the river. Her personal trajectory is inscribed within the exchange of kinship, exogamy, tracing a circulation away from her father through a marriage and divorce to her present relationship with Ron. The personal memory anchoring this register was of a game Revelle played with some friends who lived in “Skeeversville,” an impoverished neighborhood near her home, where she was forbidden to go by her parents. The game was called “perfume in the black hole,” the “hole” referring to a pile of mattresses in the basement of the home.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Revelle’s relationship with Ron is the motivation for the burning question of her consultation, which is framed syncretically as empirical and oracular. The Problem orienting the exchange is love — manifested in this case as jealousy, which motivates the intense and repeated fights between Barbara and Ron. He accused her of wanting to start an affair with some of the men she met during her stay. His justification was a genuine fear for her safety. The given Solution is counseling, couples therapy. Her story is simultaneously that of a querent and theoros, working in the “middle voice” which is the “mood” of theoria (the tour of the problem out there is a reading of my Family situation).

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 Anagogic Level: Career (disciplinary knowledge)

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 The quarter of Expertise is absent from most narratives, since the discourse of disciplinary knowledge avoids story and prefers science, argument, document: the treatise format. The structural account of circulating objects, of exchanges governed by contracts, nonetheless applies equally well to knowledge, especially to the institution of consulting that is the target of our invention. Knowledge circulates between the academy and the community — the agencies, commissions, and councils overseeing policy formation in the City of Miami, for example. The Problem considered within this institution is every problem and any problem that comes to the attention of the public. The Solution is science (Natural and Social Sciences) in the form of instrumental reason, empirical applied knowledge.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 The difficulty for the FRE is that our expertise (Arts and Letters) is excluded from this exchange. The narrative obstacle for the FRE is that its expertise is refused, remains unsolicited, rejected as irrelevant to the policy formation addressed to the zone. It is important to note, at the same time, that the kind of knowledge we have to offer does not conflict with the Problem-Solution terms operating in each quarter of the allegory. Rather, what we have to offer is a different category, a different framing of events altogether, from the problem-solution narrative of conventional consulting. Nor does the EmerAgency replace conventional consultants, but supplements them with egents, student witnesses, working through a new medium — the Internet.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 KaChing

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0
KaChing

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 The consultancy borrowed from the Chinese oracle, the Book of Changes, the strategy of treating the found “disaster” (the policy dilemmas encountered in the Miami River zone) as a parable of one’s own circumstances. Given the popularity of divination sites online, familiarity with this form may be assumed. In the proposed online version a querent forms a dialectical image by entering into a database (containing information on all the policy issues active in the zone) along with the burning question (“what is my situation with regard to X?”) an anecdote expressing a childhood memory — or childhood block (Revelle’s memory of a childhood game in the poor neighborhood called Skeeversville). The database simulates for the online querent the accident-match in Revelle’s prototype between the mattress featured in this childhood memory and the mattress-objects within several policy problems. The querent “recognizes” one of the circumstances as an objective correlative (figure): the scene of the “disaster” expresses in a figure the feeling the querent has about her own circumstances. Here is a summary of the procedure used to generate the Miami attunement.

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 Miautre = one situation of an American Book of Changes, dubbed KaChing (hybrid combining the name of the Ancient oracle and the onomatopoeic term for the sound of a cash register). The parts of the attunement include:

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 1. The river zone (Miami River and everything found there: water, police, warehouses, Cubans, Haitians, tourists, oil drums, mattresses, dogs, boats…).

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 2. A querent (Barbara Jo Revelle).

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 3. The querent’s burning question, related to a personal problem (“what is my situation with my partner?”).

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0 4. A chance procedure (the mystory popcycle juxtaposing signifiers from several discourses).

¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 5. A diviner (the FRE). The diviner makes decisions about which elements of the archive (the zone) are most relevant to the question.

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 How did we arrive at the photograph entitled “Crossroads” as the categorical emblem? The chance mystorical procedure produced the mattress as a sinthome, a vinculum repeating across four discourses:

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 Family = Skeeversville (“perfume in the black hole” = Revelle childhood memory);

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 Entertainment = Miami Vice, the role of the femme fatale (the seductive woman uses the bedroom strategically);

¶ 42 Leave a comment on paragraph 42 0 Career = poststructural theory, Lacan’s quilting point metaphor for ideology and the Symbolic order (ideology is like the stuffing in a mattress that requires upholstery tacks to be kept in place).

¶ 43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0 History = the community story of the Miami River: the Haitian traders carry used mattresses back to Haiti for refurbishment and resale.

¶ 44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0
The Caribbean Code

¶ 45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0 The FRE as diviner sees the patterns in the materials produced by the querent’s encounter with the river (this role may be formalized in the database). Revelle remembers a childhood game involving a mattress. The mattress repeats, persists through a number of circumstances in the zone: Jose Marti Park (homeless); the ruins of the apartment house under demolition (immigrants displaced by gentrification); cargo for Haitian traders (older boats being forced off the river). Each of these circumstances represents a different social issue, and at the same time each contributes to the larger ecology of the river as a dilemma. The querent recognizes one of the possibilities as an answer to her question. The procedure by now is commonplace, after the plethora of quizzes created on Facebook: which Miami Policy Problem am I?

¶ 46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 http://apps.facebook.com/personality-quizzes

¶ 47 Leave a comment on paragraph 47 0 The “table work ” of the FRE resulted in selecting an impounded Haitian trader (Simon Lubin’s impounded boat) as the answer to the burning question. The consultation constitutes a structural portrait: Barbara Jo + Ron = impounded Haitian + Coast Guard. The querent’s situation served in turn as an attunement, measuring the Stimmung or categorial mood of the scene, constituting one hexagram or archetype of American wisdom. The genre of these choragrams remains to be defined. Working with the hexagram relay, we named this configuration “Aporia” (Impoundment, Impasse). The idea of contemporary divination as a way to add attraction to the civic sphere, to interest netizens, even school children, in public policy formation, addresses the Miami River zone as at once in its multiple elements a “tarot” system and, as a whole, one “situation” in a contemporary oracle. One consequence of this insight is the need to produce up to eight choras, which through permutation and combination generate 64 archetypal situations of contemporary American life.

¶ 48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 0 The proposal for Networked is: create a service cloud to support the KaChing, or something like it, in which individual testimonials may be collected through patterns into sets of affective experience. The argument leading to this conclusion began with the insight of grammatology, that the poststructural deconstruction of Western metaphysics is in fact a mutation in metaphysics, not just a critique of conceptual thinking (essentialism), but the outline of a new ontology, a new categorical system based on imaging. The quick review of philosophy was intended to show what is at stake in networked media: not only new forms of art, but a new metaphysics as well. My research is devoted to the creation and application of an image category. The review of my pedagogy, as demonstrated in accounts and demonstrations of recent assignments in undergraduate and graduate seminars, is to relate how I am using image reason. Students not only study about imaging, but experience image reasoning in their own projects. The FRE collaboration, finally, describes an experiment in using image reason for original inquiry. The through-line of the argument is the retrieval of the oracular strategy of imaging, cited from Heraclitus by Heidegger and Arendt, and reasserted by Derrida: the oracle neither reveals nor conceals, but intimates. The philosophy is there for purposes of pedigree, so to speak, as a rationale motivating the pedagogy.

¶ 49 Leave a comment on paragraph 49 0 Part of the interest of divination as a relay, appropriated for an Internet consultancy, is that it manifests the logical operation of an image category that is generalizable across every level of image reason: the chance convergence of two seemingly unrelated worlds or semantic domains (as above, so below). Divination formalizes the operation: a chance procedure (flipping the coins, for example) is used to match a querent’s circumstances with patterns of wisdom. Arthur Koestler introduced the term “bisociation” to describe events of creative insight that reveal a similar structure: Archimedes in his bath, Newton’s apple, Pasteur’s “ruined” laboratory cultures, as examples of chance exposures of hidden analogies (Koestler, 108). These folds are figural, in the terms used in this essay. Koestler observed the relationship between the Eureka experience and getting a joke. Paolo Virno made a similar connection between this joke structure and phronesis, good judgment, the capacity to make decisions within situated action (Virno). In deciding what to do in ambiguous circumstances there is always a gap between rule (maxim, habitus, law) and its application. In this passage there appears an opportunity for deviation, given the state of exception (as Virno explains) potentially in play in a decision. Jokes exploit the gap by giving us fallacies where we expect logic. Surrealist artists pushed this figural operation to the extreme, and called it the bachelor machine. The prototype is from Lautreamont: the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table. In electracy, developing a metaphysics of practical reason, decision becomes ontological (this is how the philosophers put it): the action determines the rule. Divination, creative insight, political and ethical praxis, Surrealist experiments, the poetics of epiphany, the joke: from these practices electracy extracts the features of a categorial image. An important role for the learning screen as a pedagogy of networked art is to give students some practice, some bodies-on experience, using this image (flash) reason.

¶ 50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 0 Hopefully the course assignments make sense even if the review of the history of philosophy is too condensed. The point is that image reasoning is not analytical but affective, not inspective but circumspective. It persuades only if it is undergone, beyond being understood. The graduate seminar EmerAgency consultation on a disaster, and the KaChing project for an Internet wisdom, apply figural or parable strategies to public policy education. The spirit of this account is experimental, an inquiry, not an assertion, and an invitation for further collaboration and “comparing of notes.” It is left to others to invent the database ontologies assumed and required for the KaChing to be practical not only as a pedagogy, but as deliberative reason for an Internet public sphere.

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