Third Workshop #5

Our fifth meeting, on my last afternoon in Berlin, persists as a hazy, picture of pleasurable conversation around the big table in Hadley and Maxwell’s studio. I know it was Saturday, and not Thursday or Friday, because Patricia Reed was with us, but little else is certain. Hard to tell if it’s my memory or my will that’s failing. A note from Hadley reminds me that Patricia (an artist whom we invited to the workshop to discuss her work after the collapse of Manifesta 6, in which she was included) mentioned “the kinetic elite,” a phrase I had also seen in a story by Tirdad Zolghadr. I see m-trends.org credits Rem Koolhaas with coining this neologism.

(I suspect that Koolhaas, like Mies before him, will become the terminal point of credit for a forest of stray phrases that emerge from the culture around him. It certainly sounds like Koolhaas. Which reminds me, I do recall a conversation from the second evening of the Berlin workshop, the dinner that exceeded my control, during which Ralf de Moll and Christiané Dellbrügge and I discussed Koolhaas and his manipulation of the client. I’m not sure I meant it, but I argued that Koolhaas is a master of the unfolding narrative, that his great skill is for composing a story that ensnares the client and all other instrumental parties in the ambitions of the designer; that having made this miracle of a story, woven this fabric in which everyone sees their own desires, the actual design of the building is secondary, a piece of follow-through that is neither excellent nor poor, nor really of much consequence. The building will have a much less lasting presence than the story. It is an aftereffect, like the headache one suffers after an especially long and memorable movie. )

Patricia, Hadley, Maxwell, and I were joined by Lukas Matthaei, Christian Struck, Michel de Broin, Mark Neufeld, and Michael Baers. Though Michel arrived late, I began the session by acknowledging his request that I “teach a little bit” and gave a brief presentation about the methods and costs of publishing. But, is memory playing tricks again? I’m remembering the discussion of Fillip and The Organ, which I earlier ascribed to the Friday afternoon session (see: Third Workshop #3). Perhaps I repeated myself, on Lukas and Patricia’s behalf? A long gmail chat with Hadley and Maxwell today, while they were in the Berlin evening and I in the Portland morning, turned up the following:

Madley: ah yes, saturday... ok hold on going to look for the note book...
can't remember what we were writing in...
10:21 AM
me: Some images would be fine, especially if you've got any images of Saturday. But as for notes. Just any small recollections will probably do.
Madley: think we sent you a good image of saturday with the boy on the bike in the foreground and a couple folks looking out the window...maybe you already used it though
ok, here are some quotes:
me: Something to open the flood gates of memory...
Madley: "you start out already refused"
think that was you.
"bomblets"
michael.
10:23 AM
me: Hhhmmm...
I'm drawing a blank here.
Madley: "your but first" michael after there was a but, but but...war with um, maybe patricia?
me: A war?
10:24 AM
Madley: "all those blog sites... its like going to the holiday inn, they're all the same." Patricia
me: Nice!
Madley: um, ok, maybe just competition, a but competition, not sure what about.
me: Oh yes. Patricia uses the "top 20" to surf YouTube.
Madley: yes.
me: A butt competition?
H-O-T!
10:25 AM
Madley: wit and nimbleness as important components to design... think that might have been you.
me: Right, that was the day I got stuck on wit.
Madley: yes, the butt competition, nothing to do with Paris.
me: Nothing.
Madley: "kinetic elite" patricia
me: I see her cute younger brother got mugged.
Not Patricia's.
Nice phrase.
Madley: "wit is the first three letters of withholding" that's you of course
me: But wait, I just saw that in print elsewhere.
10:26 AM
Madley: oh yes, and we talked about insurance companies and the production of fear...
that was fun.
me: Really. Maybe it was a piece by that man who did the kitchen Skype seminar.
Madley: and Lukas showed us the QUINTURA site
me: Oh, I loved that. Production of fear. That was Lukas talking about the corporate site. But now you're on to the second table. My amnesia is with the first table.

The day had been divided between two tables. The first, around which we sat passing small printed objects, was the site of our conversation about printing and design strategies. The second, after a short break, brought two computers into the mix so that we could focus on digital media. It was at the second table that Lukas showed us a superb search engine called quintura.com. The quintura engine organizes subjects spatially, so that a kind of web of connected subjects appears and reorganizes as one clicks and opens whatever is of interest. Lukas put in my name, and my father came up below and to my left.

It is interesting to me, that the production of my narrative, here on this blog for the workshop (up until this point a useful, organizing act of recording) now becomes entirely secondary and inadequate. With quintura.com fully operational a mere hyperlink away, filling your mental space with my narrative is a little like nattering in someone’s ear while they are trying to think. You have a narrative already, a sequence of thinking and being assembled by moving through the web, link by link, consuming and producing at once — my narration of that movement can only be derivative, a secondary overlay.

In a digital environment, the architecture of the web itself imposes a narrative, simply by shaping a space through which the thinking mind moves. This link-by-link journey does not require a narrator because it is itself narration. Social interactions and relationships to objects do not organize us this way. Our encounters with those media — the interpersonal and material — are discreet, multivalent, and leave room for (even beckon) the narrating intelligence that is the teacher, the critic, the reporter, the workshop leader, the artist, the writer. Not so digital media. Digital media simply require users/producers, those weirdly instrumental indwellers who function inside this system as nodes that produce by using and use by producing. Our best metaphors for this process, these positions, are organic: in the web we are like cells in a body, or synapses in a system of nerves — fully integrated and unbounded; neither willful nor coerced; neither origin nor endpoint; neither user nor producer, but all of these things at once.

I wonder if the disappearance of narrative into the architecture of the medium itself plays a role in this radical repositioning of the thinking and acting subject? Digital media position us, paradoxically, as agents of an organism that makes nonsense of our agency (as if cells could struggle for power over other cells inside of a body); digital media let us consume by producing; digital media make us active and willful, while negating the place of individual will or action. Do digital media do all this, I wonder, by embedding the articulation of narrative into the system’s architecture? Relieved (robbed?) of the burden of narration, do we necessarily then ascend (sink?) into this new position of integration? And is this a kind of liberation?

If I say it is, then my work here, as narrator, becomes a reactionary force dragging us back into old relationships of dominance and submission (ones that might comfort me by being familiar even as they plunge us into old, dead-end struggles). If I say it isn’t, then my narration becomes a kind of liberation politics, reclaiming agency in the face of technologies that might rob us of it. Is this a useful dichotomy? I wonder, will we talk less and less as digital media become more immersive and complete?

In a day or two, my last account of Berlin: our dinner (and sixth meeting) on Saturday night, at which Patricia told us in detail about her work.