ISBN 9780996944236

90000 >

9 780996 944236

any 04

MATTERS OF ACTAJournal

of

Ideas

A

already not yet
Bro o kl yn , N ew York

Anonymous Poet x Kay Festa

You Nakai⠼⠁⠛⠑[INTERNAL MEASUREMENT]

Aevi

⠼⠁⠛⠋

[INTERVIEW]⠼⠋⠋No Collective[PROTOCOMPUTATION]

⠼⠋⠓

⠼⠑
⠼⠓

[PRESCRIPT]

gather as many

[DONE IDEA]

facts as possible to convey the fact that something happened.

Earle Lipski

are conducted with people[INTERVIEW]

we are interested in, but who for one reason
or another nobody else seems to know.

Hilde Walde-Piquod x Dee Ali

Aevi[DONE IDEA]

Melanie/Camden Fisher⠼⠁⠓⠉[PROTOCOMPUTATION]

⠼⠛⠓

⠼⠁⠋

are concrete
figures for processing abstract entities de-[DONE IDEA]

vised by a five-year old.
Ai Chinen[DONE IDEA]

Jay Barnacle + You Nakai

Shinichi Takashima x No Collective, et al.

[DONE IDEA]

Reta Zhang⠼⠁⠓⠙

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson[ACCOMPLISHED ACT]

⠼⠁⠊⠃

⠼⠓⠚

[ACCOMPLISHED ACT]

⠼⠁⠉⠚

⠼⠙⠙

⠼⠁⠓

are just that, in various ways,
and a repository thereof.

[REVIEW]

are situ-

Satoshi Hashimoto

ated observations of unknown phenomena andthe registering of their effects on the observ[PROTOCOMPUTATION]

er as much as the observed.

Aevi

are assemblies of minia-[ACCOMPLISHED ACT]

Compiled by Dee Ali + Lindsey Drury[CON-NOTATION]

Una Nancy Owen + Kay Festa

⠼⠁⠊⠙

⠼⠁⠉⠓

⠼⠙⠋

ture texts and images whose morals and connectivities hang in mid-air.

[MINORITY REPORT]

Rice Peckinpah

examine idiosyncratic{DONE IDEA}

Ellen C. Covito

⠼⠃

Aevi

[MICROFICTION]⠼⠃⠚⠚DJ JD x Jay Barnacle[PROTOCOMPUTATION]

⠼⠃⠚⠃

⠼⠁⠙⠋

[INTERVIEW]

⠼⠁⠙⠓

⠼⠋⠑

⠼⠑⠓

forms of notation and their peculiar implications.

[DONE IDEA]

try to withhold value judgment in

Kay Festa + You Nakai

order to capture the complexity of an event.

[POSTSCRIPT]

are well-reasoned
and well-seasoned assessment by minors of

No Collective

artifacts made by adults.

Takuma Ishikawa⠼⠉

MATTERS OF ACT : A Journal of Ideas

ACCOMPLISHED

Publisher
No Collective (Ai Chinen, You Nakai, Kay Festa, Dee Ali, Jay Barnacle, Earle Lipski)

A C T S

Editors/Copy Editors
You Nakai, Kay Festa, Lindsey Drury, Dee Ali, Ai Chinen
Designers
You Nakai + Kay Festa
Translators
You Nakai + Ai Chinen
Cover Image
Anonymous Poet/Aevi
Published byalready not yet
http://alreadynotyet.org
Already Not Yet is a publisher run by members of No Collective.
Dedicated to consummating the age to come, we make available unprecedented texts
that question and/or traverse the boundaries of art, theory, fiction, and other curiosities,
primarily via the medium of language.
Contribution Enquiries
info@alreadynotyet.org
ANY 04 | MATTERS OF ACT: A Journal of Ideas, Issue A (2017)
ISBN: 978-0-9969442-3-6
Published January 2017
The digital editions of this publication can be downloaded freely at:
http://alreadynotyet.org/04.html© No Collective, 2016, 2017
This is an open access journal, licensed under the Creative Commons By Attribution ShareAlike license.
Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute,
and/or copy this publication so long as the authors and source are citedand resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license.
View a copy of this license at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

⠼⠙

BY

NO

COLLECTIVE⠼⠑

No Collective

December 2012 - Los Angeles
My two-year-old son throws a tantrum at the playground and I tell him to stop. I do soin a relatively loud voice so that other adults around can hear me. It suffices that myutterance took place in the world and was acknowledged by others. Whether this performance succeeds in actually silencing my son is a matter of consequence that is ultimately
inconsequential. For the primary concern of my speech act is not the conveyance of message X but the conveyance of the ‘fact’ that X was uttered. [YN]

June 2010 - Rome
Tourists take photographs of places wherever they go, mindless of the fact that there
are hundreds of far better pictures sold as souvenir postcards or scattered acrossthe internet. The only way to explain this strange act is to think that the tourists are
documenting not what they are seeing but the ‘fact’ that they are seeing. In other words,
their photographs are intended to record not the scenery but the relationship between
the photographer and the scenery. The degree of ‘success’ of the photograph taken issecondary to the ‘fact’ that it was taken at all. [EL]October 1955 - Boston

Accomplished Acts

January 2014 - New YorkI am taken to see a bad theatre piece. Sitting there, confined in my seat for
two hours,
gives me good ideas. There is thus a certain efficacy to “bad” works. To put it
differently,
a bad work is only “bad” if one confines its workings to the content of what
was staged:i.e., the performance in the work. The performance of the work, on the other
hand, cannot
be fully assessed, determined, or even identified, until much later (if at all).
The worksthat works do always surpass the author’s intention, the audience’s percept
ion, and thecritic’s interpretation. It goes out of time and out of control. All that is needed
to trigger
this uncontrollable consequence is for the piece to have been realized as a ‘fact.’[AC]

September 2012 - Tokyo
I take my son for vaccination and he screams and he cries. Immunization is
like a cursethat works in reverse. Its effect in the present is only negative: it hurts, could
make himsick, and worse comes to worst even kill him. And all this for nothing—quite
literallyso. For the long-term effect of immunization is not to cause something, not to
add a newthing to the world, but quite the opposite: to prevent new things from happeni
ng. It puts achild’s present in jeopardy so that nothing happens in the future. Therefore, likeall forms
of insurance, it is the very ‘fact’ that my son has been vaccinated that is importa
nt. Theperformativity of this act succeeds by not taking place. [YN]

J.L. Austin states the distinction between “constative” and “performative” utterances. Buta certain ambiguity lies at the heart of this statement of fact. Whether a performative
speech act is ‘happy’ and succeeds in doing what was intended, or ‘unhappy’ and fails,
only matters as long as the utterance follows two conditions: it must be (1) teleological,
and (2) contextual. In order to discern the success of a speech act (e.g. “I now pronounce
you husband and wife”), the speech needs to be anchored within a specific context (e.g.
marriage) and have a clear goal (e.g. getting married). Austin’s performative, in otherwords, only works in the present. But what the philosopher did not know was that there
was no way for him to know how the very ‘fact’ of his statement—and not his statementof fact—would act far beyond the context of its production. [KF]

The presence of performance is from the beginning the presence of the factual
ity thatit was performed at all. In other words, a fact will always appear accomplished,
alwaysoutside its original present, always embedded in its transmission over timeand space—always out of control. In the end, therefore, what is transmitted is the factof the transmission of the fact. My act at the playground may never have taken place, but
my writing
about it surely did, because it has reached you.

⠼⠋⠼⠛

August 2016 - San Diegov

Anonymous, “ANOTHER LANGUAGE / OUT OF BATTLE: THE
POETRY OF THE GREAT WAR / TWO PLUS TWO / UP THE
LINE OF DEATH / TALKING TO THE GODS / To Exercise Our
Talents / The Forms of Youth / BEFORE STARTING OVER” or“BEFORE STARTING OVER / The Forms of Youth / To Exercise Our Talents / TALKING TO THE GODS / UP THE LINE OF
DEATH / TWO PLUS TWO / OUT OF BATTLE: THE POETRY OF
THE GREAT WAR / ANOTHER LANGUAGE” (2016, commission from No Collective)

Titles,One Too MaNy
Interview with Anonymous Poetby Kay Festa
The poet-librarian, who wishes to remain
anonymous, is an obscure local legend in New
York City where he writes poems by discreetly
rearranging books in libraries and bookstores.
Kay Festa from No Collective tracked down thiselusive figure, commissioned him a new work,and obtained the first inteview in more thantwenty years.

⠼⠓⠼⠊

Anonymous Poet x Kay Festa

KAY FESTA When I first contacted you about
this interview you said you would do it only if we
didn’t reveal your name. So I complied. But could
you at least talk about the reason why you don’t
want to put your name on the journal?
ANONYMOUS POET The short answer isbecause I am a poet.
KF Okay. So what’s the long answer?
AP As a poet, I work with language. I use
letters, words, sentences, and compose a certain configuration of these elements that says
something to the world. I am responsible forthat. But what is a name if not a word—composed of letters just like any other word. And
if it is a word, then it is something I need tothink in relation to my work. But the use of myname renders me irresponsible for at least two
reasons. The first is that I did not choose that
name, and the second is that I did not choose
its attachment to my work. The first was thework of my parents and the second that of convention. The only thing I can do therefore is tochoose not to attach it to what I make.
KF But can’t you think of your name in the same
way as titles of works?
AP I can and I have—that is why my works do
not have titles. Names and titles are placeholders but there is no need to hold a place in thefirst place. You only need a tag if you are selling
something, which I am not. But I suppose youare?

KF So you don’t want me to put a title to thisinterview?
AP It’s your choice. In the end it will say thatthe interview is “by Kay Festa,” so if my nameis not there people will think that it is yourwork—perhaps even that you wrote the wholething.
KF Very well, let me think about that then. As
you know, I came across one of your works in the
New York Public Library and was so thrilled byit that I was determined to find out who you are.
And after a very difficult search, I managed tomeet you. In your works you “write” solely withthe titles of books in the library, placing the books
together so that visitors can read the poem acrossthe book spines. So for one thing, I know that theseworks you make in the library don’t have a title—or rather, they have too many!
AP Titles are always one too many. So in myworks I let them cease to be titles. They instead
become what they are: words. Another important factor in my works that you didn’t mention is that after placing the books together, I
leave the work to be disintegrated over time,
as books become relocated or new ones added. So the content of the poem is constantly
changing.
KF Yes, of course. But you also use a pile of books
as a bookend to signal the presence of works.
AP Yes, a small marker, like quotation marks.
But because these are also made by books, they⠼⠁⠚

Titles, One Too Many

too join the process of relocation, get pulled
into the flux. It is important that unlike names
or titles, this framing device is material, and assuch, exists on the same level as what it seeks
to frame.

trol how much people read.
KF Could you talk a bit about why you write inthis way?

AP I think surprising encounters are the essence of reading. When you read a book there
KF Another feature of your work, which derives
are many things you know beforehand: the size
from the nature of how book titles are printed, isof the book, roughly how long it is, the synopthat your poems can be read both from directions:sis, and perhaps even the story. But you read itleft to right and right to left.
anyways because there are still many surprises
AP I always write at least two poems at once.
that you could not have anticipated. As theysay, you can’t judge
KF It works bea book by its cover.
cause the basic unit
And then, when youof your writing isfinish reading, youa title which often
don’t remember alltimes is not just athe details of whatword. The reversal
you read. What
doesn’t mess up the
you remember are
grammar, though
the encounters you
the meaning changes
had. I take this exdramatically. For
perience of reading
National Library of France, Parissinstance, in the newbooks and try to rework you wrote for us, a line reads “the forms ofalize it outside the books, using books themyouth / before starting over” in one direction,
selves as my writing tools. My writing thereand “before starting over / the forms of youth”
fore becomes an allegory of reading.
in the other. In the former, “the forms of youth” issomething that exists before starting over, whereKF So in that analogy, the library becomes a big
as in the latter, it becomes the very thing that isbook of its own, and each book a word.
started over.
AP Some libraries are shaped like books.
AP If you include the names of authors thatKF Yes, like the Bibliothèque nationale de France
are sometimes printed on the spine, as well as
in Paris! Do you ever make works in different lithe library call numbers, the possible number
braries or bookstores?
of readings proliferate even more. I can’t con-⠼⠁⠁

Anonymous Poet x Kay Festa

AP I always try to write new works in every
city I go to. As I don’t keep any tracks, I’m notsure how many of them still exist. And yes, I
also write in bookstores. It is naturally moredifficult since I need to research what books astore has and make sure I don’t get caught. But
I usually get more readers in bookstores thanin libraries so it’s worth the trouble.
KF Do you tell people about your works? Or is it
always a chance encounter?
AP I’ve announced works in the past, but havealways refrained from telling exactly where
they are in the library so that people need tolook for them on their own. Sometimes people write to me afterwards and report about apoem they encountered—but many of them
are actually not my works! They would encounter a certain configuration of books andfind poetry there.

AP The experience of reading a book is more
about reading and less about the book. In other words, what is important is not the work but
the experience of the work. And that experience, by nature, is not something you can put
a cage around in advance. As far as other artists go…well, look, I work as a librarian. And
do you know what librarians do? They mediate readers with books. And as mediators theyfunction better if they remain anonymous. I
think poets are no different. In a sense, all I do
is to facilitate an encounter.
KF It’s interesting to think about that in relation to your earlier claim on responsibility. On one
hand you don’t allow exterior framing devices to
be attached to what you write, but that prohibition is precisely to blur the separation between
what you write and all the other writings in thelibrary. It’s like you suppress one form of outside
in order to invite in another.

Titles, One Too Manyeffect will appear in one form or another. It will
inevitably affect the world.
KF So it’s not always that you take photos ofyour own work, like you did this time for the coverof this journal?
AP No, and it betrays the spirit of the work.
But sometimes it’s nice to have a souvenir. It’s
like those postcards that they sell for tourists.
You get them to remind yourself of the experience you once had, not to relive the trip. Mostof what happened is not in the pretty picture.
KF Your works seem to have a complicated relationship to contemporary poetry. They go against
the current trend while having at the same timesome striking resemblances. Do you know, for instance, about “conceptual writing” and the works
of Kenneth Goldsmith?
AP Yes, I do.

KF Well, it’s exactly like you say: you can’t control how much people read. I think your pursuit ofsurprising encounters inevitably results in making
the presence of your works indeterminate. One isnever quite sure where the work is, or what pointof ‘disintegration’ it’s at. Obviously the ambiguous status of the markers you leave, as well as the
choice of not putting your name or title to thework—the absence of exterior framing devices—increase the vagueness of the work. I am very interested in this mechanism, as artists are generally
concerned about the framing of what they produce. They want people to notice their doings.

AP Well there is one kind of exteriority thatis inevitably part of the experience since there
is no way to read my work without going pastother books in the library, but the other kindof exterority can be bypassed because its justa convention. It doesn’t matter—quite literally
so, since it’s not a matter.
KF But don’t you have any ambition or desire toreach more people?
AP If I managed to solve an artistic problem,
the world cannot erase that fact, even if it was
not made public. If one created the cause, the⠼⠁⠃KF What do you think about Goldsmith’s use of
ready-made materials?
AP Well I read that he bases his approach on
the existence of the internet, claiming that,with the internet, the creative author writing
an original work is gone and all that is left to
do is to copy and paste. But I must ask: since
when did poetry become an art that simply
operated on the content level of the media? On
the contrary, poetry has always carved itself
out of the struggle against the media of language on one hand, and language as media on

the other. Media is therefore the componentof poetry and not the other way around. But
more importantly, the internet is not something that fell out of the sky and landed on poets one day. The very existence of internet is amatter of language—it is being written and rewritten everyday. It’s no secret that an HTML,for instance, is a “script.” So the media which
Goldsmith thinks rendered creative writing
obsolete is itself created through writing. Theinternet is obviously poetic.
KF It strikes me that Goldsmith’s repeated claimthat his works are conceptual, and thus what is
important is not to read them but to appreciate
the concept, also goes directly against your stanceof not relying on external framing devices.
AP Well, let’s say that you happen to agree with
Goldsmith that there is no creativity anymore
and everything is simply a matter of copy-andpasting found material. But even then, there
remains the question of why name yourself theauthor. The fact that he names himself, alongwith his style, and that they are recognized assuch, disproves his claim and proves in turnthat nothing has changed. The realization thateverything is ready-made and all you can ever
do is copy and paste certainly did not emerge
with the internet. Language is a found material
from the beginning. So the very act of writing
can be nothing other than copying and pasting. But this does not prevent the existence ofauthors—it conditions it. The creativity of apoet does not reside in the making of materials,
but always in the choosing thereof.

⠼⠁⠉

Anonymous Poet x Kay FestaKF But what do you think about the term “conceptual”? I mean, I can see how people would callyour approach to poetry “conceptual” as well…
AP To conceive is to write—so writing is conceptual! Think of all the “conceptual artists”
who came out in the late 1960s. Contrary to
popular belief, what they did was not to “dematerialize” art works, but to expose the materiality of media that had supported visual art until
then. Naturally, this inquiry ended up targeting
two things: language and the body. So the artists who were conceptual either became poetsor performance artists or both. Calling a specific kind of writing as “conceptual” is therefore redundant. But it’s more than just redundant—it’s lame. What can be less conceptual
than calling yourself conceptual? Simply put,it’s a bad word choice. And for anyone who
claims to be a poet that is a serious problem.
KF So what kind of poet does that make you?
AP It makes me a poet, not a kind thereof.

v

Anonymous, “HOW DO I BEGIN? / despite this flesh / OR, /WANT / IF YOU ASK ME / What I Saw / IN OTHER WORDS/ WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER / IF YOU CALL THIS CRY
A SONG / IN A CLASS BY ITSELF / In a Cold Crator / THISI REMEMBER / BECAUSE IT IS MY NAME” or “BECAUSEIT IS MY NAME / THIS I REMEMBER / In a Cold Crator /IN A CLASS BY ITSELF / IF YOU CALL THIS CRY A SONG
/ WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER / IN OTHER WORDS /What I Saw / IF YOU ASK ME / WANT / OR, / despite thisflesh / HOW DO I BEGIN?” 2012.

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9+6+3+6⠼⠁⠋⠼⠁⠛

Site-Specific
Fictions(Miyagi)⠼⠁⠓by Robert
SmithsonWithout
RobertSmithson⠼⠁⠊Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

ROBERT

SMITHSONWITHOUTROBERT

SMITHSON

Several years after 1973 when Robert Smithson supposedly died in a plane crush, crop circles started appearing in England. People became obsessed in finding their creator. Various speculations swirled around,
ranging from aliens, UFOs, ancient spirits, magic, to natural phenomena such as tornados, micro-bursts, orplasmas. Adding to the flurry were new circles made by copycats. Then in the early 1990s two English men
confessed that they were the true authors. Today the appearance of new circles has decreased. The crop
circles seem to have been reduced to a form of Earth Works, one among the many that appeared in the 1970s.
Although the two men convincingly explained and demonstrated the process of making a crop circle (which
remained an enigma until then) we do not believe that they were the actual culprits. The true author, we posit
instead, was Robert Smithson; or more accurately, “Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson.”(Kazenosawa Museum, Katakozawa, Miyagi)

We are all trapped in the facile assumption that in order to interpret something it is necessary to posit
the existence of an agent who made that thing. From ancient times, we have imagined the mighty Creatorto understand nature, and then, artists in order to understand art works. An author provides objectivity tothe phantasmagoria that is experienced. It relieves one from being responsible, by reframing the ghost-likesighting as a re-cognition of what was first seen by the Other. However, the true phantom in this process is,of course, none other than the figure of the “author.”
Robert Smithson realized that the very notion of “author” was a metaphysical fiction. He therefore attempted
to do away with the phantoms of “creation” or “originality” that pestered art, and to instead observe thematerial world directly. The notion of author dissipates therein, for humans do not have power to create eventhe smallest mass. All that is there is a contiguous time, a constant increase of entropy. Every moment you see
and interpret something, time proceeds in an irreversible manner. That is why the retrospective endeavor offinding the correct “Robert Smithson” amidst innumerable wrong ones is bound to end up in vain. For “Robert
Smithson” is likewise subject to the inevitable process of collapse and decay. But this also means that there
is no way to truly dispel the phantoms. It is for this reason that, whereas Smithson himself decided to feign
his death in order to continue his activities anonymously, we choose to excavate the buried name and carry it
as our banner. In contrast to Smithson who thought making his 1965 work “Enantiomorphic Chambers” disappear was a significant move, we choose to re-materialize the same work fifty years later. The project “Robert
Smithson without Robert Smithson” thus proceeds in a timely manner.

Numbers and letters indicate Earthworks, several surrounding sites, and an exhibition of documents

From 2014 to 2015, “Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson” created several Earthworks in Miyagi
prefecture, Japan. These are real sites created by a fictional author and thus they constitute “Site-specific
Fictions.”
An Art Users Conference

⠼⠃⠚

⠼⠃⠁

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson

Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson | 2014 (1986) | Earthwork | Tsukuridate, Kuwabara City, Miyagi Prefecture

In 1986, a small stone tool was buried into a 290,000 years old stratum. This was the deed of Shinichi Fujimura, an amateur archeologist known as “God’s Hands,” who for quarter of a century had
single-handedly rewritten the history of the Paleolithic era in Japan through a series of astonishingexcavations. His performance made humans appear at the Takamori site of 290,000 years ago. The
illusion of history makes us think that a ruin pertains solely to the past, as if it has nothing to do withthe present. But now, its “author” has been exposed to the light of day. In 2000, it was revealed that
Fujimori had planted forged artifacts at the Takamori site and later investigation identified similar
fabrication of archeological evidence in more than 31 sites he had excavated. The cluster of ruins
related to this notorious “Paleolithic Hoax” will never be inscribed within history. The remains ofremains thus become traces of past that only exist in the past.

⠼⠃⠃

⠼⠃⠉

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson

Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson | 2014 | Earthwork | House, Planet EarthIf one remained in the same space without being dragged by Earth’s gravitational pull, various sitesaround the world that exist on the same latitude will pass by one after the other. Or, if one hitched aride on this house as if it were a vehicle and moved along with the planet’s rotation, it will be possible
to visit those sites: the space that had been inhabited by the international date line (Pacific Ocean)
three hours ago; the space that had been inhabited by the Spiral Jetty (Utah) seven hours ago; thespace that had been inhabited by the Smithsonian Museum (Washington D.C.) nine hours ago; thespace that had been inhabited by the Atlantis tanker thirteen hours ago; the space that had been
inhabited by the Temple of Apollo (Delphi) sixteen hours ago; the space that had been inhabited by
The Gates of Hell (Turkmenistan) eighteen hours ago; and the space that had been inhabited the Tiananmen Square (Beijing) twenty-two hours ago. This house moves at a speed of 1300 km per hourand revolves around the Earth in twenty-four hours.

⠼⠃⠚
⠼⠃⠙

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Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson

Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson | 2014 | Precipice

Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson | 2014 | Tree Stump⠼⠃⠋

Robert Smithson without Robert Smithson | 2014 | Worm-eaten Wood⠼⠃⠛

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson“When he found the tiny celluloid float that the fisherman had thrown away, he put it in his pocket. That was also a strange habitof Nobuo. He would fill his pocket with shiny objects on the roadside or things that interested him for a moment. And then he would
immediately forget what he picked up.” (Teru Miyamoto, “Mud River”)

The road for managing the village forest traverses the Earthwork. The road was paved with rubble
so that car wheels wouldn’t sink in the mud. Countless fragments of concrete, limestone, gravel,tile, brick, river sand, granite, glass, volcanic rock, basalt, wood chip, and PVC, scatter across thesoil formed by volcanic ashes and decomposed plants. Similar to the layers of volcanic ash that havesedimented over long periods of time, these fragments have also journeyed over eons. But the limein the concrete does not retain the memories of the time it used to be a shell or a bone of an organism, and the PVC that was divorced from fossil fuel does not remember the time when it was alive asbacteria. The artificial movement and mixing of soil, and the precipitation of chemical reactions givebirth to these rubbles removed from both date and place of origin. Like the ground at the end of time
where entropy has maximized, the Rubble Earth emits an inactive air. At times, green glass fragments
reflect the sun light and glitter like emeralds. An emerald is created through the encounter between
beryl and chrome which are produced in completely different geological conditions. It is proof of theblending of heterogeneous earth crusts through the collision of moving continents.
The Rubble Earth appears to be at once a natural object and an artificial construct; it is like material
but also akin to wastage. For the exhibit, minerals were collected from an imitation emerald mine.
2,000 kilograms of rubble and 2,000 posters of the Rubble Earth were scattered across the floor of
the exhibition space.

The documentation of the Rubble Earth was printed as a poster (841x594mm) with a real-size photograph of thework on the front, and the back divided by eight Earthworks and their corresponding texts.

⠼⠃⠓

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson
Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

Erosion and Sedimentation (Plan) (2014)

The ground never stops to decay. Any ground is either in the midst of erosion or sedimentation. Culture and technology attempt to overcome decay and death by creating invariant logic or durable material. The fact that logic lacks the notion of time is not an indication of its incompleteness, but of its
wishful thinking. The nature of time is neither dialectic contradiction nor creative evolution, but anirreversible process towards decay and death. It is impossible to completely conceal the fundamental
erosion and sedimentation processes of the ground. The deposit of volcanic ash exposed at the paththat cuts right through the ground reveals the longevity of its generative process. It is impossible todetach the transformation of the ground that has continued since time immemorial from the makingof the Earthwork.
Erosion and Sedimentation was created by tampering with the site of an abandoned rice terrace.
The rice terrace had in turn been created by tampering with a glen. Hence, traces of the rice terrace
as well as those of the glen remain there. The myth of “creation” is supported by the blind belief thatspace precedes matter. For “creation” is production of something inside an empty space. But any
man-made artifact is created from materials of nature, and every material is already formed. Whenone becomes aware of contiguous time, the notion of creation dissipates, and artifacts and naturalobjects are de-differentiated. The notion of “ready-made” decays the illusion of artistic creation.

⠼⠉⠚

Poster of Godzilla (1954)

Erosion and Sedimentation (1976)

Aerial photograph of Katakozawa from 1947.
The mouth of the Godzilla-looking landscape isthe site for Erosion and Sedimentation

Erosion and Sedimentation (1947)⠼⠉⠁

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson“I thought I suddenly felt myself spreading and dissipating like a cloud, mixing with everything around me. It was a good feeling,
Joseph. And then the owl went over, and I was afraid that if I mixed too much with the hills I might never be able to collapse into
Elizabeth again.” ( John Steinbeck, “To an Unknown God”)“When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment about distances, that he thought all objects whatever touched his eyes
(as he express’d it) as what he felt did his skin; [...] he knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however
different in shape or magnitude” (George Berkeley, “The Theory of Vision or Visual Language, Vindicated and Explained”)

The small-size hydraulic shovel scrapes the leaf mold and the chernozem soil, digging out the siltthat has sedimented in layers. There was a time when these volcanic ashes, now buried underground,composed the surface of this land. The rubble of countless sedimented surfaces pours down onto
the excavated ground. The water that spreads out from the cracks between strata mixes with silt,
and the ground ceases to be solid. The mushy mud swallows your boots. As you proceed throughthe Muddy Walk lifting your sinking feet, the surrounding wall gradually grows higher until the view
field is entirely covered. Vision attempts to efface the very condition of its existence: its distance tothe object-figure. The only thing left here is ground—the ground above your head, the stratum wall
formed by countless sedimented grounds, and the ground that swallows up your feet. They all mix
up and deprive figure from vision.

⠼⠉⠃

Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

The linguistic description of Muddy Walk becomes dull and glum. As contours disappear
both physically as well as visually, the senses become obtuse and the walk slowly sinks into thebosom of nature. Lurking behind the worshiping of nature is a desire to return to the mother’swomb. The undifferentiated vision before theseparation of figure from ground, the undifferentiated form of existence before the self becomesdetached from the world—these are reminisced
as lost origins, mixing the images of birth anddeath in an ambiguous manner. But every time
you try to remember, the very thing you try to retrieve crumbles apart. The more a child grows up
and learns about his mother, the more he forgets
what she used to be.

⠼⠉⠉Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson

Nature reveals completely different aspects according to shifts in the scale of perspective. Mountainclimbers are often surprised at the sheer lack of similitude between the mountain seen from afar andthe mountain beneath their feet. It is difficult to imagine a space in which the world viewed througha microscope co-exists with that viewed through a telescope. That is why the micro-world tends tobe detached from the macro-world, and nature becomes confined into a singular scale.
Double Focal Point functions as an observation apparatus that changes the focal length throughwhich nature is viewed. As one starts walking the path that cuts through the earth, the ground on
both sides gradually approaches the eyes. As the ground thus draws close, so does the focal point ofvision, enticing the viewer into a more microscopic scale of observation. As one proceeds and goes
below the ground level, the silt wall enwraps the view field. Within this all-over vision the object ofnature becomes undifferentiated, achieving thus a certain kind of blindness. Without the necessary
distance to the object, its image is lost.
On the other hand, when walking on the levee (bank), the water surface gradually moves awayfrom the eye, distancing the focal point and inviting the viewer to a macroscopic scale of observation. The gaze thrusts itself into the mirror of the water surface, and the reflected sky covers halfof the view field. The object of nature is de-differentiated within a vision where real image and its
mirrored reflection oppose one another, attaining thus another kind of blindness. When the object
cannot be unified, its image is lost. Microscopic and macroscopic views together constitute the fundamental paradox of vision.

Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

The levee going around the water is a slightly slanted walking path. The absence of things that may
serve as criteria for measuring flatness, along with the drop between the planes on both sides of thepath, upsets the walker’s sense of equilibrium and focus, giving rise to a mild vertigo. On the one
side, the surface of the water indicates a level plane. On the other, however, the vertical drop to theground level distorts the focal length. The water is right there but the sky reflected on it lies at infinity.
The roots of trees submerging into the water are rotten. Aerobic bacteria (mitochondria) and anaerobic bacteria (chloroplast) cohabitate inside plants. The latter bacteria decomposes plants whichhave been severed from the provision of oxygen into inorganic material.
Standing at the edge of the jetty, a cliff can be seen to the right. The water flowing out of the crevice
between the strata of chernozem soil and volcanic ash has scraped the surface of this cliff, bringing
out a finger-like shape and making the whole precipice look like the head of a giant covering his eyeswith both hands. At the top of the cliff is a scenic overlook, which, when imagined from below, seems
to provide a bird’s-eye view of Double Focal Point where the viewer stands. But the pussy willow sticking out from the side of the jetty actually creates a blind spot that conceals people for the view fromabove. You do not exist in the world seen from the overlook.
The notion of segmented scales produces the false sensation that you do not exist inside the universe and that no bacteria exist inside you. But the ground is part of the universe, just as bacterias
form a part of you. Miyagi prefecture, the Earth, and the solar system are all seen at the same timethrough the microscope.
When looking through a microscope one sees countless microbes swarming inside a drop of water. It may seem that microbes are too small to be seen by the naked eye. However, they appear as“turbidity of water” which can be seen from afar. It forms an undifferentiated “color” without “shape.”
When viewed from above, Double Focal Point becomes a giant hieroglyph in the shape of a flagellata,
endowing gigantic contours to the microscopic organism. And the sun reflects on the surface ofwater.

Magnified water sample from Double Focal Point (flagellata)⠼⠉⠙

Double Focal Point (Plan)⠼⠉⠑Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson“The Pendulum told me that, as everything moved--earth, solar system, nebulae and black holes, all the children of the great cosmic
expansion--one single point stood still: a pivot, bolt, or hook around which the universe could move.” (Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s
Pendulum”)“To ensure an optimal stability without compromising the maneuverability, the Bebop Drone analyzes data from numerous sensors automatically: 3-axes accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, one ultrasound sensor with an 8 meters reach, one pressure
sensor and a vertical camera to track the speed” (Parrot.com)

A Buddhist priest from a temple in Kurihara City helps us with the airborne filming. The drone
operated by the priest takes off, the sound of its propellers clattering in the air. The drone films as it
moves from west to east. Its gyroscope stabilizes the camera. A gyroscope extracts the movement
not of the object it is attached to, but of itself.
There are many people who believe that the Earth rotates. But where is the immobile spot fromwhich the rotation of the planet can be observed? Leon Foucault proved the rotation of the Earthusing a pendulum. The direction of the pendulum’s oscillation is fixed in relation to space. Foucault
called the pendulum, a “gyroscope.” If space itself doesn’t move, the Earth’s rotation is moving us
east, along with the earth’s crust of Miyagi prefecture, at a high speed of 1,300 km per hour. In seven⠼⠉⠑Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

hours we shall arrive to the space formerly known as Utah.
The ground covered in green is captured in the drone’s
camera. The sunlight on the surface of the leaves makes themshine in brilliant green. Inside a leaf the chloroplast takes inthe sunlight and converts it into energy. The green is caused by
the chloroplast, but the chloroplast only takes in and converts
the blue and red rays of sunlight into energy. In other words,
green is the light that the chloroplast rejected. A certain reversal takes place on the interface of perception, and the light thatthe surface bounces off allows us to see what is on its otherside.
At the base of the flagellum of euglena, there is a primitive
visual organ called the “eyespot.” This organ functions not asa lens that delivers light to the photosensitive part, but as acover that blocks the light from reaching the photosensitive
part of the organism. The photosensitive part of the euglena,an organism that moves by rotating its body, senses its own
body through the regular obstruction of exterior light. The
perceptive organ functions to differentiate the inside from theoutside even before exterior information is taken in.
The drone desperately resists Earth’s gravity that tries to pulleverything to the ground. The camera would certainly break
if it collides into a stone. But what is the stiffness of a stone?
When a finger touches a stone, what transforms is not the object that is touched but the finger tip, and what is sensed is thistransformation. But the transformation of the finger then becomes reversed and projected onto the stone as its stiffness.
Would it be possible to further reverse this mechanism as thesoftness of the finger tip? The separation between inside andoutside, and their reversals, are always taking place on the surface of sensory receptors.
Hands clasped in prayer (Gassho) creates an experienceakin to a coupled mirror. The sensation caused by the transformation of the right hand surface is projected as an attributeof the left hand, and vice versa. The process of reversal neverstops.

⠼⠉⠛

Drone photographing its own refletion

Plan for Eyespot

Gassho | 2015 | Mirror and GestureSite-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

Monji Sanzan | Robert
Smithson without Robert
Smithson | 2015 | Scenery(From Left to Right: Oodogamori, Nakano-mori, Hitsugamori)

The folklore describing the creative process of Monji-sanzan Mountains differentiates a “place” where
space and matter and name are undifferentiated, and thereby transforms the concept of “creation.” Is“space” a concept that emerged from a sense of loss? The mountain peak of Oodoga-mori forest was
created with dirt taken from Hitsuga-mori forest. “Histuga-mori” is the name of the space where themountain exists, as well as the name of matter that constitutes the mountain. If the dirt that consti-

tutes Hitsuga-mori forest had been entirely transposed elsewhere, would the name “Hitsuga-mori”
address the space that remains or the entity that was removed?
Dug Slant was conceived as a walking trail that extends in both directions from the road facing
the fallow field. One path goes towards the slopes of the village forest, while the other goes in the
opposite direction towards the fallow field. The two dead-ends make the people take a u-turn andreturn to the place of origin.
To walk back and forth on this trail is not to move between “places.” This is because one end of thetrail is a Dug Slant as a space created by removing the slant surface, and the other end is a Dug Slantas matter created from the removed dirt. The “place” called Dug Slant therefore remains singular. The
walking trail in this way connects space and matter, exterior form and interior content, making the
singular “place” oscillate between the two poles and triggering a conceptual earthquake.
The water reflects Dug Slant, creating the latter’s representation beneath its surface. The same“place,” Dug Slant, now exists in two different “places”: above and under the water. Moreover, therepresentation of Dug Slant is printed on various surfaces of paper as photograph or as letters, reproduced and disseminated. The rain and wind cracks the slant surface and causes it to decay. Similarly,
the object cracks every time it is represented, as do letters every time it is read or written. Neither
matter nor information can escape the law of entropy increase.
The shaking of the ground beneath our feet creates a sensation of fear. But inside that vertigo, there
are different kinds of emotion that are irreducible to fear. Why are children amused by earthquakesimulating vehicles? Wouldn’t this suggest that there is a certain pleasure within the Freudian “deathdrive”? Vertigo is the pleasure of dying, the intuition of an entropic time.

⠼⠉⠓

⠼⠉⠊

“Once a upon a time, Ootsuchi-hiko (Ootsuchiga-mori Forest) and Ohitsu-hime (Hitsuga-mori Forest) lived in Monji but the two
did not get along together at all and were always fighting. They would throw rocks to each other and wage wars, but the head of
Ootsuchi-hiko grew taller with the accumulated rocks that Ohitsu-hime threw, and the head of Ohitsu-hime became flat because
she was throwing all the rocks.” (Toru Shibasaki, “The Celebrated Mountains of Miyagi”)“The idea of the absolute nought, in the sense of the annihilation of everything, is a self-destructive idea, a pseudo-idea, a mere word.
If suppressing a thing consists in replacing it by another, if thinking the absence of one thing is only possible by the more or less explicit representation of the presence of some other thing, if, in short, annihilation signifies before anything else substitution, the ideaof an “annihilation of everything” is as absurd as that of a square circle.” (Henri Bergson, “Creative Evolution”)

Robert Smithson Without Robert Smithson“He woke up and happened to glance at the mirror--there was his nose! He grabbed it with his hand to make sure--but there was
no doubt this time. ‘Aha!’ cried Kovalyov, and if Ivan hadn’t come in at that very moment, he would have joyfully danced a trepak
round the room in his bare feet. He ordered some soap and water, and as he washed himself looked into the mirror again; the nose
was there. He had another look as he dried himself--yes, the nose was still there!” (Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”)

Where is one’s nose? In the mirror; at the periphery of the visual field—the nose appears everywhere. But to discern its exact location is not an easy task.
Katakozawa Nose was created by mounding the soil from the slope of the village forest. As one
advances towards the tip of the Nose, the ground recedes and the vista expands. People tend to longfor a bird-eye viewpoint that looks down at the world, encompassing great many things within thegaze. But what one encounters at the tip of the Nose is a scenery that relegates half of the visual field
to mirrors. The surface of the water inverts the sky and the trees, producing a mirror-image world.
Is it possible to have a single overview of the real world and the mirrored one? When the real
image of a tree and its reflection are regarded as a continuous figure, the inverted image of the tree
on the water becomes the tree’s root, visible through a transparent ground. The tree thus takes rootin a ground that is both real and unreal. But this ambivalence comes with a price, for now our own
viewpoint which sees the tree becomes torn between the world of real images and that of mirrored
ones. Just like you would do from a path that cuts through the ground, you look up at the exposed
tree roots from the water surface below.
If the person inside and outside the mirror switched places at the precise moment you glanced
into the mirror, you would not be able to realize it. This is because the eye-ball that captures theinverted world also inverts itself. In other words, there is no way to deny that this kind of thing is
not actually happening. Jacques Lacan suggested that the mirror is involved in the structuring of the“self.” When you recognize your mirror image as “yourself,” you are traversing the world of mirror
and the real one.
When you perceive the real image of a tree and its mirrored reflection as a continuous figure, theperson standing at the tip of the real Nose and the person standing at the tip of the Nose reflected on
the water might be switching their places at an incredible speed while retaining a pseudo-continuity(like the workings of film). This structure corresponds to that of the right and left eyes, torn apartby the nose. For the right and left eye-balls mirror one another. “Katago,” the name of the location,
signifies a person torn in half. How can one deny the fact that one is always torn between the world
inside and outside the mirror traversing the bridge of the nose?

⠼⠙⠚

A logical map to indicate the location of the nose
When the world is synthesized: Far-sight
The nose seen with the right eye is on the left side of the world

The nose seen with the left eye is on the right side of the world

The nose seen with both eyes is on both the right and left side of the world
When the nose is synthesized: Near-sight
The world seen with the right eye is on the left side of the nose

The world seen with the left eye is on the right side of the nose

The world seen with both eyes is on both the right and left side of the nose⠼⠙⠁

Site-Specific Fictions (Miyagi)

If there is something akin to the notion of death within the life-cycle of unicellular organisms that
propagate through cell division, it must be connected to the moment when one individual splits in
two. But if, as Plato’s myth suggests, our own present form is that of a Katako, an individual split in
two, what is the individual that preceded the split? When an arm is cut off, it is not the arm, but therest of the body that feels the pain. But this pain also seems to pertain to the arm that has been cut off.
When a person is split instantly in half with a sword, right along the nose, it is very likely to be painful. But who is feeling this pain? The right half of the body feels it as the pain of the detached left half,while the left half feels it as the pain of the detached right half. But since the two sides are now cutapart, there is no way for the right half to feel the pain on the left nor for the left to feel the pain on theright. It could be said that the person is split into two individuals, even if it were only for an instant.
Between unicellular organisms and multi-cellular organisms there exists not only a quantitative
difference concerning the number of cells constituting an individual, but also a qualitative difference. The splitting of an egg cell (which doesn’t happen vertically, but horizontally, from left to right)
seems to be the definitive moment that repeats phyletic evolution from unicellular to multi-cellularorganisms inside the growth of a single individual. But a more substantial difference lies in the factthat whereas the splitting produces two different individuals in the case of unicellular organisms, it
forms a single individual in the case of multi-cellular organisms. A strange bond is formed between
two individuals that have been split apart. We are composed of what has been split apart; we are bornout of a unicellular organism’s death. Katagozawa Nose, created by dividing a circular water surface in
two equal parts, reminds one of the primordial fissure that once split a cell in half.

v“And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a danger that we shall be split up again and go about inbasso-relievo, like the profile figures having only half
a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that
we shall be like tallies.” (Plato, “Symposium”)

The process through which the two eye-balls split between the inside and outsideof the mirror identifies the right hand (as opposed to the left hand):A. The real eye-ball sees the real hand.
B. The eye-ball in the mirror sees the hand in the mirror and believes that thishand is outside the mirror.
C. The eye-ball in the mirror believes that it is outside the mirror.

⠼⠙⠃“The task for contemporary Japanese is to not let
Katako (a half-breed between a human and an ogre)
commit suicide, or let him be killed in the hopes fora Western-style of transformation. We must instead
strive to oversee what kind of new fantasy can be created by letting the Katako live. We need to place ourefforts in living this new fantasy.” (Hayao Kawai,“The Tragedy of Half-man”)

H O M E L E S S
L O T T E R Y

New York is a divided city. Many of the richest people in the world reside
here while the streets are filled with starving and freezing homeless humanbeings. And these two extremes never seem to converge. The main reason why
passersby and subway passengers tend to ignore the desperate pleas of people
asking for food or money is because there is no return. Spending money isalways a form of investment in our society and unless you are a billionaire
who needs to worry about public image or tax deduction, giving money away
for free seems like a senseless act. Nevertheless, there are things in thisworld for which people gladly spend their money, fully aware of the immense
possibility of there being no return. One example of this form of seemingly
nonproductive expenditure is, of course, the lottery.
So plant one or several ‘Jackpot Homeless’ people in New York. Announce theproject widely. If you give money to the Jackpot Homeless you get back whatever the amount you gave multiplied by X.
— Jay Barnacle + You Nakai⠼⠙⠙

They say putting on a costume or a mask helps you leave your shyness behind.
But for many sensitive souls, a single layer of disguise is just not enough cover.
MAGIC CIRCLE® is a unique circular contraption with a comfortable harness that fits
directly to the body. A costume for costumes, a mask for masks, MAGIC CIRCLE®
lets you hide your disguise and act in public without being seen.
Just look at what happened to this brass band who long dreamed of
the orchestra pit where they could play without being gawked at.
Fear no more to parade in the streets or even trick-or-treat!
* One size fits all * Available in many bright colors* Can also be painted, decorated, or written uponA META-COSTUME®

The Judson Dancers(Fall 2013/Winter 2014 Season)

Compiled by Lindsey Drury & Dee Ali
A collection of applications that were submitted
to Movement Research in Fall 2013, for the performance series at Judson Church. Some of themwere accepted, others were not.

⠼⠙⠋

⠼⠙⠛

The Judson Dancers

Austin EpikSo  for  a  while  I  considered  learning  Trio  A  and  doing  the  signing  for  No  Manifesto  as  a  part  of  it  to  some  really  hip  music.  But  some  how  it  didn't  seem  like  a  very  pure  idea.  So  I'll  do  it  in  silence  and  invite  deaf  people  I  know  in  New  York.    
  The  other  thing  is  that  I  was  thinking  how,  well,  my  piece  isn't  a  trio,  its  a  solo,  and  second  of  all,  at  this  point  in  time,  No  Manifesto  doesn't  articulate  what  has  actually  been  erased  from  dance.  What  No  Manifesto  articulates  now  is  precisely  that  we  haven't  lost  anything  she  was  talking  about  getting  rid  of:  virtuosity,  glamour,  transformation,  magic,  transcendency,  heroics,  spectacle,  style,  camp,  seduction,  eccentricity,  its  all  still  at  work.  So  I  decided  to  title  the  work  Ssolo  No  Loss  because  that's  what  it  is-­  A  solo  that  loses  nothing.    
  And  I  misspelled  solo  because  otherwise  it  wouldn't  be  a  palindrome.    

  Sign Language Dance 1: Just A Dream    From:  Movement  Research  <apply@movementresearch.org>  To:  austinepik@yahoo.com    Sent:  Monday,  April  15,  2013  11:16  PM  Subject:  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Application  Thank  you  for  applying  to  the  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Season!    
You  can  review  your  application  below.  We  will  contact  you  if  we  have  any  questions.  
    Artist  Bio  Austin  Epik  runs  Epik  Productions  in  Toronto.  He  is  fascinated  with  music,  and  was  raised  by  deaf  parents,  so  he  knows  sign  language.  In  2005,  he  began  performing  Sign  Language  Dances  in  Toronto  dance  clubs.    

Work  Sample  Title  Sign  Language  Dance  1:  Just  a  Dream  Question  Answer  Work  Sample  Venue  Front  Lawn  Full  Name  Austin  Epik  Date  Performed  March  2,  2012  Address  3887  Chesswood  Dr.,  Toronto,  ON,  Canada  M3J  2R8000000  Duration  3:56  

Phone  Number  (647)  -­725-­2060  Collaborators  None  

E-­mail  austinepik@yahoo.com

Work  Sample  Cue  Point  0:40  

Website  http://www.epikproductions.ca/

Work  Sample  URL:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIyj_xGb3rA

Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)    Project  Description  Ssolo  No  Loss    Ssolo  No  Loss  is  my  first  work  of  avant  garde  Sign  Language  Dancing.  
I  have  been  developing  it  since  I  read  Yvonne  Rainer's  "No  Manifesto."  I  had  never  been  interested  in  postmodern  dance  until  I  read  her  manifesto,  because  I  think  for  the  first  time  some  one  had  explained  to  me  what  exactly  postmodernism  in  dance  was  dealing  with.  I  thought  it  was  interesting  that  Rainer's  manifesto  had  to  be  in  text  and  not  in  dance  for  me  to  understand  it.  But  I  thought,  if  she  had  made  No  Manifesto  as  a  sign  language  dance,  no  one  would  have  ever  argued  that  dance  needs  language  to  act  as  discourse  around  it.  Sign  Language  dance  solves  this  issue  by  making  dance  itself  a  method  of  clear  communication.  If  dancers  learned  sign  language  they  could  talk  with  their  bodies  all  they  wanted,  and  people  would  know  what  they're  talking  about.  They  wouldn't  even  need  to  write  proposals  like  this  anymore  if  they  didn't  want  to,  there  would  be  no  more  rift  between  the  act  of  articulating  a  dance,  and  the  act  of  performing  a  dance.  In  Sign  Language  dance,  this  can  be  one  and  the  same.  An  added  bonus  is  that  postmodern  dancers  could  completely  divorce  from  music  for  their  sign  language  dances  because  the  people  who  would  understand  their  works  best  would  all  be  deaf,  and  so  they  wouldn't  need  music  at  all.    
  So,  I've  read  that  Yvonne  Rainer's  Trio  A  is  the  work  that  most  exemplifies  her  Manifesto.  So  what  I  propose  to  perform  at  Judson  Church  is  a  remake  of  Trio  A  as  a  sign  language  dance.  As  you  can  see  from  my  video,  I  am  able  to  place  sign  language  in  the  context  of  very  complex  dancing,  so  it  won't  be  a  problem  for  me  to  do  this  in  the  end,  I  just  need  a  little  training  to  become  familiar  with  these  modern  dance  moves.  I've  already  started  ballet  classes,  I  know  its  not  very  modern,  but  that's  still  the  technical  basis  of  current  experimental  dance  forms,  no?    
  

⠼⠙⠓

  

  

Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)  

  This  is  the  only  documentation  I  have  thus  far.  This  video  is  online  to  "test  the  waters"  of  interest  in  Sign  Language  Dances  online,  as  I  would  like  to  start  up  a  new  project  in  my  production  company  called  Epik  Silence,  which  would  produce  Sign  Language  Dance  videos  for  deaf  viewers  of  online  music  video  materials.  My  goal  is  to  have  Sign  Language  Dancers  eventually  incorporated  into  music  videos  online  for  deaf  viewers.    

⠼⠙⠊The Judson Dancers

Jackie Bennington Weiss
  Movement  Research  has  itself  been  involved  in  addressing  the  history  of  postmodern  dance  in  the  past  year,  as  a  part  of  the  "Judson  at  50"  platform.  I  understand  the  Protein  Synthesis  dance  as  both  independent  of  Judson  and  deeply  related  to  it,  a  parallel  development  that  manifested  from  cultural  loosening  and  that  that  intermingled  art  and  science.  My  argument  is  that  while  Judson  artists  were  concerned  with  challenging  the  rigid  confines  of  dance  practices  at  the  time,  the  Protein  Synthesis  dance  emerged  to  challenge  the  same  rigidity  in  science  education.  
  The  question  I  bring  to  Judson  is  this:  What  artistic  value  might  the  Protein  Synthesis  have,  not  merely  as  a  part  of  the  history  of  science  education  in  the  US,  but  also  as  a  part  of  dance  history?    
I  propose  to  Movement  Research  a  reenactment  of  the  Protein  Synthesis  dance  for  the  Judson  series.  I  will  work  my  own  notes,  memory,  and  with  documentation  to  reproduce  this  work  as  faithfully  as  possible  to  how  it  took  shape  in  1971.    
  Upon  acceptance  into  the  Judson  series,  I  will  arrange  a  one-­week  rehearsal  period  and  will  gather  performers  for  this  project  through  Dance  NYC,  Craigslist,  and  other  online  forums.  I  prefer  to  work  with  students  of  the  sciences.  To  follow  my  original  methods,  I  will  have  each  "process"  in  the  dance  led  by  a  versed  modern  dancer.  My  husband  Gabriel  and  I  will  reach  out  to  University  Students  around  NYC  to  take  part.  

Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level

  To:  jackiebweiss@outlook.com  Subject:  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Application  Date:  Mon,  15  Apr  2013  22:58:32  -­0400  From:  apply@movementresearch.org

Thank  you  for  applying  to  the  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Season!    
You  can  review  your  application  below.  We  will  contact  you  if  we  have  any  questions.  
  
  
  
  

Question  Answer  Full  Name  Jackie  Benington  Weiss  Address  3231  Waring  Ct,  Oceanside,  CA  92056  Phone  Number  (760)  630-­5613  E-­mail  jackiebweiss@outlook.com

Website  **please  note  I  had  a  problem  with  my  first  submission!  Sorry,  I'm  old,  and  not  good  with  email!  So  I  resubmitted  with  my  new  outlook  address!!**  Project  Description      At  Stanford  University  in  1971,  200  students,  fortified  by  complimentary  wine,  began  a  Bacchanalian  dance  replicating  the  process  of  DNA  formation.  I  was  the  choreographer  of  that  landmark  dance,  that  has  since  been  a  tradition  in  Chemistry  classes  over  the  last  40ish  years.    
As  the  years  have  passed,  I  have  begun  to  understand  the  Protein  Synthesis  dance  as  unique  in  experimental  dance  history  in  the  USA  because  it  is  only  celebrated  within  scientific  circles.  In  fact,  the  sole  reconstruction  of  the  dance  was  led  by  a  Biology  professor  Joan  Slonczewski,  in  2006.  The  artistic  integrity  of  the  work  has  only  ever  been  argued  by  scientists,  and  its  legacy  continues  to  be  shaped  by  the  scientists  who  use  it  as  an  educational  device.  
  However,  the  film  itself  enters  into  larger  discourses.  It  was  created  5  years  after  the  1966  Armory  Exhibition  9  Evenings:  Theatre  &  Engineering,  a  series  which  involved  Robert  Rauschenberg,  John  Cage,  David  Tudor,  Yvonne  Rainer,  Deborah  Hay,  Robert  Whitman,  Steve  Paxton,  Alex  Hay,  Lucinda  Childs  and  Öyvind  Fahlström.  This  exhibition  made  a  link  between  postmodernist  choreographers  and  scientists,  who  worked  collaboratively  to  build  projects.    
The  film's  narrator,  Nobel  Laureate  Paul  Berg,  called  it  a  "Molecular  Happening,"  obviously  relating  the  project  to  Allan  Kaprow  (who  took  part  in  Judson).  The  Academic  Film  Archive  of  North  America  calls  it  "The  film  is,  in  addition  to  being  a  superior  example  of  affective  filmmaking,  a  landmark  film  defining  the  early  1970s  San  Francisco  Bay  Area  art,  performance,  and  alternative  lifestyles  culture."      ⠼⠑⠚Artist  Bio  Jackie  Benington  Weiss  was  at  Stanford  University  in  1971  finishing  her  Master's  degree  in  Education.  She  was  a  high  school  dance  and  aerobics  instructor,  and  California's  Junior  Miss  in  1969.  She  went  on  to  dance  in  the  work  of  Donald  McKayle  in  the  1980s.  
She  is  the  mother  of  two  children,  and  has  been  married  to  Gabriel  Weiss  (the  filmmaker  for  this  work  and  now  MD  and  author)  for  more  than  40  years.  

Work  Sample  Title  Protein  Synthesis:  An  Epic  on  the  Cellular  Level  Work  Sample  Venue  A  playing  field  at  Stanford  University  Date  Performed  1971  

Duration  9:22  

Collaborators  Paul  Berg,  Robert  Alan  (Gabriel)  Weiss,  Chem,  Biochem,  Med  students  at  Stanford  1971  Work  Sample  Cue  Point  2:00  

Work  Sample  URL:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmqhdozuf7Y

Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)    Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)  

I  created  the  choreography  for  the  1971  film  "Protein  Synthesis:  An  Epic  on  the  Cellular  Level"  The  film  was  hosted  by  Paul  Berg,  filmed  at  Stanford  University  by  Robert  Alan  Weiss,  and  directed  by  Gabriel  Weiss  for  the  Chemistry  Department.  I  also  am  in  this  performance  as  the  dancer  "Initiation  Factor  Two,"  who  performs  a  small  solo  starting  around  2  minutes.  Martha  Graham  called  this  work  "The  Best  Film  I've  ever  seen  about  Protein  Synthesis."  

⠼⠑⠁

  

TheHow  Hoop  Dancing  Will  be  Presented  at  Judson  Judson Dancers

Work  Sample  Venue    I  propose  to  act  as  a  host  for  a  mini  Hoop  Dance  contest  between  three  dancers  of  the  form  in  New  York  City.  Whoever  I  choose  as  the  winner  of  the  contest  will  receive  the  full  amount  of  my  Movement  How  Hoop  Dancing  Will  be  Presented  at  Judson    Research  artist  honorarium  (assuming  there  is  one).    
  I  propose  to  act  as  a  host  for  a  mini  Hoop  Dance  contest  between  The  reason  I  propose  to  present  my  work  in  this  way  is  precisely  three  dancers  of  the  form  in  New  York  City.  Whoever  I  choose  as  the  because  experimentation  in  Hoop  Dance  has  always  been  driven  by  winner  of  the  contest  will  receive  the  full  amount  of  my  Movement  competition  and  money.  The  history  of  Hoop  Dance  has  laid  the  Research  artist  honorarium  (assuming  there  is  one).    
  foundations  for  its  cultural  modes  of  engagement.  Hoop  Dance  is  a  model  of  inventiveness  and  progressivism  across  North  American  The  reason  I  propose  to  present  my  work  in  this  way  is  precisely  tribes  precisely  because  Native  American  people  sought  economic  and  because  experimentation  in  Hoop  Dance  has  always  been  driven  by  social  gain  through  their  dancing  of  it.    
competition  and  money.  The  history  of  Hoop  Dance  has  laid  the    foundations  for  its  cultural  modes  of  engagement.  Hoop  Dance  is  a  I  am  also  interested  in  what  conversations  might  arise  out  of  this  model  of  inventiveness  and  progressivism  across  North  American  presentation  at  Movement  Research.  Listening  and  reading  interviews  tribes  precisely  because  Native  American  people  sought  economic  and  with  Bill  T.  Jones,  for  example,  leads  me  to  think  that  NYC  modern  social  gain  through  their  dancing  of  it.    
  dancers  equate  dance  experimentation  with  economic  loss.  Bill  T  Jones  brings  up  this  issue  of  the  "ghettoization"  of  experimental  I  am  also  interested  in  what  conversations  might  arise  out  of  this  dancers  in  New  York  City.    
presentation  at  Movement  Research.  Listening  and  reading  interviews    with  Bill  T.  Jones,  for  example,  leads  me  to  think  that  NYC  modern  So,  as  far  as  I  can  tell,  middle  and  upper  class  kids  go  into  dancers  equate  dance  experimentation  with  economic  loss.  Bill  T  experimental  modern  dance  after  college  and  become  economically  Jones  brings  up  this  issue  of  the  "ghettoization"  of  experimental  and  culturally  "ghettoized"  (aka  marginalized)  by  so  doing.  Yet,  poor  dancers  in  New  York  City.    
  Native  American  kids  go  into  Hoop  Dancing,  using  experimentation  So,  as  far  as  I  can  tell,  middle  and  upper  class  kids  go  into  with  the  form  as  a  way  emerge  out  of  their  economic/cultural/social  experimental  modern  dance  after  college  and  become  economically  ghettos  through  the  financial  gains,  respect  of  their  communities,  and  and  culturally  "ghettoized"  (aka  marginalized)  by  so  doing.  Yet,  poor  opportunities  offered  by  cultural  organizations  as  a  result.    
Native  American  kids  go  into  Hoop  Dancing,  using  experimentation  with  the  form  as  a  way  emerge  out  of  their  economic/cultural/social  Lyndon  is  a  member  of  the  Alabama-­Coushatta  tribe  of  Texas  and  is  a  ghettos  through  the  financial  gains,  respect  of  their  communities,  and  premier  hoop  dancer  who  has  performed  all  over  the  world,  including  opportunities  offered  by  cultural  organizations  as  a  result.    
being  featured  in  the  opening  of  the  Goodwill  Games  in  Russia.  He's  also  performed  in  Australia  and  England.  He  is  one  of  the  few  Lyndon  is  a  member  of  the  Alabama-­Coushatta  tribe  of  Texas  and  is  a  remaining  Alabama  Indians.  
premier  hoop  dancer  who  has  performed  all  over  the  world,  including  being  featured  in  the  opening  of  the  Goodwill  Games  in  Russia.  He's  Hoop  Dance  also  performed  in  Australia  and  England.  He  is  one  of  the  few  remaining  Alabama  Indians.  
The  Moundville  Native  American  Festival  Work  Sample  Title  Date  Performed  Hoop  Dance  October  13th  2012  Work  Sample  Venue  Duration  The  Moundville  Native  American  Festival  5:10  

Date  Performed  Collaborators  October  13th  2012  Mike  McCracken  (videography)  Duration  Work  Sample  Cue  Point  5:10  
0:20  

Collaborators  Work  Sample  URL:  Mike  McCracken  (videography)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBhXGPLrFmM

Work  Sample  Cue  Point  Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)  Work  Sample  URL:  0:20  

Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)  Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)  

You  will  see  in  the  video  my  performance  of  the  Native  American  Hoop    Dance.  This  dance  is  performed  in  many  North  American  Tribes  and  is  considered  a  modern  dance  form.  It  was  developed  and  popularized  by  Tony  White  Cloud  of  the  Jemez  Pueblo  in  the  1930s.  Hoop  dancing  You  will  see  in  the  video  my  performance  of  the  Native  American  Hoop  became  a  competitive  sport  in  the  1990s,  and  has  since  progressed  Dance.  This  dance  is  performed  in  many  North  American  Tribes  and  is  rapidly  as  dancers  experiment  with  new  and  innovative  ways  to  considered  a  modern  dance  form.  It  was  developed  and  popularized  by  perform  it  for  the  competition  circuit.    
Tony  White  Cloud  of  the  Jemez  Pueblo  in  the  1930s.  Hoop  dancing  became  a  competitive  sport  in  the  1990s,  and  has  since  progressed  rapidly  as  dancers  experiment  with  new  and  innovative  ways  to  perform  it  for  the  competition  circuit.    

Lyndon Alec  Hoop Dance    To:  lyndonalec@live.com  Subject:  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Application  Date:  Tue,  16  Apr  2013  13:02:12  -­0400  From:  apply@movementresearch.org  Thank  you  for  applying  to  the  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Season!    
You  can  review  your  application  below.  We  will  contact  you  if  we  have  any  questions.  
    Question  Answer  Full  Name  Lyndon  Alec  Address  575  Park  Road,  56,  Livingston,  TX  77351  Phone  Number  (936)  563-­1100  E-­mail  lyndonalec@live.com

Website  http://www.lyndonalec.com/

Project  Description  I  propose  to  Judson  because  I  am  a  performer  of  the  Hoop  Dance,  a  Native  American  development  in  dance  modernism.  My  form  is  continually  left  out  of  current  discourses  of  experimental  dance  institutions  who  frame  "dance  modernism"  and  its  aftermath  in  America.    
  I  am  a  well-­respected  Hoop  Dancer  who  has  performed  all  over  the  world.  And  though  my  work  has  found  much  support  with  producers  who  support  the  arts  of  "traditional"  and  "indigenous"  cultures,  I  am  interested  in  performing  my  work  as  a  part  of  Judson  because  it  is  a  context  that  frames  dance  experimentalism  and  Hoop  Dancing  is  a  form  of  American  Dance  driven  by  experimentalism.    
    Background  Information      The  history  of  Hoop  Dancing  since  the  1930s  challenges  habitual  notions  of  the  role  of  dance  in  Native  American  cultures.  First  of  all,  Hoop  Dancing  can't  be  traced  back  to  one  source  tribe.  It  is  a  recent  dance  tradition  shared  amongst  many  tribes.  Tony  White  Cloud,  the  contestable  "father"  of  modern  Hoop  Dancing,  popularized  it  by  performing  in  the  1942  movie  "valley  of  the  Sun"  with  Lucille  Ball.    
When  the  first  championship  Hoop  Dance  contest  was  arranged  by  the  Zotigh  family  for  the  New  Mexico  State  Fair  Indian  Village  in  1991,  they  inadvertently  instigated  a  huge  shift  in  the  form.  Dancers  began  to  invent  whole  new  ways  of  dancing  as  they  planned  for  how  to  wow  the  judges  at  the  next  competition.  And  so  experimentation  in  Hoop  Dancing  was  driven  by  its  competition-­based  public  presentation  format.    
  
  
  

⠼⠑⠃

Artist  Bio  Artist  Bio  Work  Sample  Title      Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)  

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBhXGPLrFmM

⠼⠙⠉

  

  

The Judson Dancers
can  the  choreography  between  technology  and  body  become  an  act  of  mutuality.    
  Finally,  because  human  performers  are  trained  to  act  both  responsively  and  independently  within  a  performance  context,  I  will  program  my  technological  hand  robots  in  the  same  manner.  There  will  be  no  external  human  operator.  The  hand  robots  themselves  will  be  programmed  to  respond  to  touch,  to  communicate  with  each  other  in  space,  and  to  follow  their  own  logarithmically-­defined  trajectories.  
Within  each  robot,  this  multi-­intentional  programming  will  sometimes  cause  internal  conflict  within  the  robot  as  multiple  input-­sources  present  packets  of  information  that  cannot  be  resolved  as  one  course  of  action  in  the  moment.  I  am  not  sure  what  will  happen  yet  as  a  result  of  this.  But  this  problem  will  further  allow  me  to  address  another  question  I  have  about  dance  performers  who  engage  in  improvisational  practices  and/or  who  face  momentary  glitches  and  accidents  in  works  that  conflict  with  the  operation  the  dance  is  supposed  to  have  (ie  when  somebody  trips,  when  a  cue  is  missed,  when  the  audience  applauds  before  they're  supposed  to,  etc).    
  An  initial  1  minute  movement  experiment  with  Crispin  Jones  can  be  found  here:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx4W2usnkP4  Steven Levon Ounanian
  Right or Wrong interpreted by Steven Ounanian    From:  Movement  Research  <apply@movementresearch.org>  To:  Ounanian.hands@yahoo.com    Sent:  Tuesday,  April  23,  2013  12:50  PM  Subject:  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Application  Thank  you  for  applying  to  the  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Season!    
You  can  review  your  application  below.  We  will  contact  you  if  we  have  any  questions.  
    Question  Answer  Full  Name  Steven  Levon  Ounanian  Address  760  Broadway,  Brooklyn,  NY  11206  Phone  Number  (718)  963-­8314    E-­mail  Ounanian.hands@yahoo.com

Website  www.stevenlevon.com

Project  Description  Collaborators  Work  Sample  Title  Crispin  Jones  Right  or  Wrong  interpreted  by  Steven  Ouanian  Work  Sample  Venue  Work  Sample  Cue  Point  Crispin's  studio  10:00  

Collaborators  Date  Performed  Work  Sample  URL:  Crispin  Jones  September  21st,  2007  https://vimeo.com/1464426

Work  Sample  Cue  Point  Duration  Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)  Work  Sample  URL:  10:00  13:15      I  have  begun  my  investigations  for  this  work  with  the  idea  of  the  disembodied  hand  becoming  an  independent  and  whole  body.  I  am  doing  this  because  the  most  general  image  of  a  person  involved  in  everyday  technologies  is  a  person  whose  body  is  disengaged  from  a  situation,  but  whose  hands  are  incredibly  active  in  relationship  to  the  technology  itself.  The  ultimate  form  of  this  would  be  to  create  a  human  who  needed  to  be  nothing  more  than  a  pair  of  hands.  This  basic  idea  is  already  immortalized  in  modern  pop-­culture  via  "The  Hand"  in  the  Addams  Family.    
  The  first  phase  in  my  project  will  be  to  reverse  the  basic  assumption  that  the  human  has  hand  that  operates  technology.  I  am  beginning  to  build  technological  hands  to  operate  humans.  Thus  far,  I  am  building  pairs  of  hands  connected  to  poles  on  stands  with  wheels.  These  hands  can  place  themselves  on  humans  and  then  locate  (and  relocate)  humans  in  a  space.  The  choreography  in  this  work  will  therefore  be  physically  conducted  by  technological  hands  that  move  the  humans  around  like  objects.    
  As  I  create  this  work,  I  am  studying  choreographers  who  instruct  performers  live,  as  a  part  of  their  works.  Such  choreographers  include  Jerome  Bel,  and  here  in  New  York  City,  Yvonne  Meier.  I  am  also  studying  dance  workshop  methods  like  "blind  leading"  to  investigate  how  choreographers  tackle  the  issue  of  "operating"  their  dancers  in  real  time.    
  As  I  develop  my  technological  hand  robots,  I  will  begin  to  further  address  how  the  relationship  between  hands  in  this  performance  can  be  one  of  hand-­to-­hand.  My  question  is  simply:  What  happens  if  a  human  reaches  out  with  a  hand  to  engage  with  technology,  which  is  a  hand?  If  both  have  hands  to  operate  one  another,  what  happens  then?  
If  both  are  equalized  in  this  way,  wielding  each  other  with  hands,  how  can  the  choreography  between  technology  and  body  become  an  act  of  mutuality.    
  Finally,  because  human  performers  are  trained  to  act  both  responsively  and  independently  within  a  performance  context,  I  will  program  my  technological  hand  robots  in  the  same  manner.  There  will  be  no  external  human  operator.  The  hand  robots  themselves  will  be  programmed  to  respond  to  touch,  to  communicate  with  each  other  in  space,  and  to  follow  their  own  logarithmically-­defined  trajectories.  
Within  each  robot,  this  multi-­intentional  programming  will  sometimes  ⠼⠑⠙Artist  Bio  Steven  Ounanian  is  originally  from  Los  Angeles,  and  received  his  Masters  from  the  Royal  College  of  Art  in  Design  Interactions.  His  work  consistently  explores  the  neuroses  embedded  in  technology,  and  the  geographic  dilemmas  which  technology  is  meant  to  solve.  In  2008  he  made  a  robot  of  himself  to  be  with  his  mother  in  America,  and  has  given  workshops  dealing  with  performance  and  technology,  including  some  in  San  Quentin  State  Prison  in  California,  and  Highbury  Grove  School  in  North  London.  Through  interactive  media,  collaborative  experiments,  and  video,  he  looks  at  how,  perhaps  frighteningly,  it  is  often  through  technology  that  we  understand  how  to  be  human,  together.  
  He  explores  contracts  between  peoples,  and  enjoys  collaborating,  especially  with  unwitting  participants.  Through  such  collaborative  experiments,  he  generates  videos,  performances,  objects,  and  situations.  Technology  (from  crude  phones  to  synthetic  biology)  has  challenged  what  it  means  to  be  human  on  a  fundamental  level.  
Somehow  there  is  an  element  of  ventriloquism  or  puppetry  that  occurs  as  people  associate  with  this  technology.  Ounanian  enjoys  exaggerating  this  phenomenon,  giving  external  techno-­social  identities  agency  and  voice,  watching  what  happens  when  they  get  out  of  control.  
  Steven  has  recently  relocated  to  New  York  City  after  he  was  not  able  to  renew  his  UK  visa.  He  is  developing  a  new  movement-­based  project  here,  based  on  the  idea  that  the  human  hand  is  the  centerpiece  of  the  connection  between  people  and  their  most  everyday  technologies.  His  goal  is  to  address  the  choreography  of  the  hand  and  develop  technologies  that  confound  its  interaction.    

Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)  Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)  Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)    https://vimeo.com/1464426

    I  made  a  robot  of  myself  to  be  with  my  mother  in  America.  According  Android  Scientist,  Karl  F.  MacDorman,  we  don’t  have  a  working  model    for  human  presence  yet.  I  lament  this  issue  through  a  series  of  performances  with  my  mother’s  robot,  as  we  try  to  establish  a  working  I  made  a  robot  of  myself  to  be  with  my  mother  in  America.  According  model  of  a  technolo-­family.  This  video  is  documentation  of  the  whole  Android  Scientist,  Karl  F.  MacDorman,  we  don’t  have  a  working  model  process.  This  video  played  on  at  the  Royal  College  of  Art  Degree  for  human  presence  yet.  I  lament  this  issue  through  a  series  of  show.  performances  with  my  mother’s  robot,  as  we  try  to  establish  a  working  model  of  a  technolo-­family.  This  video  is  documentation  of  the  whole  process.  This  video  played  on  at  the  Royal  College  of  Art  Degree  show.  ⠼⠙⠑

The Judson Dancers
seemed  too  interested  in  the  swimming  pool,  and  so  it  was  merely  a  clear  glassy  surface  that  killed  and  consumed  small  creatures  upon  contact.  It  drowned  innumerable  dragonflies,  saturated  and  preserved  countless  frogs,  its  chorine  acting  as  poison  and  then  as  embalming  fluid  for  any  tiny  being  that  made  the  mistake  of  landing  upon  its  surface.  
  The  pool  was  horrifying  and  infinitely  clean.  Clean  enough  to  counterpoint  the  dingy  cars  and  oiled  heads  of  the  patrons,  the  pool  shone  bright  and  flawless  under  the  doting  care  of  the  aged  groundskeeper  who  seemed  to  take  his  only  pleasure  in  stroking  its  innards  with  a  net  at  the  end  of  a  long  pole,  scooping  up  its  victims  daily.  
  So-­  the  artist,  breezing  along  in  a  mimesis  of  tendus,  thought  about  two  ways  of  dying  while  in  dance  class.  There  is  proliferation,  which  causes  violence  and  strangulation,  the  death  of  life-­zest  in  any  contained  environ.  And  there  is  sterility  which  causes  poisoning  and  starvation,  the  death  of  clarity  and  cleanliness  that  maintains  the  purity  of  form  in  an  environ  by  first  rendering  it  uninhabitable  and  ultimately  lethal.  And  so  this  became  the  model  on  which  the  artist's  entire  body  of  work  is  based.  

Fictivia Solar
  Time Lapse: Frog Spawn

    From:  Movement  Research  <apply@movementresearch.org>  To:  solar_artist@ymail.com    Sent:  Monday,  April  22,  2013  3:16  PM  Subject:  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Application  Thank  you  for  applying  to  the  Movement  Research  at  the  Judson  Church  Fall  2013  Season!    
You  can  review  your  application  below.  We  will  contact  you  if  we  have  any  questions.  
    Question  Answer  Full  Name  Fictivia  Solar  Address  4560  Louisiana  1  #8,  Raceland,  LA  70374  Phone  Number  (985)  532-­0800  E-­mail  solar_artist@ymail.com

Website  http://s743.photobucket.com/user/Fictivia/library/Various?sort=3&start=
all&page=1
There  is  no  real  separation  between  biography  and  art  in  my  work,  so  please  read  my  "Project  Description"  and  my  "Artist  Bio"  as  one  continuous  piece.  Thank  you.    
  Fiction  Inoculation    The  artist  grew  up  attending  dance  school  in  rural  Louisiana.  The  studio  was  adjacent  to  a  hotel,  and  the  two  shared  a  gravel  parking  lot.  
In  the  gravel  parking  lot  there  was  this  large  hole,  possibly  left  over  from  some  unfinished  construction  project.  Ever  time  heavy  rains  came,  the  hole  would  fill  with  water  and  a  little  cycle  of  life  would  begin  in  there.  When  the  artist  was  on  her  way  to  dance  class  each  day,  she  would  gaze  into  the  hole  and  see  how  its  biosphere  was  progressing.  For  a  while  it  would  become  more  and  more  complex,  with  more  and  more  tadpoles,  water-­skeeters,  mosquito  larvae,  and  various  water  plantlife  and  algae  in  colors  of  green,  brown,  and  orange.  
  The  child's  first  artistic  impulses  began  in  dance  class  while  staring  out  the  window  and  thinking  of  the  hole  filled  with  water,  imagining  the  developing  drama  out  there.  And  then,  at  a  certain  point,  the  proliferation  in  the  hole  would  begin  to  pollute  it.  This  always  began  as  a  clouding.  The  colors  of  plantlife  would  dim  and  darken.  The  pool  would  itself  begin  to  emit  this  dark  slime,  and  then  it  seemed  to  strangle  itself,  finally  blackening  and  hardening  as  it  dried  in  the  sun,  leaving  mud  walls  caked  in  tadpole  carcasses  and  flaky  dead  algae.  
  Meanwhile,  the  hotel  next  door  boasted  of  a  concrete  swimming  pool  painted  pink  and  blue.  It  was  a  boring  object  and  square,  but  infinitely  more  lovely  than  the  rest  of  the  dilapidated  propoerty  on  which  it  rested.  Men  and  women  came  and  went  in  and  out  of  rooms,  but  none  seemed  too  interested  in  the  swimming  pool,  and  so  it  was  merely  a  clear  glassy  surface  that  killed  and  consumed  small  creatures  upon  contact.  It  drowned  innumerable  dragonflies,  saturated  and  preserved  countless  frogs,  its  chorine  acting  as  poison  and  then  as  embalming  fluid  for  any  tiny  being  that  made  the  mistake  of  landing  upon  its  surface.  
  The  pool  was  horrifying  and  infinitely  clean.  Clean  enough  to  counterpoint  the  dingy  cars  and  oiled  heads  of  the  patrons,  the  pool  ⠼⠑⠋Work  Sample  Title  time  lapse:  frog  spawn  Work  Sample  Venue  petri  dish  in  Austria  Date  Performed  unknown  Duration  Work  Sample  URL:  Collaborators  approx  1  minute  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiQYWxJLhaQ
mnolf  of  Austria  Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  Work  Sample  Cue  Point  password  protected)  Work  Sample  URL:  none    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiQYWxJLhaQ    Project  Description  Artist  Bio  The  artist  tracks  processes  of  how  both  proliferation/plenty  and  sterility/lack  kill  alternate  as  causes  of  death  because  she  learned  how  to  dance  while  her  mind  was  contemplating  a  swimming  pool  and  a  water-­filled  hole.  But  what  she  has  discovered  is  that  dancing  itself  undergoes  a  similar  process  through  its  contextualization  in  a  similar  way.  Namely,  a  dance  in  the  clean,  organized  venue  is  itself  a  corpse  undergoing  embalming  in  performance.  And,  a  dance  presented  outside  such  a  formal  context,  in  the  start-­up  world  of  live/work  lofts,  impromptu  spaces,  alternative  artist  infrastructures  etc.—such  contexts  proliferate  art  until  it  strangles  itself  with  its  own  eager  yet  impotent  virility.    
  The  most  recent  development  in  this  body  of  work  is  called  "Fiction  Inoculation."  The  artist  responds  to  contextual  dichotomy  by  imagining  fictional  methods  of  making  dances,  ones  that  will  never  need  to  take  place,  and  therefore  will  never  undergo  the  tyrannical  process  of  creation-­in-­environ.  These  pure  fiction  dances  exist  only  in  written  form,  and  manifest  only  as  idea  (not  as  implementation),  only  as  proposal  (not  as  realization).  By  one  means  or  another,  the  fiction  must,  through  the  clues  it  provides  of  its  own  fictitiousness,  deny  the  proposal's  access  to  the  environ.  
  The  rejection  of  the  proposal  saves  the  work  from  its  contextual  annihilation  in  venue  hole  or  pool.  
  Every  piece  in  this  series  must  be  fiction.  Even  this  one.  

Password:  (provide  if  online  work  sample  is  password  protected)  Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)  Work  Sample  Description  (150  words  or  less)      Choreography  is  everywhere,  there  is  no  need  for  me  to  make  it.  In  this  Danish  video  of  tadpoles,  you  can  see  a  timelapse  that  exemplifies  the    tadpole  development  I  witnessed  as  a  child  going  to  ballet  school.  
These  tadpoles  are  in  an  environment  of  sterility,  and  in  that  Choreography  is  everywhere,  there  is  no  need  for  me  to  make  it.  In  this  environment,  the  clear  form  of  their  developmental  choreography  can  Danish  video  of  tadpoles,  you  can  see  a  timelapse  that  exemplifies  the  be  witnessed.  Once  they  are  fully  hatched,  and  need  outside  sources  tadpole  development  I  witnessed  as  a  child  going  to  ballet  school.  
for  food,  they  will  die  unless  supplied.    
These  tadpoles  are  in  an  environment  of  sterility,  and  in  that  environment,  the  clear  form  of  their  developmental  choreography  can  be  witnessed.  Once  they  are  fully  hatched,  and  need  outside  sources  for  food,  they  will  die  unless  supplied.    

⠼⠑⠛Private Parts Made Pub(l)ic

Private Parts
made Pub(l)ic
Interview with DJ JD
by Jay Barnacle
Despite his name DJ JD is not a DJ and infact hates DJs. He instead makes laptop music that is unlike any other laptop music, butcannot be anything but music made with alaptop. Jay Barnacle from No Collective sat
down with DJ JD after a show in Austin to
discuss his contradictory approach to computer music and the radical aesthetics-ethics
behind it.

⠼⠑⠓

JAY BARNACLE So I just saw your concert
and I was impressed by your use of the computer
as an instrument. It struck me as being entirely
different from, well, everybody else’s use that I
know of. Could you talk a little bit about the
specific piece as well as your general approach tocomputers?

out of the speakers, when actually I was watching internet porn. I did this until I had full erection. And then I watched other stuff to get ridof that erection. It took me about 10 minutes
to get the full erection and another 10 minutes to lose it, so the performance went on forabout 20 minutes.

DJ JD Sure, though I think we should be a
bit more specific here and say “laptop computers” because desktops are another beast completely. Of course they both have a screen anda keyboard and a mouse and all that stuff. But
desktops are different kind of machine because
they’re super heavy and need to be connectedto the wall.

JB What did you watch in order to get rid of theerection?

JB So you only use laptops?
DJ JD No, I’ve used desktops too, especiallywhen I need something irritating on stage.
They’re more vulnerable too, you know, because of their weight and the connection
which tends to be ridiculousy fragile. Man,I mean people trip on them and disconnect
the power all the time, man. So they’re likethese extremely big and unreliable creatures,
but sometimes it works to have them roaming
around.
JB Going back to your concert, could you describe what you did?
DJ JD It was a solo piece where I sat in frontof the laptop completely naked and pretended
I was performing the music that was coming

DJ JD I was going to keep this a secret, but I
Skyped with my parents.
JB Really?
DJ JD Yeah, I mean I was naked and didn’t
talk to them so they got pretty weirded out, but
it was the most effective thing I could think of,you know, to get rid of my boner. And man
did that work magic. The problem was that towards the end I got a bit sentimental and teary,
but I hope nobody noticed that!
JB Well I sure didn’t. How did you come up withthis piece?
DJ JD Well, I’ve been pissed about how all thepeople doing “laptop music” only use laptops
in one way. The sound that comes out might
be different, but it’s always the same format interms of what you see. You know, one or several people—mostly dorky white guys—sittingin front of a machine, staring the monitor likeidiots, and doing something mysterious on
the keyboard just to play some fucking music.

⠼⠑⠊

DJ JD x Jay Barnacle

I mean, give me a break. And I hear all thesepeople discussing whether the computer is auniversal instrument or not. Of course it’s notuniversal! It’s a very particular machine. For
instance, the specific way a laptop is designed
keeps the audience from seeing whatever’s on
the screen that the performer is seeing. This issuch a strange feature for a musical instrument
if you think about it: that other people can’t
see the side of the instrument you’re looking
at. So suddenly you obtain this private viewin an otherwise public situation. And you can
use this aspect of a laptop in performance todo things you couldn’t do with other instruments. So I took that to an extreme in thepiece you saw.
JB That was what impressed me, the play of private view within a public space that was enabledby the specific property of the laptop computer.
And the audience could not see what you are seeing but they could still see the bodily reaction—of the particular kind that is usually considered
private—you are having from what you are seeing. So you also turned the relationship between
private and public inside-out: you let people seethat there was something private inside what is
generally considered the public, but also exposedin public something that is generally considered to
be private.
DJ JD Yeah, but it’s also just what’s always
happening in a concert situation, you know. a
performer sits in front of the audience facing
them, and does something. It’s because of thisstrange setting that the one side can’t see what

the other is seeing when it comes to computers. If I’m going to be smart about it, I would
say that there’s also a link between exposing
private parts in a seemingly public situationand exposing what’s specific in a seemingly
universal instrument. And different things get
universalized at different times. A buddy ofmine who does come cool research about thehistory of music technology told me that in thenineteenth century, the piano was the shit, andthat’s why people like Helmholz or whoever
thought about the human ear using the piano
as model. Today, that would be computers, ofcourse. But its also true that in every model,
the specifics of each body fucks with the ideathat a machine can be universal. So man, it’sdoomed. You know what I mean?
JB Sure. Are you familiar with the activities of
the Laptop Orchsetra?

Private Parts Made Pub(l)ic

browsing the internet, writing emails, listening to other music with earphones, and things
like that. Maybe even porn. And then the performers left the stage one by one, until there
were none. The music kept going because thereal performer had one sound file just play byitself for a bit. And then after some time theperformers returned to the stage, again one
by one, and when everybody was back, they
all pressed the stop button at once, so that theaudience never got to know who the real performer was.
JB That would actually be a nice laptop orchestra piece! It would be an orchestra, but with only
one, or even none, of the performers actually playing. I also know that you are exploring the issue ofinterface in your works, could you talk a bit aboutthat?

DJ JD Well, everything is an issue of the damninterface if you ask me, and I can give you someexamples. I’ve been developing and using an
app that filters your laptop screen, regardlessof what you’re doing. It’s kind of like thosephotoshop filters, but this one, you can apply
it to the whole screen. What this causes, ofcourse, is to make the display difficult or even
impossible to read. So even if you’re using aboring commercial software like Ableton Live,the performance suddenly becomes thrillingand full of surprises. All these software companies assume that the display is transparent.
It’s like how everybody doing electronic music assumes that loudspeakers are neutral devices. So we’re repeating history pretty much.
I wonder if it’s because we have some shit inour brains that make us think of interfaces astransparent. It’s a mindfuck.

DJ JD Nah, I don’t watch TV.
JB What about your other works? Do you explore the media-specificity of laptop computers inother ways?
DJ JD Well another thing about laptops asmusical instruments is that the connection between what you do to it, and what comes out
as a result is invisible. I did one piece where I
combined that with the privacy of the screen.
I had several performers each in front of theirlaptops, and sound coming out from the speakers, but actually only one guy was performing.
All the others were just doing other things, like

⠼⠋⠚

⠼⠋⠁

DJ JD x Jay Barnacle

JB I want to see that screen.
DJ JD Here, it looks like this. [see below andprevious page]JB I see. Hmm, I wonder why nobody has thoughtof this before. Like you say, it’s so simple, butchanges all the preconceptions that support laptop music. It also connects the laptop with all theprevious experimentations other composers havedone, of putting some kind of constraint within thesystem so that performers are forced to re-invent
their behaviors in relation to it. It’s laptop indeterminacy. By the way, do you know the work ofEllen C. Covito? She’s an Argentinian composer
who has done many works with traditional staff
notation that I think resonate with what you aredoing on the laptop.

DJ JD I’ve heard her name, but don’t knowmuch about her works. I told you, I don’t
watch television.
JB Her works are on YouTube... well, nevermind.
What about the keyboard? That’s one thing you
haven’t mentioned so far, I think.
DJ JD Well, in another group piece of mine,
I told the performers that they can’t touch thelaptop themselves, so they had to use longsticks or whatever to control the instrument.
Of course, the laptop keys are designed withhuman fingers in mind, all of them squeezed
next to one another, so using a stick naturally
caused a lot of typos and mistouch. It was afucking beautiful mess. The computer suddenly became the most difficult instrument toplay.

Private Parts Made Pub(l)ic

JB Do you know the piece Distance by the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi? It’s basically the sameidea, but for traditional instruments. I think it
was composed in the 1960s.

In one of my first pieces, I dropped a bunchof tape recorders from the roof of a building.
So they played music as they fell, until they
all crushed on the ground making a really big
sound.

DJ JD Damn!
JB How many did you drop?
JB So it seems like you are more concerned about
instruments rather than how things sound?
DJ JD Nah, I’m deep into sounds too. But
it’s the same thing there too: I focus on what’s
specific about them. So in one piece I put the
speaker inside a bell jar that was connected to a
vacuum pump, and pumped until the air inside
the jar was sucked out. Because sound can’t
travel in a vacuum, this lowered the volume ofthe sound people could hear. But I wasn’t doing anything to the sound itself. I was just fucking with the medium through which soundtravelled. Now there’s an idea.

DJ JD About a hundred. But some of themwere attached to wires and slinkies and othermaterials so that they didn’t hit the ground andbounced back. So that caused a bit of the doppler effect.
JB What kind of music were they playing?
DJ JD Oh, each one of them had a recordingof a sine waves in different frequency, so when
put together it sounded like a damn waterfallof sound.
JB Why did you use tape recorders?

JB That’s interesting in the sense that it’s both
highly conceptual and physical.
DJ JD But the conceptual is always based on
the physical, and the physical is the most conceptual thing. I mean how do you conceive athing—I’m talking about a baby—without abody? You can have virtual sex, but not virtual
birth.
JB Do you always work with computers?
DJ JD Almost always nowadays, but when
I started making music I wasn’t using them.

⠼⠋⠃

DJ JD Cause I couldn’t afford to drop hundred laptops! And I can’t afford to drop hundred people either—that would be insane anddifficult to do. I might even get arrested. So I
stick to cheap tape recorders.
JB I wonder what you would do if you had tonsof money then?
DJ JD I know what I’m going to do. I’m goingto buy every single ticket from a stadium concert of the biggest pop star in the world and am
going to turn the tables around and perform⠼⠋⠉DJ JD x Jay Barnacle

for them as my sole audience.
JB And who do you think is the biggest pop starnow?
DJ JD Elton John?
JB Okay, why do you call yourself a DJ?
DJ JD I think the letters of my name look likean elephant. You see: “DJJD.” And I’ve always
liked elephants. They’re kind of like the desktops of the animal world.
JB But this elephant would have two trunks?
DJ JD Huh?
JB Nevermind, tell me about your next project.
DJ JD I want to take a fucking grand piano
and turn it into an interface for my laptop. A
keyboard typing to the letter. It’s pretty easy,
actually—just a matter of mapping the keys on
the piano to those on the laptop. But in performance it would be fucking unreal. Think of it,
I’m going to play the piano to play the laptop! I
mean would that still be computer music? I’mgonna start calling myself a pianist.

DJ JD A few years ago I went to see a pieceby this dude Florian Hecker about a pink box
or whatever the hell it was. What pissed me off
was that the guy had written some dumb story
where speech that’s intelligible at first graduallybecame distorted and rendered unintelligible.
The problem with that kind of cheap drama is
the idiotic assumption that there is intelligible
speech on one side and noise on the other.
But speech is full of noise and unintelligible tostart with! So it was just fucking insulting. Forme, that’s unethical—I mean, aside from being
stupid. Ethics is not about how you position
other things—like putting intelligibility in one
box and noise in another—but about how you
position yourself in relation to the other things.
The positioning of other things belongs to thecommunity. It’s a public issue. But the positioning of yourself requires a distancing fromthe community. It is private in that sense, but
this privacy that ignores what is shared in thecommunity is what’s really public...or, pubic?
Let me just say that public is like pubic and get
this shit done with.

v[Transcribed with assistance from Matthew Gannt]

JB I shall call you Pianist JD then. And so liong
for the elephant then. One last thing I wanted to
ask was, how do you think about ethics? I mean
your work can be perceived as offensive to somepeople. So what’s your take on that?

⠼⠋⠙

RULES OF ATTRACTION(Percussion/

Repercussion

E)

Version A: Contact Improvisation wearing metal costumes (an armor, for instance) with strong magnets attached.
Version B: A solo dance wearing a metal costume. Place a strong magnet on thewings of the stage and/or parts of the floor.
In both versions, contact microphones may also be attached to the costume toamplify the resulting sounds.
— Ellen C. Covito[For other works in the Percussion/Repercussion series see:
http://ellenccovito.com/pra.html
http://ellenccovito.com/prb.html
http://ellenccovito.com/prc.html
http://ellenccovito.com/prd.html]⠼⠋⠑

25 - 7

⠼⠋⠋

⠼⠋⠛

⠼⠋⠓

⠼⠋⠊

You Nakai

How People Grow

A new baby is born. Shortly after birth, you notice two instances that he reacts to other human beings. The first case: he always stops crying, even if only for a moment, when somebody enters theroom (after being left alone). This happens even when the room is totally dark, so you assume it is
not based on what he sees (a baby’s vision is not well-developed, anyways), but on the sensation of
the other person’s presence. The second case: he bites and tries to eat anything he could place his tiny
hands on, but with a notable exception: his own body parts. These, the child would put in his mouth
but never bite for real. Probably because it hurts.

Age 0: Something That is Not Me

These two cases seem to point towards an acknowldgement of the body that precedes the Lacanian‘mirror stage’ which supposedly occurs somewhere between six and eighteen months after birth. It isthat moment when the infant sees the entirety of his body in a mirror and, through that image, grasps
the wholeness of the body that pertains to him and only to him. But even at an earlier stage, the bodyof the child is already delineated (given a contour) in relation to the bodies of others. The body may
be disparate, without the image of totality, but the distinction between the child’s own body and what
is not is defined without resorting to visual channels. In other words, there is a difference between
the disparity and indistinguishability of the body. Everything that is not the child constitutes thecontours of himself.
The other, or what is not him, is what the child can eat and/or something that breaks his solitude. If
the world was composed solely by the child, there would only be pain. The amorphous continuity
between the child and the rest of the world allows him to not sense this pain, while the fact that thecontinuity relies on the bodies of others and can therefore be dissected any time serves to expose
it. For the child, that is to say, the body that is not himself is always a source of pain as well as a resource for coping with that pain. Pain, physical or emotional, is what intervenes in the basic principleof expansion/consumption and stops the child from eating the entire world or eating himself. This
preventive mechanism would later morph into the conception of the “world” as the general irreducibility of everything to him.

⠼⠛⠚

⠼⠛⠁

You Nakai

How People Grow

Language starts as a command to others. It is an extension of the helpless but insistent crying thatthe child has been doing ever since his birth: a desperate means to make something happen. Whatneeds to happen, in most cases, is clear: the child needs to eat. Now there are things that he can eat(i.e. doesn’t hurt when he bites), but cannot move (i.e. doesn’t follow his commands). And there areother things that he can move, which he can or cannot eat (though in principle he can). The child’s
mother, for instance, is something he can move as well as eat.

Age 1: Something That is Not HERE

Meanwhile the child learns to point at objects with his fingers in tune with the delineation of one
thing from another. He then learns his first word: “mama.” Everything he points he calls “mama.”“Mama” is the mother of all names. But this does not mean that everything is “mama” for the child;it simply means that “mama” is the command that enables him to access whatever the thing he ispointing at. “Mama” in this way is an extension of the child’s own body, which (in addition to being
edible) complements for the lack of its own mobility. The child would have power over this extension through certain sounds that come out of his mouth. Primordial language is therefore nothing
short of magic spell. Word/name that makes things happen: abracadabra!
Gradually “mama” is replaced by other names of other things. This means that the origin of proper
names lies not in description or designation of something in the world, but in commands to makethings happen. In other words, the primary function of names is not the indication of connection
between language and a thing, but rather the indication of connection between the people whoshare the usage of that name. What matters is accurate correspondence with others who the childcan move, and not with things that he cannot. In other words, the accuracy of language is measured
by its performativity. Anything that works, works fine.

⠼⠛⠃

⠼⠛⠉

You Nakai

How People Grow

The second word the child learns is “no.” This is because he can point at things but cannot point at
nothing. The word “no” thus serves to express the failure of correspondence, the disobedience ofcommands.

Age 1.5: Something That is Not THIS⠼⠛⠙

One day the child starts asking incessantly—“What is this?” You tell him what it is by saying its nameand he repeats it. The name is therefore something you give to the child. And when it is given, it
closes the suspense of the waiting time, thereby opening up and connecting the child’s solitary timewith yours.
After a while the child starts asking the names of things he already knows. You notice that he is doing
this mostly to hold your attention. By obtaining the answer he already knows, the child reconfirms
the sharing of time and space between you and him, based on the sharing of the name. By affirming
a common world, this ritual anchors the child’s reality. Without names, his world and yours could
easily drift apart. The amount of time that it takes to transmit and confirm a name delineates thewidth of present that is shared between the two. The name thus functions as an objective correlativeof one’s connection with an other. The correspondence between a thing and its name is secondary
in comparison to this correspondence with the other’s present. A quick proof: the same effect canbe achieved by saying phrases like “I love you” which has no correspondence with things. In otherwords, the correlative here is the relationship and not the thing.

⠼⠛⠑You Nakai

How People Grow

The first step in dealing with pain is to localize it. The same is true with desire. The child often cries
for no apparent reason. It seems that he just wants, without knowing what it is that he wants. When
this happens you give the child a list of things he may be wanting, so that he gets to pick what hewants. Once this choice is made, a particular contour is given to the child’s amorphous and over-all
desire. It turns desire into an object of desire (an objective correlative) so that you can then startnegotiating with him on that concrete ground.

Age 2: Something That is Not NOW

Negotiation consists mostly in creating an order between the different, possible objects of desire.
Despite the child’s constant and consistently overflowing wants, it is impossible to fulfill everything
all at once. Reducing the overall feeling of lack into a specific object of desire makes it possible todifferentiate and thus count desires. Desire always pertains to the present. So its differentiation is themultiplication of presents. But not all those presents can be realized in the present. Now the childfaces an internal conflict within his own desires. The incompatibility of multiple desires/presents canthen be used to force the child to place an order between them: the child needs to choose what hewants, and leave what he did not choose until a later time. He must learn to wait and endure for thesake of desire. This installs the conception of “before” and “after” (You have to get X now so that you
can get Y later. You can get Y now because you got X before). The child acquires all words related totime and temporality through these scenes of negotiation.
And this is also how the idea of causality is installed. That is to say, (the understanding of) causal relationship is not derived from the observation of physical phenomena; it emerges rather through thegeneralization of artificial conditionals that are fabricated and imposed on the child by you. This arbitrary yet absolute (from the child’s perspective) rule that governs the world then becomes a model
to discern the workings of nature. You thus play the role of god, the regulator of absolute rules, theengineer of the world: you play being adult.

v

⠼⠛⠋

⠼⠛⠛

AGE

OLD

EXCHANGE

It was Gertrude Stein who said, “we are always the same age inside.” She was

Our family tries to fight this terror of agism with a simple method. When

only half right. Age is not a quantity that increments every year; it is

we celebrate birthdays, instead of a yearly linear accumulation of age, we

rather a quality stratifies. A forty year old person is not simply forty. He

each decide on what age to be next by drawing a lot. The result this year

is, at the same time, thirty-nine, thirty-eight, forty-one, and so on. In

was interesting, since the daughter and the father got each other’s age. So

the same way, a twelve year old is not simply twelve. She is, at the samethe twelve year old daughter had to act as a forty year old, while the forty

time, eight, nine, thirteen, and so on. Seen like this, the common custom ofyear old father behaved as a twelve year old. Note that the father-daughter

projecting a particular image of how a person should behave (act, think, andrelationship remained unchanged. Our focus is only in shifting the surfacetalk) according to his or her age is an essentialism which violently effaces

behavior (which again, mostly concerns the manners of acting, thinking andall the actual and potential strata of ages embedded inside a person, reify-

talking). This “age old exchange” was performed continuously under different

ing only what appears on the surface. If racism is the belief that there issituations: solely between ourselves (intimate and intense), with the resta particular trait inherent within each racial group, then agism (or ‘age-of the family (hilarious and disturbing), and in public (weird and embar-

realism’) is the belief that there is a particular trait inherent withinrassing).

each age group. In both cases, these are beliefs that trigger and justify
discrimination. They are oppresive apparatuses that require creative ways ofThis description was written by the twelve-year old performing as the forty.

resistance.
—Melanie/Camden Fisher (age 12/40)

⠼⠛⠓

⠼⠛⠊

UNCONDITIONALde
RESTORATION estor
2015.10.25-12.19 | Milkyeast, Tokyo, Japan

Co-curated by Naoki Matsumoto, Milk-souko + Shinichi Takashima

R

In the beginning, there is deficiency.
By adhering to the image of an original,
the act of restoration physically intervenes,
overwrites, and renews what is extant.
Restoration is thus a wager, an intervention
into this very thing that is irreplaceable.

⠼⠓⠚

⠼⠓⠁

Unconditional Restoration

The group exhibition Unconditional Restoration, co-curated by theartist group Miruku-Souko (Milk Warehouse), Naoki Matsumoto, and Shinichi Takashima took place in Fall 2015 at Milkyeast,a restored former print factory in downtown Tokyo, following a preexhibition in Spring of that same year. The concept of the exhibition(first posited at the pre-exhibition, and later restored and expanded for the main exhibition) along with the discussions held during
the three public artist talks, presented important ideas surrounding
the concept of restoration and questioned established dogmas about
the temporality and ontology of art works.
Unfortunately, however, these discussions were not documented inany way, and due to excessive consumption of alcohol during theevents, the recollection of the participants also remains fragmentary. Thus there is a lack, which calls for nothing other than restoration. What is presented here, then, quite appropriately following the problematic of the exhibition itself, is an attempt to restore
Unconditional Restoration from extant resources including online
documentation, preparatory notes, and fragmentary memory of theparticipants.
⠼⠓⠃

All photographs
in this section by:
Shu Nakagawa⠼⠓⠉

Unconditional Restoration

Notes for the Pre-Exhibition

takes as its premise the standpoint that there is no such thing as an original, thateverything exists as multiples from the start. This is why an interesting effect of res-by Shinichi Takashima

toration emerges in the manipulation of reproduced objects. For instance, reproducing money is illegal but restoring money releases it from being a mere transparent
medium, endowing it an aura of singularity. What results, therefore, is a curious effectIf we abstract the notion of “restoration,” the following two realizations immediately
ensue:of giving an original status to something that never had an origin.
Restoration may seem to resemble imitation, reconstruction, or translation, in the

In the beginning, there is deficiency—this is the first premise of restoration. In oth-sense that the status of an “original” is at stake in one way or another. But the truth iser words, something appears as a fragment, a part of a whole that is absent in the herethat restoration is more similar to medical operation or treatment. For it is through aand now. We are thereby incited to fix or restore the fragment. Once we pursue thisnecessarily tentative repairing process, such as medical treatment, that even entities

idea of primordial deficiency, everything starts to appear incomplete, calling for somethat do not have a body are endowed with one. The desire to treat and repair actuallywork of repair. For there is no such thing as a complete being. Even the current hu-

brackets out the explicit details of what the original was. It merely posits that there

man beings may need restoration—according to Aristophanes (as described in Plato’s

was an original unity by refusing the state of tabula rasa. A restorer perceives the

Symposium), all humans were originally androgynes in the form of a sphere, with two

entire world as a sort of debt that cannot be canceled.

heads, four eyes, four hands, and four legs, who could move in all directions.

No matter how objective it claims itself to be the act of restoration is inevitably

By thus adhering to the image of an “original,” the act of restoration physically in-conditioned by sentiment. However, contrary to general belief, the primary aim oftervenes, overwrites, and renews what is extant. And the positing of this extant thing

restoration is not to cover up and erase the traces of deterioration. As Cesare Brandi

as being “irreplaceable” forms the second premise of restoration. Restoration is a wa-

noted, restoration must be an intervention that is always easily recognizable. Whatger, an intervention into this very thing that is irreplaceable. It is an act that involves

will be examined in our exhibition is the very idea of “irreplaceability” which cannot

the risk, if it should fail, of destroying once and for all an irreplaceable thing.

be reduced to the process of deterioration; something like a medical treatment that

The notion of restoration can be contrasted with that of reproduction. The latter⠼⠓⠙

nonetheless detaches itself from the notion of death or sickness.

⠼⠓⠑

Shinichi Takashima, etc

Unconditional Restoration
The creative aspect of restoration is based in the process of interpretation that reposits the “original” as a unified whole. In particular, the act of reconstruction (categoryB), which lacks any material continuity with the “original,” must rely entirely on such

Notes for the Main Exhibitioninterpretation, and may thus achieve the same degree of creativity as translation orreenactment.

by Shinichi Takashima

We could further increase the degree of freedom in the process of interpretation to
imagine a third category, which is rather banal in art:1

C: The act of customizing or renovating an “original” by assigning a different
usage to it (revision).

“Creation” and “destruction” are not objective notions but value concepts, which is to
say that the relationship with the user of the term is necessarily embedded in their se-

This exhibition will nevertheless focus solely on restoration as repair (category A).

mantics. By contrast, “restoration” is usually considered a rather inactive term, evenThis stands in contrast to reconstruction in that the physical continuity with thea secondary notion derived from the dichotomy of creation-destruction. For restora-“original” conditions the intervention into the surviving fragment. Ironically, this also

tion cannot exist without something having already been created, and without thatpoints to the destructive aspect of restoration—the risk accompanying all attempts tosomething having already suffered some kind of destruction. However, despite thisreturn things to its original state.

seemingly belated and derivative nature, the idea of restoration may hold interesting
possibilities that cannot be reduced to the binary from which it seems to stem. For
instance, if seeing something as creation or destruction is a value judgment, restora-

3tion can be thought as being a judgment (or critique) of that judgment. This meta-judgment contributes not to the justification or authentication of what has been created

There is an evident paradox concerning restoration as repair: the more one tries tobut rather to the fabrication of its singularity. For instance, judging something to berestore something, the more damage one causes. For instance, the cleansing of var-

restorable works in the opposite direction from the judgment of disposability, which isnish is always a problem in the restoration of paintings. The varnish on the surface

another form of meta-judgment. If labeling something as disposable is like giving it athat has discolored over the years transforms the tone of the entire canvas and candeath sentence, the process of restoration can be likened to rehabilitation, or perhaps

even erase details of thea probation period of something that has been declared disposable.

work. The cleansing and removal of varnish is therefore a mandatory procedure2in restoration. At the sametime, however, too much

Restoration can be classified into two categories:

cleansing results in chang-

A: The act of deducing and reviving the original from a surviving fragment (re-ing the very image of thepair).

painting. When we encoun-

B: The act of imagining and reviving the original that is completely lost from a

ter artworks (or any othersecondary source (reconstruction).

object, for that matter), we⠼⠓⠋

Feathered Tyrannosarurus Rex (imagined drawing)⠼⠓⠛Shinichi Takashima, etc

Unconditional Restoration

perceive them with their physical deterioration (sometimes these are called “patina”
and even thought as adding richness to the work). But the act of restoration involves
detaching these objects from the passing of time that they have accustomed andseeped themselves into.
One pertinent example here is the strange sensation we get when we are told thatthe now-white ancient Greek marble sculptures were originally painted in brilliant
colors; an uncanny feeling similar to the one effected by the recent theory claiming
Tyrannosaurus Rex was covered in feathers. Restoration therefore may sustain orcollapse a myth. The destructiveness of restoration is akin to the danger of time paradox in which the act of changing the past by traveling backin time erases the very motive for time travel in the first
Anthony van Dyck
“Portrait of Olive Boteler Porter” (1637)
before and after conservation

place. But what if this tendency
for destruction was not a mereside-effect to be evaded but aninherent function of restoration?

4
The terra-forming of Mars, for instance, does not appear to be an act of restoration—it
is simply an act of creating a “reproduction” of the Earth using different resources.
But contrary to the attempt of converting another planet into ours, the terra-formingof the Earth itself could be considered as restoration. This seemingly self-contradictory task can be conceivable under some circumstances. For example, in the face of a total nuclear contamination of the planet, restoring Earth’s atmosphere would become
necessary. One merely needs to posit the state of the planet at a certain point in history as being the “original” to enable and justify the restoration of the present one. If
the “original” Earth was posited as being 4.6 billion years in the past when the planet
was still in its infancy, restoration would consist in getting rid of the ozone layer or themagnetic field surrounding the planet which now serves to block radiation from space.
Everything is changing constantly. Which means that the act of restoring something
Reconstruction of the interior, altar and statue of temple of Aesculapius at Epidaurus⠼⠓⠓

to its “original” state is always based on a particular interpretation projecting a partic-⠼⠓⠊

Shinichi Takashima, etc

Unconditional Restorationular time scale that is necessarily entangled with the specifics of our current interest.
In other words, restoration without conditionals is an impossibility. Even the same act
can mean opposite things depending on what is considered as “original.” But the more
serious issue is the following: is there a fundamental difference between the projectionof terrestrial environment onto Mars and the projection of terrestrial environment
from a certain point in time onto the current Earth? If both are acts of transformation
based on projection of specific interests, wouldn’t the two be ultimately the same?

5
We chose the paradoxical term “Unconditional Restoration” as the name for our outrageous proposal to regard every single thing as a deficiency awaiting to be restored andto attempt the fabrication of their origin. The passivity of restoration that only hopes
to fill-in what is missing counters both the desire of creation ex nihilo and the tabularasa impetus longing for complete destruction of all things in order to begin anew.(*)
Through the unconditional expansion—and restoration—of the concept of “restoration” we aim to ask one fundamental question: could the restrained hope for not adding
anything new to the world nevertheless serve as a lever for transforming the world?

(*) Restoration, which discovers the “original” through what is lacking, is a method of
fabricating the past from the present. When this mechanism is shifted in the opposite direction it leads to the negativity of prevention (or immunization) that seeks to not makethings happen (as opposed to the positivity of trying to make something happen). The
following episode offers an example of a pure “preventive” measure that is at once active
as well as passive: “A man claps his hands every ten seconds. Asked why he does that, heanswers: ‘to drive away the elephants...’ ‘But why, there are no elephants here.’ The man
replies: ‘Precisely.’” (“The Situation is Hopeless But Not Serious,” Paul Watzlawick)

Terraformation of Mars (imagined process), Daein Ballard

⠼⠊⠚

⠼⠊⠁

Unconditional Restoration

First Discussion

Restoring Discussions
by No Collective and Shinichi Takashima

Pre-Discussion
No Collective So you’re telling us that there
is no documentation of the three discussions
held during the exhibition, nor do you remember much about what you talked since youwere drunk every time. None of us saw themain exhibition nor the pre-exhibition. But
I [You Nakai] did discuss the basic conceptsof the exhibition with you when you were trying to write the two “Notes” and made somesuggestions, so I’m vaguely familiar with what
you were up to. Since in the “Notes” you examine the different types of restoration, which
are essentially different ways to respond to theloss of a given original, we decided we should“restore” the lost discussion by applying yourown model to the situation. The resources
available to us were very limited: images presented during the discussion, photographs andbrief reports found on Twitter, commentaries
left on Milk-Souko and other people’s websites
or blogs, and preparatory notes taken during
meetings leading up to the actual event.

Shinichi Takashima The main exhibition
was in three terms, so we held the discussions
three times. Each time we started off with an“Artist Talk” where the participating artists
for that term talked about their works, andafter that we would continue the conversation to address more abstract problems andtopics. The discussions were always aroundthree hours: an hour for the Artist Talk, andtwo hours for the discussion. And although“discussion” was how we called it the firsttime, since no one spoke except me, it sort ofbecame a “lecture” from the second time. The
nature of these “discussion/lectures” was more
about laying out various examples rather thanconstructing a fully-formed argument. I also
think we held discussions during the pre-exhibition. Since the Milk-Souko website (http://
milkystorage.tumblr.com/) refers to the only
discussion that is documented there as “Talk
No.1,” I suspect there was at least a “No. 2.” I
don’t remember what we discussed at all, but I
probably talked about some of the underlying
concerns of the “Notes” I wrote.

⠼⠊⠃

problematic that connected to the issue of historical revisionism.

NC In the two “Notes” for the exhibition, as
well as in the three discussions presumably,
you picked up various examples to consider
the multiple facets of restoration. However, thefundamental issue that you were examining
could perhaps be paraphrased quite simply as
the contradictory status of entities—whether
that be an organism or an object—which are
the “same but different.” And all the examples
presented can in fact be read as case studies revolving around two questions that are logicallyderived from that core problem: “What causes
the difference regardless of the sameness?”and “What remains the same despite the difference?”
ST “Same but different” is an attribute oftransformation in general. And for any transformation one can either stress the differenceor the sameness. Since restoration is an attempt to preserve identity or continuity, what
is usually foregrounded in relation to it is thesameness. But the realization at the basis ofUnconditional Restoration was that the very
process of sustaining identity inevitably generates fissures and discontinuities. Also, theattempt to expand the notion of restorationbifurcated into the direction of innovation—“creating something anew”—and the reactionary path—“to regain what was lost.” And we
wanted to see what would happen if we deliberately mixed up those two directions with theconcern for self-preservation—“to continue
what already exists.” In this sense, it was also a

NC In the first discussion, you cited Cesare
Brandi’s Theory of Restoration, drawing a line
between “restored objects” and “relics,” trying to articulate the former in comparison to
the latter which are always defined in relation
to external historical context. Your wanted toregard restoration as a process pertaining to
objects themselves that does not rely on external observation. At the same time, however, inyour “Notes” you refer to the uncanny feelingyou get after knowing that Greek sculptures
were colored, for instance. This feeling belongs
not to the object itself but to the external observer. Or, you also comment on how the present interest of the observer always drives andregulates the act of restoration. So how do you⠼⠊⠉

Cesare Brandi“Theory of Restoration”
Istituto centrale per il restauro, 2005

No Collective x Shinichi Takashimaconnect the role that the observer plays in restoration to the model of self-restoring objects
which does away with external observation?
ST In the “Notes for the Main Exhibition”
I categorized the notion of restoration into
three types: A = repair, B = reconstruction, C= revision. The first type is when a fragmentof original remains and a continuous processof restoration evolves around it. So this could
be paraphrased as “maintenance.” In the second type, the original is completely gone but

its reactivation is aimed for, so this is equal to“revival.” And the third type thinks of otheruses of the original or implements new additional values, so it could be linked to “customization,” “renovation,” or “remake.” In terms of
temporality, this third type is neither constantlike the first nor intermittent like the second,
but transient. In the “Note,” I wrote that thefirst category, type A, which seems to be mostlacking the creative freedom of manipulation,
is nonetheless the one that most displays thecharacteristics unique to restoration. However,“The Building of Noah’s Arc” Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)⠼⠊⠙

Unconditional Restorationin the meetings for the exhibition with Naoki
and nurse log, C to grafting and pinching, andMatsumoto—who came up with the topic of
D to reversion—perhaps? In terms of mearestoration in the first place—and the memsurement of time, type A would be stopwatch
bers of Milk-Souko, what actually interested us
or biological clock, B would be sundial and calmost was a fourth kind of restoration that did
endars, C would be timers, sandglass, or water
not fit into the threefold classification. Restoclock. Otherwise, type A could be cleaning up,
ration is conditioned by its relation to the deB could be laundry, spring cleaning, or estatesire or interest of the restoring agent and theliquidation, C could be moving of houses or
passing of time, but wedisappearance of peowondered if there could
ple—you see, we werebe any cases where thattrying to rethink the clasvery desire and temsification system via difporality caused a truly
ferences of time span orradical break from thethe degree of irreversibiloriginal. Without knowity. But the more we did
ing whether such a thing
this the messier the defiexisted or not, in the
nitions became, and it
meeting we called thisquickly got out of hand.
fourth category, type D,(laughs)or “transmutational resAs we were discussing
toration.”what this fourth categoIn the end, we failed tory could be, it occurreddefine this fourth possito me that the problem
bility in a clear way, butof restoration can also
what we attempted tobe thought as the prob“Emma, Relique” (ca. 1900)
Collection Jean-Jacques Lebel
do was to take various
lem of metamorphosis.
examples from different
By “metamorphosis,” Igenres and forcefully categorize them as thewasn’t imagining any drastic change of state,
four types of restoration. For instance, with arbut rather something occurs through the verychitecture, it could be easily said that type A is
attempt to preserve identity, unbeknownst to
repair, B is refurbishing, and C is house renothe entity itself—metamorphosis as a side efvation. So what would type D be? Or, if type A
fect, so to speak. Now there is a certain ambiguwas prosthetic limbs, B would be an android,
ity in the word “metamorphosis”: it is unclear
C would be a cyborg, and D might be Frankenif it is something that one makes happen, or
stein. In agriculture and forestry, type A would
something that happens to one. And by resortcorrespond to thinning, B to soil amelioration
ing to that term, I thought it might be possible⠼⠊⠑

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

to address a certain form of restoration where
the agent of restoration was indeterminate. Or,
instead of the usual assumption of objects being the passive receivers of the act of restoration, to think of events that can be considered
as an active self-restoration of objects. The
reason we referred to “relics” in the discussion,
albeit in a critical manner, was because thatmodel served to expose the limits of setting aclear distinction between manipulating andbeing manipulated in regards to restoration.
A “relic” is established through the framing ofobjects by a context that lies beyond any possibility for perceptual verification. In this sense,
the condition of relics approximates the methodology of conceptual art. It does not dependon how the thing looks or its physical state, butrelies instead on external context, and can only
be retained as narrative. In other words, if you
pursued the mandates of the observer or the
restorer to an extreme, you end up with the tyranny of narrative. At the same time, however,contrary to “restored objects,” “relics” have theradical potential of eradicating the distinction
between natural and artificial objects, as canbe seen in examples such as “the dried oak treethat gave shade to Tasso,” or “the stone thatDavid used to kill Goliath.” So what happens
when that nature of relics is taken as a modeland cross-applied to restoration? Would it bepossible to find a form of restoration that similarly nullifies the dichotomy between naturaland man-made objects? The example that I
came up with was petrified wood, the fossilof trees that are said to have “failed to becomecoal.” A petrified wood retains its former tree

shape despite the complete transformationof its interior chemical compound. So doesit still preserve its identity, or has it become
something entirely different? When you place
the petrified wood within the problematics ofrestoration, I thought it could serve as a niceexample of a self-restoring object.
Furthermore, the concern for focusing on processes that are inherent to objects was also motivated by the two theories of art that I referred
to, or rather wanted to oppose, in the lectures.
One was the logic of the “Formless (informe)”
presented by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain
Bois. I thought the operation of restoration
was antithetical to that of the Formless, but letme talk more about this later. The other theory I had in mind was the ironical argumentthat Boris Groys presents in his book On theNew, where he claims that it was the strategy⠼⠊⠋

Caravaggio, “David and Goliath” (1599)

Petrified WoodNo Collective x Shinichi Takashima

Yve-Alain Bois & Rosalind Krauss“Formless: A User’s Guide”
Zone Books, 1997

Boris Groys“On The New”
Verso, 2014of the avant-garde aiming for the nullificationof distinction between artworks and regular
objects that ultimately summoned the institutional apparatus of art museums. In otherwords, contemporary art demanded an external regulation of objects through the frame ofart museums. Even if Groys’ analysis is true, it
entirely ignores the existence of any intrinsic
order between the objects themselves. And for me,
an argument that can only be established bysingling out the difference between artworks
and everything else, while bracketing out allother differences between the various objects,
seemed entirely pointless.
So there was the consideration of these othertheories in parallel with the discussion about
the fourth type of restoration. But in addition
to that, the methodological choice of doing
away with exterior observation also became
important in the analysis of actual works thatwere exhibited. We all wanted to get away fromthe usual way of looking at art works as a product of an artist’s manipulation of pre-existingmaterials. So instead of talking about why andhow the material was processed, we tried tofocus on how the material transformed or restored itself. On the other hand, the claim that
objects or things reveal themselves as such only
when they are released from the functional
network subdued to human use and attain aunnameable status, is also a stereotypical argument that extends all the way from Heidegger
to Georgio Agamben or Graham Harman. It
posits objects as an excess that cannot be reduced to any external framing, emphasizing
their constant withdrawal, and so on. But I⠼⠊⠓

Unconditional Restoration

think that going to that extreme is going too
far. Instead, I was interested in how some ofthe exhibited works in Unconditional Restoration presented a transformed object which
nonetheless retained its functional or structural identity. So the function of objects wasdeliberately held onto, without turning theminto an unidentifiable fragment. These works
therefore lingered at the edge of the functional
network. The function would remain, but themethod to sustain the function would be altered. When thinking about “restoration,” thisapproach was informative, since function must
always be preserved in one form or anotherwhen you restore something.
NC In your initial argument, you posited via
Brandi that “relics” necessitate context but“self-restoring objects” do not. However, iffunction is preserved, as you are now saying,
it would be more accurate to say that context
is embedded in the object itself, rather thanbeing totally absent. Of course, it is not a situational, historical context, but the object itself
preserves and affords the context of its own
use. This means that in restoration, it is not
only the object itself but also its function, inother words the relationship between the object and other objects, including its user, thatneeds to be reactivated. In this sense, evenwhen you assume the objects to self-restore
themselves, the connection with a certain exteriority—other objects and users—cannot
be entirely excluded. Moreover, whereas thecontext required by “relics” is historical, thefunctional context connected to restoration

seems to be ahistorical, since if the function
is embedded in the object itself there should
be no difference in what it affords whether thetime is now or 500 years ago. Nevertheless, restoration is obviously a problematic embedded
in history. This means that there is a historical
process in which the ahistorical function of
objects deteriorates materialistically over time.
So that adds yet another layer of exteriority—a secondary exterior situated further beyond
the primary exteriority of functionality. It is
not that the ahistorical function/context ofobjects is preserved in eternal heaven.
ST For example, Naotaka Miyazaki’s piece
Quadricycle from Four Bicycles (2015), exhibited in the second term, consisted in collecting a number of broken bicycles and creating a single whole bicycle out of them. The
broken bicycles are each broken in different
ways—one would lack the front wheel, while
the other would have loose brakes. Usually
you would replace a broken part with a partthat still works and dispose the useless remainders. But Miyazaki instead preserved the fourbicycles as he found them and constructed asingle bike that one can actually ride on using
all the parts. His maneuver does complement
the lack of one bicycle with another, so it is awork of repair for sure. I mean, it’s neither aconstructive deformation common in plastic
arts nor the creation of a new form. But in thiscase, it is all the non-broken parts that remain
as extraneous parts. So it is not that a mistakein the restoration process gives birth to something different than the original.

⠼⠊⠊Unconditional Restoration

then becomes detached from the question of
how accurate it represents the human mind,
and starts functioning as an autonomous model. This model is then fed back into psychology,
giving rise to cognitive science which studies
humans using the computer as model. So that’s
one example of the effects caused by externalization and objectification of mechanisms. The
model is “objective” precisely because it is particular and cannot be generalized.

Kazuo Umezu“Negai [Wish]” (1975)
Naotaka Miyazaki
Quadricycle from Four Bicycles (2015)

NC In the process of restoration, new materiality is inevitably added to the object in order
to complement what is lacking, but this materiality is an excess that changes the very conditions of the object itself. Its like that story ofOscar Pistorius, the Paralympic sprinter whose
prosthetic legs made him faster than the Olympic athletes.
ST Yes, the materiality that is added in theprocess of restoration. In the discussion wealso talked about the horror manga Negai by
Kazuo Umezu—which I referred to in thefootnotes of the “Notes for the Main Exhibition”—which tells a story of a “wish” that once
externalized, strikes back as a material object
at the person. In terms of Miyazaki’s piece, thecrucial question is: for how many people is his
quadricycle designed? According to the artist
it is meant for just one person—who must be
a virtuosic driver! And in terms of relation toother objects, this bike would surely demand
the width of roads to be changed.
NC In regards to the process of materialization and objectification, it is important to notethat there are at least two types of objectivity.
On the one hand, objectivity refers to whatgoes beyond particular differences and can beapplied to many things. It is something generalthat is shared across individual objects. On theother hand, however, in the discourse of feminism, most notably that of Donna Haraway,
objectivity was redefined as being the attri-⠼⠁⠚⠚butes of an object. In this case, the image of objectivity is reversed: it is the specific attributeof a particular object which is biased and limited, but also rigid and immovable. And when
you trace for instance the history of psychology from this perspective, scientists in the 19th
century were always haunted by the problem
of how to “objectively” deal with the humanmind which no one can really observe. In theearly 20th century, behaviorism claimed thatwhat cannot be treated in an objective manner is not science, so psychology should stick
onto the behaviors that can be observed fromoutside. Yet, while psychologists were arguing
about the objectivity of the human psyche,mathematicians and engineers were trying tocreate machines that imitate the thinking process of humans. And once computers externalized the human mind as a mechanical object, it

ST Well, this might deviate a bit but I feel I
am always looking for “examples” that I could
use as material. Not an example of any specificthing, but searching for some example that I’m
not sure what it exeplifies. An “example,” bynature, points toward something other thanitself. But what is interesting is that a narrative of something that actually happened—aseemingly straightforward documentation ofan accomplished fact—can be treated as addressing something else in its entirety. In otherwords, something that was not meant to be an
example can become one. I’m curious about
what conditions that kind of transformation. A
book I read long time ago said that in the developmental stages of cognition, there is a transitional phase called the “proverb-logic level” inbetween the “naive-empirical level” and the“conceptual-scientific level.” I am interested
in things like proverbs that have abstract form
while still retaining a sensual concreteness.
NC An example is a paradigm—it is a single
thing, but you can look at multiple other things
through it. So the objectivity of a model is not⠼⠁⠚⠁

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

in its generality, but in the specific relationshipbetween that model and its particular instance.
And when you say you don’t know what theexample you are looking for is an example of,this connectivity with particular instances ishanging in mid-air. It’s that feeling that is generated and conveyed in certain microfictions,like Kafka’s short stories or Takuma Ishikawa’s
fables.(1) In the discussions, you didn’t reallyhave to present “examples” since the theoretical principle had already been articulated. But
by presenting them, you were not only clarifying the principle, but also producing a multiplicity of differences that could not be reduced
to that same principle.
ST The works exhibited in Unconditional
Restoration lacked the convincing power ofobjects that is usually appreciated in works
of art. I would hate for what we did to begrouped together with arte povera, but someone did suggest that since restoration is also
an attempt to preserve something without
throwing it away, it connects with the issue of“poverty,” and that is indeed true. Even beyond
the works presented in this exhibition, what
is interesting about Milk-Souko in general isthat their works deal with the problematics of
sculpture but do away with the feeling of material presence that sculptures tend to resort to.
Especially Naotaka Miyazaki’s Public Internal
Organs series (2007-), composed of feedback
networks of balloons inserted inside glass bottles and activated with pumped air, deals withthe basic issues of sculpture—that of makingof forms from the inside out—but is never-theless presented as pseudo-experimental devices. A lot of works in Unconditional Restoration, in terms of their style and appearance,
triggered people to narrate them as instancesof the method of alienation: the displacementof pre-existing objects. But I don’t think that’s
correct. Regardless of the work being good or
bad as art, the logic embedded in them madeyou think interesting thoughts.
NC In other words, they operated as examples, as models.
ST Exactly! I suppose we were not really concerned with pursuing objects per se, but morewith the maneuvers of objectification, the process of turning particular parts into objects.
NC For instance, when a person commits
a crime, that human being is regarded as not
being responsible if he or she is consideredinsane. In other words, the culpable was not
the person but the mind. Extending this, we
could imagine a society where responsibility is
detached from the person as a whole and distributed to the various bodily parts: it was thehand, or the mouth, and not the person. Eachbody part becomes an agent of responsibility.
ST Let me try to connect that with anotherexample. Naoki Matsumoto’s Jar of Kitchomu(2015), exhibited during the first term, wasbased on a short Japanese witty story about(1) See, Takuma Ishikawa, “If We Ask Questions to Others, Our
Knowledge Will Increase” in this issue.

⠼⠁⠚⠃

Unconditional Restoration

a silly man named Kitchomu-san, who seesa jar turned upside down at a store and complains that it’s useless since its mouth is shutand its bottom is open. Matsumoto createdjust that: he opened a “mouth” for the jar,closed its “bottom,” and thereby “fixed” it. In
other words, he turned a jar upside down, cut
the base part now at the top, and used it as thecover for the opening which was now at thebottom. So the whole jar is reversed verticallybut the consequence of that reversal is eradicated—the top is still open and the bottom
still closed. Like the spheric work of Walter deMaria at the contemporary museum of art inNaoshima, there is a puzzling aspect regarding
how it was made because the base part that iscut does not seem to fit into the opening which
is obviously narrower. In any case, the jar canstill be used as a jar—it’s function is restored.
The manipulation here consists in the mutilation and suturation of two vertical partitions:that of the space and that of the object. Rosalind Kraus praised Bruce Nauman’s casting of
the space under a chair (A Cast of the Space Under My Chair (1965-68)) as a method that differs from that of the Formless, which was more
about the dismantling of objects and scatteringof their rubbles. She called Nauman’s approach“implosion.” Matsumoto’s jar can be seen as
extending that lineage, but since he doesn’t
even resort to negative space it is even moreof an “implosion” than Nauman’s casting. It is
not a positive creation of form but neither is it
an absence or the destruction of form. Nevertheless, something was broken and then fixed.
The piece accurately follows the inherent artic-

Naoki Matsumoto, “Jar of Kitchomu” (2015)

Bruce Nauman, “A Cast of the Space Under My Chair”(1965-68)⠼⠁⠚⠉

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

ulation of the object, but by doing so, exposesa hole in that same articulation and makes theobject implode. There is nothing particularthat is added or subtracted, but one can clearly
see that some form of manipulation has been
implemented. It’s kind of like reviving myself
using only my own body parts.
NC Or like skin grafting a part of your buttocks to fix a burnt face. Although in this casenothing was broken in the first place, so the
maneuver of the artist consists in burning yourown skin and fixing it yourself with anotherskin part. However, if the same procedure isseen from the perspective of the object, thiswould be akin to a human experiment by amad scientist.
ST Yeah, like a pervert surgeon going crazywith the body of the jar: “Look how much I
have done to you little jar! And still, you remain the same!” The poor jar would be all
messed up: “You say you have restored me but
nothing is the same anymore!” (laughs)

Unconditional Restoration

tion... hmm, would that be type C?
ST But again, what I wonder is whether we canthink of this seemingly nonsensical manipulation—of fixating the whole and switching only
the mouth and the bottom, instead of simply
turning the jar upside down—as a doing of thejar itself, without bringing in the pervert surgeon. Because it’s not a random chopping upof the object. There is an element of precise
control that is comparable to the effort of taking your underwear off while still wearing yourpants. It’s a transformation that would occur
if the jar was forced to stay in the same placewith the same posture, while it had to switch
its upper and lower parts—though I have noidea what kind of situation that is! You can seethat the transformation was the result of a conflict between a certain constraint and a certain
demand that were mutually contradictory.

NC Well, there’s the recent trend of Object
Oriented Ontology, with books such as Democracy of Objects being published and people
discussing the society of things. So in another
100 years or so, when they finally start admitting basic “human” rights to objects, all these
artistic endeavors will probably be reflectedback as the dark history of object abuse by humans. The narrative of self-restoration of objects may then serve as a discourse of historicalrevisionism. Revision in the name of restora-⠼⠁⠚⠙

Levi Bryant“The Democracy of Objects”
Open Humanities Press, 2013

Yuki Matasumura
On the Blue Bucket Made in 1957 #2 (2015)

Second Discussion
ST In the first term of the exhibition there
was a work by Yuki Matsumura called On theBlue Bucket Made in 1957 #2 (2015), which restored a plastic tank as a plastic bucket. It was awork seemingly devoid of any artistic contrivance but I was taken by that nonchalant natureand kept thinking, “what in the world is this?”
So we started the second discussion with thatpiece. It shared its main attributes with theworks of Miyazaki or Matsumoto: neither addition nor collapse of functions; neither creative nor destructive. But compared to Matsumoto’s jar, for instance, which upon a closed
observation did reveal a sophisticated manipulation, Matsumura’s piece was thoroughly plain
and lacked any idiosyncrasy. The tank andbucket are almost identical in terms of material, form, or topology; their only difference isthe size of the opening hole, and the presenceor absence of a lid. So Matsumura transformed
the plastic tank into a bucket solely by enlarging the opening—she left its handle intact. A
plastic tank and bucket resemble one anotherto begin with, so the maneuver of bringing
them closer is almost imperceptible and nonsensical—a conversion where nothing is really converted. Instead, what results is a redundancy of functions. Not a medium specificity
but a swelling or glut of specificity, so to speak.
But precisely because of this, there is a feelingthat something has been secretly transformed
even though there is actually nothing hidden.
I thought this could be seen as an example of“metamorphic restoration,” the fourth typeof restoration we were talking about. In otherwords, instead of a synthesis of A and B thatare opposed to one another, we have a fusionof A and A’ which are adjacent and substitutable with one another—belonging to thesame category—and this is what produces the⠼⠁⠚⠑No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

subtle uncanny sensation. During the discussion, I showed the painting by Rene Magritte
which depicts a feet transforming into shoes as
a visual reference. Also, searching for anothermodel, I stumbled across a style of language
called “Jyu-Gen [overlapping words],” which issimilar but slightly different from the rhetorical method of redundancy which uses sameor similar words for the purpose of emphasis.
In the case of Jyu-Gen, instead of repeating exactly the same words, a paraphrase of a word isjuxtaposed right after it. For instance, phrases
such as “my headache hurts,” that are usually considered as speech errors. But not all ofthem are errors and we do use expressions like“the current state of this moment.” So there’s
a grey zone between what is considered an error and what is not. Just like the preservation offunction in the work of Miyazaki or others, JyuGens are not entirely senseless. And they seem
to operate according to a different mechanism
than the redundant use of words to emphasize
something. Also, self-reflexivity usually falls
into infinite regression but Jyu-Gen manages tostop. In the discussion, we compared these linguistic examples with Jasper Johns’ Flag paintings—in particular the Three Flags (1958),
where the canvas itself proliferates—which
are often referred to as the exemplary works ofmodernist reflection.
NC One quick observation is that the repetition of words in Jyu-Gen occurs on the levelof letters—Chinese characters—but since
the function of the reiterated words differs interms of syntax, it’s not simply the repetition

Unconditional Restoration

Effect of redundancy and infinite regression

Rene Magritte“The Red Model” (1934)of the “same” thing. It’s probably this structural regulation on the level of syntax, like thedifference between noun and adjective, thatprevents Jyu-Gen from entering into an infinite
regression. But that’s also the same with Jasper
Johns’ paintings. They are regulated by the sizeof a human being which in turn defines the sizeof the canvas, so actually they are not endless.

Jasper Johns
Three Flags (1958)

ST Hmm, you might be right. That seems to
explain the mechanism. By the way, is there asimilar expression in other languages? Howabout English?
NC Well there’s a term “pleonasm” that addresses redundant expressions such as “peo-⠼⠁⠚⠋“Zutsu ga itai,” an example of Jyu-Gen⠼⠁⠚⠛

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

ple’s democracy,” “black darkness,” or “endresult.”ST But the feeling seems to be a bit different
in English, right?
NC Well, the reason why there’s a uniquesensation that Jyu-Gen evokes in Japanese isprobably due to the use of Chinese characters. In English, the doubling of meaning is
not exposed on the surface of the words. For
instance, the “demos” of “democracy” means“people,” so “people’s democracy” is in fact
redundant, but you don’t see that just by looking at the words. With Chinese characters, on
the contrary, what repeats is not only meaning(the signified) but also the letters (the signifiers), so the repetition is exposed on the surfaceof the text. And all the examples of Jyu-Gen you
mentioned actually revolve around the different ways to read the same Chinese characters
in Japanese: onyomi and kunyomi. For instance,“頭痛が痛い (zutsuu ga itai)” [headachehurts] repeats the same character “痛” which
is first used as the second letter of the word “頭痛 (zutsuu)” [headache], read in onyomi, andthen used as the letter of the verb “痛い (itai)”[hurt], this time read in kunyomi. This mechanism of Jyu-Gen becomes apparent when you
compare it with, or translate it into, English. In
any case, the uncanny effect in Jyu-Gen seems
to be generated from syntactical operation,
whereas the model of overlap between adjacent things belonging to the same category ismore about paradigmatic substitution.

ST If it’s really about the structural regulation on the level of syntax maybe Jyu-Gen is
not that different from redundancy in terms offunction, after all… Though the feeling theyevoke still seems different. What interests mein terms of redundancy is, for example, the line
“Votre coeur/en forme de coeur/C’est bien
rare! [Your heart/shaped like a heart/it’s rareindeed!]” from the poem Locutions [Sayings](1923) by Jean Cocteau. “A heart shaped like aheart”—an object described by its own metaphor. Or, the last phrase from the line in Wallace Stevens’ Description Without Place (1945),“Be alive with its own seemings, seeming tobe/Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening,”
which describes a red in present tense regulated by a red in past perfect tense. This phrasingby Stevens is actually similar to Jyu-Gen. Or,
more simply, we can think of the expression“red like red”—instead of, for instance, “redlike fire.” “A red red” would be mere emphasis,
but “red like red” is a metaphor that is used in

Unconditional Restoration

a redundant manner. Another example would
be “a skin-colored skin.”
NC Or if we were to connect it to the issue of
disguise that we would be talking about later inthe third discussion, expressions like, “a spider

like a spider” or “an ant like an ant.” Once you
say “like,” the object is converted into a metaphor—an example or a model—and a gap isgenerated in between the two, a space where
negation—such as “a spider that is not like a
spider”—can be inserted. If one regards the

Genpei Akasegawa“Staircase in Yotsuya (Hyperart: Thomasson),” 1970s⠼⠁⠚⠓

Guy Debord“Psychogeographic Guide of Paris” (1957)⠼⠁⠚⠊

No Collective x Shinichi Takashimamodel and the object as belonging to different levels, this can be explained by the same
principle as Jyu-Gen: the precedence of a certain structural regulation stops infinite regression. Again, if the logical types are different,
they can be structurally differentiated regardless of the sameness on the level of words. But
even if we explained it like this, it doesn’t erase
the repetition on the level of words, and since
what actually creates the feeling is the gap between the repetition of words and the structural differentiation, the uncanny feeling remains. Actually, “Description Without Place”
is itself—both the title as well as the poem—avery good description for “examples that you
don’t know what it is an example of ” that you
mentioned in the first discussion. A metaphor
hanging in mid-air. Except that in phrases like“red like red,” it’s precisely the double, conflicting nature of the relationship between theword and its own metaphor—sameness on
the level of signifier and difference on the levelof the signified—that creates the uncanny feeling.
ST I don’t know if this connects to what
you just said, but to run off with that line ofthought—in utterances that express a contradictory state or feeling, such as “not deadafter dying” or “to die without dying,” oneof the repeated words seems to become themetaphor for the other. And it is this doublingthat seems to lie at the basis of divisions between “death” in material terms and “death” inconceptual-metaphorical terms. Even in statements like “neither alive nor dead,” among thetwo negative forms involved—“not alive” and“not dead”—the former is being understood asa metaphor. That is, “not alive” is considered to
be a state of “not being able to die”—of clinging at the edge of life. “Not alive” is therefore ametaphor for a certain form of life. However,the same statement “neither alive nor dead,”on the contrary, will not be understood as a
metaphor for a certain form of death. Even if
you reverse the order of the statement and say,“neither dead nor alive,” things don’t changemuch—it is still regarded as addressing a certain form of life and not death. Life is persistent in this way. Perhaps this is because the definition of the term “life” is so extensively open,
irrelevant of its limit that is “death.” Death does
not have this expanse.
NC Perhaps that’s because “death” tends tobe regarded as a negativity—lacking a positive
contour—in the first place. In short, death is
the absence of life, but life is not, or not simply,
the absence of death. So the attachment of negation works as double negation for death, immediately pointing to life, whereas the same is
not true for life. But that of course depends on
how one defines the relationship between lifeand death, and there are obviously more than
one way to do that. We’d like to stick to a moreformal argument for now. There is actually a
way to make a metaphor out of “not dead.” For
instance, Slavoj Zizek explains the difference(2) Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the
Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993),
113.

⠼⠁⠁⠚

Unconditional Restoration

between “not dead” and “undead” by mappingthem onto the Kantian distinction between
two forms of negation: negative judgment andinfinite judgment.(2) In the former, one negatesa positive statement (judgement) such as “x isdead” by denying a predicate to the subject—“he is not dead”—but in the latter, one negatesby affirming a non-predicate—“he is undead.”
According to Zizek, the latter form of negation,
the infinite judgment, undermines the distinction between “alive” and “dead,” giving a figure
to something that is neither alive nor dead.
But what is more important here, in relation to
Unconditional Restoration, is that the making
of a non-predicate involved in the move fromnegative to infinite judgment is an act of objectification. It turns the state of being not dead,or being neither dead nor alive, into a particular figure. It turns a process into an object—so
if we were to stick to the linguistic model, it
shifts “being something” to “some being,”a verb to a noun. There is thus a jumping oflogical types here. And it is crucial to note that
this packaging of process into an object is anoperation, or a faculty, of language. Language,
in other words, has the power to transformthe description of states into that of objects.
In that sense, it is interesting to note that theword “infinite” that Kant uses to address thisform of judgment is itself an example of suchlinguistic objectification of process—in thiscase, of the constant state of “not ending.” Andobviously, even before “undead,” “death” itself
can be considered as the objectification of
the state of not being alive. But of course, theimportant thing for the exhibition was not topersist on the delineation between the object
and a state but to pursue the consequences of
their inevitable confluence, or the transformation of one thing to another. It is not the logicaltypes embedded in language but the overlaps
between them—precisely Jyu-Gen, as “overlapping words”—that provide a good working
model for the inherent connection between
time and object that was at the basis of yourexhibition.
ST In terms of the connection between theperformance of language and the topic of restoration, I remember that in the third term of
the exhibition, Takayuki Toshima presented
a text piece that included phrases like “thefinger is sticking out from the hand,” “the⠼⠁⠁⠁Rene Magritte “Le Viol” (1945)

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

Unconditional Restoration

cess of inscription or the attempt at restoring
lost languages, for example. But anyway, speaking of entropy, how does your criticism against
the logic of the Formless connect to what wehave been talking about?

Rene Magritte, “Entr’acte” (1928)

thumb is sticking out from the fingers.” In relation to that, I referred to Rene Magritte’s Le
Viol [Rape] (1945) in which a faceless body
becomes a face, and Entr’acte [Intermission](1928) which shows body parts—limbs—becoming an entire body. In both Toshima’s texts
and Magritte’s paintings, what interested me
was the process of reversal from a state of lack(“having too little”) which calls for restoration,
to that of excess (“having too much”). And
these models seemed to suggest that the excess
of a thing is revealed, not via comparison or recourse to other things, but through an abuse, amaddening, so to speak, of the transformation
processes of its own attributes.

NC At the same time, there is a point where
the analogy between linguistic—grammatical—models and that of objects collapses, forthe simple reason that the former does not
physically deteriorate over time like the latter.
For instance, in the case of Jyu-Gen, the reiteration of a word is not a transformation per se—
the individual words remain unchanged—nor
an entropic process that slowly crumbles whatis written; if anything, redundancy serves tocounter entropy as far as information theory isconcerned. It would be interesting, however, if
there was any way to connect that issue of language you are talking about to the material dimension of words and letters—the actual pro-⠼⠁⠁⠃ST Well, I think it’s nice that Bois and Kraussemphasized that “Formless” is not a concept
but an operation. But because of their focus in
the heterogeneity that distorts the system ofclassification, and despite their efforts to differentiate the Formless from Julia Kristeva’s
notion of “abjection,” they end up quite stereotypically resorting the effect of shock that arises from the juxtaposition of radically different
entities. And even if they say that the argumentof the Formless is something that distresses
dichotomies instead of being reduced to them,
the “horizontality” they emphasize is clearly
opposed to “verticality,” “entropy” to “negentropy,” and “dissolution of the subject” to “themodernist formation of the subject (reflexivity).” Again, instead of going to that extreme,
we were interested in the middle ground, so to
speak, where tools and/or organs coalesce into
arrangement of sorts. Not an absolutely different Other but the potential of objects that canbe “sometimes different.” The basis of Unconditional Restoration was to consider all things
as not being complete, but lacking and therefore restorable. The difference between that
operation and that of the Formless is that we
did not aim to collapse classification systems.
So if the argument of the Formless is like a coupd’etat of matter, Unconditional Restoration ismore like an imitative deception that objects

engage in, by not paying much heed to the factthat they are arbitrarily named and classified
by people.
NC The difference between regarding things
as being complete or always lacking is precisely
the difference between the level of objects created via infinite judgment and the state thatnegative judgment belongs to. And the mechanism of infinite judgment is also operative inthe very term of “Formless”—it is an objectification of the state of there being no definite
form. So the contrast between Unconditional
Restoration and Formless can be articulatedusing the model of language as well.
ST Well, maybe the discussion has become
too centered on words so let us revert back to
the works. Throughout the three terms there
was an on-going renovation project by Kota
Sakagawa, Hiroaki Takiguchi, and Takefumi
Yamagishi called Detaching the Third Floor For
a Ship. This project used the entire exhibition
space, Milkyeast, which is a three-stories-highbuilding. As the title describes, their plan was
to detach the entire third floor from the restof the building and flip it upside down to turnit into a ship. The idea was based on the factthat the building was first built as a two-stories
house and the third floor was added later. So
in their mind, the top floor appeared to besomething that wanted to drift apart on its
own. Now, this project is clearly an attempt toconvert a house into a ship and it doesn’t havethe sense of enigma that Matsumura’s equation of the tank and bucket had. In regards to⠼⠁⠁⠉

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

Unconditional Restoration

the four categories of restoration this would be
the third type: customization. But at the sametime, a house and a ship are similar in the sensethat they are both containers of some sort so it
also has a certain Jyu-Gen character to it. Moving a house is extraordinary but moving a ship
is a matter of course. It also has a dual temporality, since on the one hand it is a return to aprevious state of the house in the past, whileon the other it was conceived as a preparatory
measure for a future time when the area becomes flooded. What they actually managed
to do for the exhibition was to tear down thewalls of the third floor exposing the posts andbeams, and make a horizontal slit between thesecond and third floor. Its appearance evokes
Gordon Matta-Clark’s famous Splitting (1974)
which vertically split a house in two. But eventhough their work is much more unspectacular, they claimed that their horizontal splitting
was much more of a feat compaired to MattaClark’s vertical splitting which heavily depended on the workings of gravity. (laughs) And
contrary to Matta-Clark’s act of destruction,
theirs was focused on restoration so the operation faithfully followed the original articulation of the building.
NC What we found interesting about thatwork in particular from what we read is that
because of its massive scale and impossibility of realization, they also exhibited sketches
and models of their plan to convert the third
floor into a ship. This points towards anotherissue involved in models and examples that
we haven’t discussed yet, which is the matter

Kota Sakagawa, Hiroaki Takiguchi,
and Takefumi Yamagishi“Detaching the Third Floor For a Ship“ (2015)⠼⠁⠁⠙

Gordon Matta-Clark“Splitting” (1974)

of scale. The gap between models and theirinstances are not simply that of logical types
but also, or more so, of scales, even when it’s
1:1. This issue of scale concerning models is
also something that is difficult to see in thelanguage model—though by no means impossible—since the formalities of language
are largely scale-free, retained across various
scales. But it cannot be dismissed when dealing with physical objects.
ST I don’t know if this connects to the issue ofscale but there’s a thing I’ve been thinking thatperhaps might serve as a model of some sort. In
terms of manipulation, there is a difference between “matter” and “material.” For example, inthe entry of “Man” in the “Critical Dictionary”
section of Documents (1929), Bataille quotes
an English chemist who decomposed humans⠼⠁⠁⠑

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

George Bataille“Documents” (1919)

into chemical values and analyzed what kindand how much matter can be extracted fromone body: ”The bodily fat of a normally constituted man would suffice to manufacture sevencakes of toilet-soap. Enough iron is found in
the organism to make a medium-sized nail,and sugar to sweeten a cup of coffee. The phosphorus would provide 2,200 matches. The
magnesium would furnish the light needed totake a photograph.”(3) It obviously evokes themindset of Nazis at the concentration camps
or that pervert surgeon we were talking about.
But this materialistic conversion is a reduction
to “matter” compared to, for instance, the actof decomposing things at a demolition sitewhich seems more to be a reduction to “materials.” They are similar in that both do awaywith whatever label that is attached to a given
individual and flatten their qualities to mere
quantity according to microscopic categories.
But there is also a difference; there are things
that can only be dealt at the level of “materials.” Normally, the reduction to matter seems
more thorough and richer than reduction tomaterials since it reveals potentials that are
not constrained by use. Materials, in comparison, seem to be always regulated by a focus to
specific use. It is always halfway to becoming a
specific object. From this perspective, the useof the top floor of a house as a ship or that an
erect penis as a towel rack is based on the levelof material and not of matter. On this level, unlike the utter heterogeneity of the Formless,there remains a certain graspable articulation.
For instance, Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combine Paintings” have an articulation akin tohermit crabs: the part of the canvas is the crab
and the various tools—wheels, ladders, door
knobs—attached to it are the shell. Well, it also
has other parts that are painted in the style ofabstract expressionism or composed as collage so it might be more similar to the behavior of a hoarder creature who attaches various
bits and pieces of things laying around it to its
own body. It’s not so much that the painting“internalizes” things outside it but more that it“wears” them. A primitive mimicry, if you will.
But by doing so, new options for interactingwith the work are afforded—the wheels allow(3) Dr. Charles Henry May quoted in: George Battaille et al.,Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary &Related Texts (London: Atlas Press, 1995), 56-7.

⠼⠁⠁⠋

Unconditional Restoration

Robert Rauschenberg“Gift for Apollo” (1959)

the painting itself to move or the ladder allows
you to climb and see the work from a different
angle. I think the pseudo-equation between atank and a bucket, or a house and a boat, occurs when such enhancement of accessibility
and manipulatability via analogy works in aself-referential manner, as in Jyu-Gen or redundancy. Instead of there being a room inside ahouse, there is a house inside a house which
distorts the wholeness of the house.
NC So there’s the factor of scale coupled withlogical types again. Actually, the difference
between “matter” and “material” can also be
articulated as an issue of scale. Whereas matter is more or less defined on a specific scalarlevel material is found across different scales

depending on the intent and interest of theobserver. The function of materials you talked
about can be rephrased as their relationship toteleology—which is simply to say that building blocks are defined by what is built. In thatsense, matter and material are not necessarily incompatible. Even Bataille’s account in
the Critical Dictionary you referred to can beread as a mixture of matter and material since
it not only decomposes the human body into
chemical values—“matter”—but also calculates what and how many things you can makewith them—“material.” But this also raises a
problem since materials on different scales canintroduce a multiplicity of teloi and therefore
a multiplicity of objects. In other words, therestoration an object on one scale might conflict with the restoration of an object insideor surrounding that object on another scale.
So when you think about the self-restorationof an object, you don’t really know how many
objects—how many wholenesses—and therefore how many restoration processes you aretalking about.
ST There is also a confusion caused by the factthat the user and the object used are composedof the same matter/materials. For instance, using a soap to wash your body is to some extent
using a soap to wash soap. And you’re right, teleology can be mutually exclusive across scales.
Especially so regarding temporal scales, as I
referred to in my “Notes for the Main Exhibition” using the case of terraforming the Earth.

⠼⠁⠁⠛

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

Third Discussion
NC We thought that the reference to Roger
Caillois in this third discussion was important because it’s here that the problem of the“body” is foregrounded. It seems to us thatwhat served as the basis of Unconditional
Restoration was a biological model of objects.
That is to say, what all the examples point towards is not so much the nature of objects per
se but that of objects conceived as bodies. Selfrestoration, for instance, is a matter of fact if weare talking about bodies: all organisms must
constantly restore their physical self in order
to live.
ST Well I did mention medical treatment inrelation to restoration in the “Notes for the
Pre-Exhibition.” But I didn’t pursue it any
further since I thought the connection was
somewhat too obvious. I had brought up theissue of bodies there to consider the problem
of singularity. Since objects when left to theirown devices simply exist without any care toexternal system of values, they are usually notregarded as being irreplaceable. However, thedesire for restoration is based on the feelingthat there is no replacement for the particu-

lar object in question. So by resorting to themodel of the body, I attempted to bestow thenotion of singularity to objects without referring to external contexts.
NC Regarding the body as an object is a common method in dance or performance art.
Seeing an object as having a body and thinking
about forms of its survival reverses and thus
complements that approach. Moreover, theself-development of systems that do not referto exterior context or observation connects
directly to the problematic of Autopoiesis.
But we also wondered how far the analogy between objects and bodies can actually go. Bodies constantly sustain themselves via self-restoration and transformation. That is the basis of
growth, often theorized as self-organization or
homeostasis. But objects, on the other hand,
are usually exposed to the laws of entropy andinevitably crumble apart in the course of time.
So in order to pursue the analogy between
objects and bodies, these differences between
them must somehow be deconstructed. Hereagain it seems important to think about theconnection between the autopoietic processes

Mulberry Borer Beetle (Xylotrechus chinensis)that mimics bees⠼⠁⠁⠓

Unconditional Restorationof self-restoration and the world outside theobject-body. How a seemingly closed system
relates to other (similarly closed) systems in
the world in order to maintain itself has always been a fundamental problem for theories
of closed systems—all the way from Leibniz’monadology to Autopoiesis. Now you guys
seem to have employed a curious strategy todeal with this conflicting duality of objects endowed with bodies: you started off the first discussion by contemplating the status of objects,
but in this third discussion, instead of reverting all the way back to humans, you move tothe middle ground, so to speak, and investigate
examples that lie somewhere in between objects and humans—non-human, extreme typeof bodies that seem to approximate the natureof objects: insects, machines, aliens, and so on.
Roger Caillois “The Mask of Medusa”
C.N. Potter, 1964

ST In The Mask of Medusa, Caillois classifies mimicry into three categories: disguise,
intimidation, and camouflage. I thought thesethree categories could be used to think about
restoration. The last one, camouflage, is thedissolution of bodies into the environment
and therefore connects to the issue of entropy,
the erasure of individuality, and the Freudian death drive. It’s also the issue that Robert
Smithson was concerned with, you know. As abody type, it is that of chameleons or the aliens
in the movie Predator (1987) who become invisible by perfectly mimicking their surroundings. And of course, it matches the model ofthe Formless: the dissolution of figures into
the ground. Indeed, Rosalind Krauss focuses

Stillshot from “Predetor 2” (1990)⠼⠁⠁⠊

No Collective x Shinichi Takashimaon the topic of camouflage in her entry on “entropy” in the book Formless. But my interest
was in finding a model for objects that was not
entropic and did not base itself on an absolute
ground of time to which all things are reduced.
In order to do this, I thought of dismantling
camouflage using the two other types of mimicry: disguise and intimidation. It is true, however, that among the three types camouflage is theone that feels the most critical. Caillois himself
discusses camouflage in detail, connecting it to
the problem of agoraphobia in schizophrenics.
Let me quote a bit from “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” which was written after
The Mask of Medusa: “I know where I am, but
I do not feel as though I’m at the spot where I
find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space
seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues
them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them.
Then the body separates itself from thought,
the individual breaks the boundary of his skinand occupies the other side of his senses. He
tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space,dark space where things cannot be put. He issimilar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is ‘theconvulsive possession.’ ”(4) But there is something that this model of camouflage misses. Organisms resort to mimicry in order to solve theproblem of how to hide when there is nowhereto hide or nothing to hide them. With camouflage, the surrounding space itself becomes a
giant cover to hide oneself. But the stabilityof this cover is never questioned. It is simply

considered as something that precedes, surrounds, and contains the body. I thought it wasnecessary to criticize this conception of absolute space. So in the discussion, I focused on
the model of disguise, where the body itself istransformed into another kind of body, such as
spiders that mimic ants, or beetles that mimic
bees. It is a form of metamorphosis, though
the body structure remains the same. In otherwords, disguise is a form of mimicry which does
not depend on the precedence of a groundor space. Instead, the body is itself treated as“ground” or regarded as a “space” for hiding.
Therefore, contrary to camouflage which dissolves everything into a singular ground, thepremise for disguise is that there are only figures. By seeing it this way, you can free disguisefrom its association with the Romantic desire
for transformation—the allure of becoming
something other—and grasp it instead as atwisted extension of the camouflage.
NC At the same time, however, Caillois’ description of the schizophrenic camouflage already depicts the “space” as an agent capableof devouring, pursuing, encircling, digesting,and possessing the person—in other words,
as having a body. So the space is given a bodyhere even before disguise turns bodies into
spaces. The process of entropy increase, or
the question of just what serves as “ground,”has to do with the state of things, but the very
language that describes the mechanism of(4) October 31 (1984): 30.

⠼⠁⠃⠚

Unconditional Restoration

camouflage objectifies this state and renders it
a body—following the nature of language, as
we talked about. If you consider this endlessformation of “bodies” on many levels, the distorted continuity between disguise and camouflage you just pointed out can be paraphrased
yet again as an issue of scale. For example, if theentire jungle is a body, or if the entire planet
is a body—like in Solaris—then camouflage isalways already a form of disguise. The application range of the notion of body is, like that ofmaterial or language, not regulated by scale.
It’s only that when the scale of a certain body
is so different from that of the human being (orany other organism that may serve as criteria),
it is regarded as space or environment and theformat of assimilation becomes camouflage
instead of disguise. The body of one can be anenvironment for the other.
ST That process can also be traced in the opposite direction—instead of larger bodies, we
can think of smaller ones. When the body becomes space/environment, organs and limbs
that were parts of the whole turn into bodies. And as depicted in Magritte’s Entr’acte,
when body parts become bodies of their own,
the wholeness that was until then called the“body” disappears.
NC It’s the relativization of a given scale that
had been considered as a standard for establishing the figure-ground opposition in the firstplace. The body turns into environment while
body parts turn into a body. But the question
here then becomes whether this transforma-

Andrei Tarkovsky“Solaris” (1972)

tion is merely an effect of language that objectifies and gives bodies to everything, or whether there is a specific difference between bodies
that appear on different scales. In other words,
is there any halting mechanism for the infinite
relativization of scales, just as the structural
regulation on the level of syntax put an end toinfinite regression in the case of Jyu-Gen?
ST Well, for instance, there is a difference
between the wholeness of the body and thewholeness of the face. The face can be framed
as a whole without resorting to the rest of the
body. This means that there is a difference concerning levels of objectification between theface and the body. For example, this is analo-⠼⠁⠃⠁

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

gous to the difference between the unit of “aroom,” which can be perceived at once, andthat of “the house,” which cannot be grasped
instantaneously and can only be unified asa whole in the imagination. Furthermore, if
these two levels can indeed be differentiated,then we could think of cases where one perceives the body but fails to discern the face.
As Humpty Dumpty tells Alice: “‘Your faceis the same as everybody has—the two eyes,
so—’ (marking their places in the air with thisthumb) ‘nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s
always the same. Now if you had the two eyeson the same side of the nose, for instance — orthe mouth at the top — that would be somehelp.’ ”(5) But the funny thing is that Humpty
Dumpty himself has a body which is also aface. (laughs)(5) Lewis Carrol, Through the
Looking Glass (London: Maximillian, 1871), 50.

Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends

NC So in regards to the physical conditionof perception/observation, there seems to
be a difference between the objectification offace and the body, while the case of Humpty
Dumpty also points to a grey zone where
this distinction is mixed up. Perhaps this differentiation between the face and the body isbased on the fact that most of the perceptive
organs, starting from the eyes, concentrateon the face—as Humpty Dumpty points out.
In other words, perception differentiates between a body part that can itself perceive, andother body parts that cannot. So it’s not simply
a matter of scale but also of a certain logicaltyping inherent in the operation of our perceptual mechanism. For example, there are thingsin the world in which people discover “faces”
quite easily, like a car or a train. They are usually objects that have a pair of circular parts—
like headlights—that resemble the eyes. And
in children’s picture books and animations,faces are given to basically any kind of thing.
But the differentiation between one thing andanother—that the kettle is one thing and the⠼⠁⠃⠃Unconditional Restorationtea cup another—is already in place before faces are, and can be, attached to them. This primordial articulation of the world that individualizes objects by delineating their contours
and assigning a wholeness to each of them istherefore conducted not on the level of faces,
but rather on the level of bodies. It seems to us
that what operates there is a projection of the
body. Of course there is a feedback mechanism
at work, for the act of perceiving an object as“one” thing correlates with, and conditions,the act of perceiving your own body as “one”
thing. The wholeness of the objects serves as
an external model for the wholeness of yourown body, and vice versa. So by giving objects
bodies you give yourself one. And precisely
because of this mechanism, the articulation of
objects on the level of bodies naturally develops into the imaginary projection of the face
and its perceptual organs to the objects whichallows them to perceive you as you perceive
them. So the often discussed sensation of objects staring back at you is really a “caricature,”
so to speak, of the inherent reciprocity between your body and that of the things that are
not you. The Lacanian mirror stage, from thisstandpoint, is simply an easy-to-understand—and certainly easy-on-the-eyes—fable of thismuch broader and general process of reciprocal articulation of the self and the world. A caricature of a caricature, if you will. Even in theabsence of mirrors, objects serve as a mirroring devices. In other words, the differentiation
as well as the mixing up of the two levels of objectification—the body and the face—occurs
throughout the various scales, and perception

Roman mosaic of gargoyles as theatrical masks (2 CE)
Capitoline Museum, Rome [Carole Raddato/Speravir]

constantly wavers between the two levels. By
the way, the body of fishes has always seemed
to me [You Nakai] like all face. And it’s a facethat you can usually only see the profile, fromone side.

⠼⠁⠃⠉

Yellowbelly flounder (Rhombosolea leporina)

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

entire body seems to become something thatwas only a part of it. And this distresses theassumed scale of the body—as if the entire
house suddenly turned into a room. To resort
to a linguistic analogy, this would be akin to
the mechanism of synecdoche. For example,
there are also flowers that create eye-like patterns to attract insects. These flowers do nothave a “front,” so to speak, but because it similarly fissures the difference of scale delineating the body and face, it generates an uncanny

ST That’s funny. It also connects with theworks of Giacometti. The flatness of the headof his sculptures is pretty fishy. The issue of
profiles in painting has been often discussed,
but we are talking about sculpture here whichcannot ignore the frontside of the face either.
NC Then what about flounder or halibut? It
would be interesting to think about the facebody problem by taking the flatfish as a model.
ST If we refer back to Caillois’ threefold division of mimicry, the confluence of face andbody is precisely the problematic of intimidation. Caillois spends much time on examplesof this kind, analyzing the eye-spot on the backof butterflies and moths in connection to medusa’s head or the nature of masks. He writes
that the important thing is not the accuracy ofresemblance to the eye, but the triggering of
sensation and fear that something is watching
you via the big shiny immobile features of two
circular patterns. But more than the aggressiveness of such forms of intimidation, I wasinterested in the fact that there is a face on theback of an organism. Usually a face only covers
the sides and the front of the head but having
another one on the back seems utterly strange.
NC There is that spooky line from the Japanese children’s rhyme Kagome Kagome: “Whois the face on the back?” Of course, this can beinterpreted as addressing the face of a stranger
standing behind you, but it can also be understood as depicting the otherness of the facethat is attached to your back.

Unconditional Restoration

sensation that is not so distinct from the eyespot of insects. On the other hand, a tattooed
face on the back of a yakuza is not so uncanny.
This is probably because the back is still recognized as a body part so the degree of confluence between the whole and part is lessened.
In any case, if we consider the uncanniness of
intimidation as being produced from the mix
up of different scales/logical types, then it canbe connected to the issue of enlargement andshrinking of body scales that connected cam-Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures exhibited during the
31st Venice Biennale (1962)

ST Let’s say that I have a face on my back.
Since it is on my back, I obviously can’t see it.
But is this truism the same as that of not being able to see one’s own face since the organof seeing is embedded there?
NC Well a face, even if it was the one on thefront of the head, is always discovered andrecognized as such via the other—perceptionthat has been externalized and consigned toobjects, including the mirror. So in that sense,
there is no inherent difference between theface on front and that on the back. For us, thestrangeness of intimidation stems not so muchfrom the opposition between the front and theback but more from the confluence of bodyand face that we have been talking about. The⠼⠁⠃⠙

Mycalesis patnia with eye-spots
Frederic Moore, “Lepidoptera Indica, vol.1” (1890)⠼⠁⠃⠑

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

Unconditional Restoration

nism of Klee’s works in which the artist discovers a “face” only at the end of the drawing process. And the images generated by Deep Dreamalso relates to intimidation through the uncanniness of ubiquitous face-beings: the environment turns into a multitude of faces. Of course,
there is also a correspondence with the issue of
restoration on the level of Deep Dream’s generative mechanism since the repetitive input ofpatterns via feedback in neural networks is yet
another example of the transformation of theself through repetition.

Image generated by Google Deep Dreamouflage to disguise. The form of bodies depicted
in Magritte’s Entr’acte would again be an excellent example here. Although, since the face isdifferentiated from other body parts for theconcentration of perceptual organs, the synecdoche of face might have a stronger effect for
distressing the stability of the operative feedback mechanism of the perceptual system.
ST Yes, calling it a “synecdoche” really clarifies things. In fact, in most cases of intimidation, what the pattern invokes is not even theface but just the eyes—or simply the functionof seeing, which evokes a certain presence. But
I also think that there is a certain type of intimidation that comes from beings that do not haveeyes or faces—something you cannot see, but
can only sense its presence.

NC But let’s get back to what you guys talked
about in the discussion. The example of maskspresents the uncanniness of something thatexists only as face and it thus connects to theuncanniness of intimidation. But in the note wefound, it says that you also talked about Paul
Klee’s drawings of angels and William Blake’s
drawing that he made during a seance. How dothese examples connect?
ST Hmmm. I really have no idea. I don’t recalla thing. (laughs)
NC Okay, so it’s un-restorable! But perhaps
they are all examples of “faces” that are discovered only from the outside or only in retrospect. That would at least explain how Caillois’
intimidation led to a discussion of the mecha-⠼⠁⠃⠋

ST Exactly. The image generated by DeepDream is camouflage-like in the dissolutionof figures into ground, intimidation-like in theubiquity of faces on different scales, but also
disguise-like in the mechanism of image generation which feedbacks any output that contains
a familiar pattern into the system itself, ending
up in a certain indiscernibility or mutual immersion of attributes between the model andthe instance—it’s quite similar to “spiders thatare like ants” or “ants that are like spiders.”

was fascinated with were of organisms that disguised themselves as something very similar
to themselves. The resemblance of two items
within a chain of iteration—the original andthe copy, in this case—also brings to mind themodel of Jyu-Gen. One funny case is that of a
spider that disguises itself as an ant. I mean,
what on earth is the benefit here? (laughs) I
can understand why an ant would want to look
like a spider, but why on earth would a spider
want to look like an ant? I was amused by theseeming inexplicability of such examples of
disguise.
NC If we referred back to the schema of theFormless—which is one that Krauss resorts
to in general—on the one side there is a modern subject who is formed and sustained via
the feedback of reflexivity, and on the other,
the process of entropy which dismantles such
subjects and their feedback systems. But here
you are positing the case of spiders who for

NC So Deep Dream provides a nice modelfor the continuity between the three types of
mimicry. But as a model it also makes us realize
something new: namely, that camouflage andintimidation are categories related to the appearance of mimicry, whereas disguise is more
at work on the level of generative principle ormode of operation.
ST In terms of disguise, the examples that I
Myrmarachne (Ant Mimic Jumping Spider)⠼⠁⠃⠛No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

Unconditional Restorationand indeterminate. This nature is supposed tomake us a special kind of organism. Humans
are strong because they are weak. From thatperspective, we can say that the proximity between insects and machines or objects, on theother hand, probably lies in the seeming singularity of their function. In the discussion we addressed this monistic nature as “the narcissismof objects themselves.” I think this appearanceof an autonomous mechanism is what attracts
kids to things like insects, vehicles, and machines. I always thought there was a similarity
between those things and super-heroes: they
are all entities whose function has evolved in
one specific direction in an extreme manner.
They have one special thing that they excel in,while lacking in flexibility and functional diversity. For instance, crab’s craws are an amazing weapon but they will serve the creature nogood in paper-rock-scissors. (laughs)

some unknown reason has transformed into
an ant. In other words, it’s an example of a
feedback system with a glitch, a bug that isbrought in from its exposure to the outside
world. A system which has not completely
collapsed and eaten by entropy but is simply
distorted.
ST Well I wanted to create an anti-entropic
model that was nevertheless not just about
the re-establishment of order. One would
usually think that restoration is on the sideof negative entropy, the reviving of orderthat has been destroyed. But our point wasthat this attempt at resurrecting what has
been lost always introduces some deviation,
producing something nonsensical that cannot be reduced to either the autopoetic regeneration of the self, nor the entropic abandonment thereof. I wanted to get away fromthe simple dichotomy of “disorder/deathversus order/life.”
NC But it must also be stressed that this“nonsense” is only a description of how
matters appear to the external observer. It’s
something that is only be framed as “distortion” or “noise” at a given present pertaining to a specific observer. And yet again, thisframing is precisely the objectification of astate where not everything can be fully incorporated within the present. For instance,
Stephen Jay Gould considered such distortions as the basis of history and called it the“Panda Principle” from the observation hemade about the “false” thumb of the panda

Plato“Republic”
P. Oxy. 3679, manuscript from the 3rd century AD
Stephen Jay Gould,“The Panda’s Thumb”
Penguin, 1980

bear. Pandas would hold bamboo trees when
they eat, but upon close inspection the thumbthat they are using to hold the tree is revealed
to actually be not a thumb but a sixth finger.
This extraneous finger was just a bump on
their hands that developed randomly at first—
a bug in the system, so to speak—but now it
has become an indispensable tool for pandas
to eat. And what are “bugs,” if not insects? In
any case, the point here is that these bugs in
the system are actually the results of the system’s exposure to the outside which generates
uncanny distortions.
ST In terms of the middle ground between
objects and bodies, or seeing objects as bodies,
there is that argument that human beings areneotenous and thus their potential is plastic⠼⠁⠃⠓

Jacques Ranciere“The Philosopher and His Poor”
Duke University Press, 2004 (Original French, 1983)

NC Plato argued that one should focus on asingle profession and complained about mimesis—which is to say, mimicry—in poetryor theatre because it distorted the purity ofthat one work per person model. And Jacques
Ranciere criticized Plato, saying that the variety and multiplicity of things that one could
do is precisely what allows revolutions happen— workers, who are not supposed to do
anything but work, actually stay up late reading and discussing what they have read. In thisregard, task-based performances tend to be
insect/machine-like: performers are made tofollow some simple rules or conditionals andprohibited to exercise the full range of possi-⠼⠁⠃⠊

No Collective x Shinichi Takashimabilities for their behavior. But these works are
effective only because of the gap between that
imposed constraint and the diversity of possible actions outside the work, in so-called daily
life. In this sense, tasks in performance rely on
the fact that they are framed as “performanceart.” If the boundary between life and art isactually nullified, all task-based works would
simply become slave or household labor. At
the same time, however, the lesson of mimicryis that despite such appearance of a singular,
closed system, the connection to the outside
world and other beings was embedded fromthe start. In other words, there was always already an attempt of restoration. The original isalways externalized as a model and beneath theappearance of engaging in a single activity is amultiplicity, the gap between the system andanother system which is objectified as “bugs.”
The important point is that the biologicalbody model is a “model”—it therefore drags
the problem of how that model and the actual
object overlap or oppose one another. The actof restoration is in this way a constant processof negotiation between the model and the object and therefore always mimicry-like.
ST In Unconditional Restoration, there weremany works that dealt with the (re)organization of how things breakdown. These works
were based on maneuvers such as reverting
the process of breaking down into a play-backdevice, or converting one form of breakdown
to another—for example, transforming something that becomes loose when stretched,
to something that shutters apart, or reviving

some broken object through the workings ofthe video camera, and so on. Matsumoto’s jar
piece could also be seen as an attempt to regard something that is not broken as being
broken, and the work Yuichiro Nakayama andMiyazaki made for the Pre-exhibition attempted to unify the process of snapping lumber andthat of creating patterns. These were attempts
to discover some sort of pattern or rule within
the very process of collapse rather than trying
to set up a new order against the workings ofentropy. In other words, they aimed to bringan object that appeares to be complete, backinto the state of process.
NC That’s interesting. You could also say that
it was a re-modeling of the very process of a
specific object’s deviation from its model. So
it connects to the problematics of history andrestoration that we briefly touched upon in thefirst discussion. For example, remember theexample of petrified wood? Within the present
value system, the petrified wood is consideredsomething that failed to turn into coal. But at
the same time, it is also sold as a peculiar fossil so it does have a certain value in the present. This means that “bugs” and “noise” thatseem like intruding alien substances in thepresent system can easily be dealt within thesame system through aestheticization and fetishization. But as a “model,” the same thing
can also be used as a tool to access other times
and places that cannot be contained in thepresent—in other words, it summons history.
Melanie Fisher’s review of Museum of Unheard(of) Things, a book I [You Nakai] co-translated⠼⠁⠉⠚

Unconditional Restorationand published from Already Not Yet, included
a nice exegesis on Stephen Jay Gould’s attitude
towards history.(6) Adaptationism reduces everything to the result of evolution as seen in
the present. But Gould’s argument was thatthe perspective which sees everything that exists now as being functionally optimal actuallyerases history since it disregards the fundamental contingency that led to the formationof what we consider as our present. The essence of history lies in things that could have
happened but didn’t or happened but is notregistered as such in the present. It is because
there is a past that is not yet regarded as a pastthat people survey and write history. In thissense, history is always connected to fiction.

(6) Melanie Fisher, “Review of Museum of Unheard (of)Things,” http://www.compulsivereader.com/2016/07/10/museumofunheardofthings/

But Fisher’s essay did not end there. It also
touched upon the debate between Hayden
White and Carlo Ginzburg, in which the latter
criticized the former’s claim that history can be
reduced to narrative. Ginzburg’s point was thatthe resistance of material evidence and objects
prevents history from being subsumed into
fiction. In other words, the objects that cannot
be encompassed in the narrative/fiction of thepresent is what calls for history. Now this is different from the history of objects, but it is one
way of connecting objects and history.

Charles Le Brun
“A System of Physiognomy” (1671)⠼⠁⠉⠁

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

ST I have always harbored a negative feelingtowards history. It is the feeling towards theexistence of something that is completely indifferent to myself, to which I am nonethelessexposed to and consequently alienated from. I
suppose, however, that I’m interested in a history which detaches itself from the concernof encompassing multiple events in the pastwithin a coherent logic or narrative. Or, perhaps to be more accurate, I should say that I
am interested in the emergence of time, rather
than history—not so much in the relationshipbetween events but in the primordial mechanism that gives birth to the very notion of temporality. I think this is what fundamentally sustains my interest in insects or objects. So what
is required for time to flow? I feel that existentially speaking, I myself am atemporal. Consciousness itself does not have time—in orderfor time, or the sense of time, to arise, an accumulation of feedback processes between me
and the world has to happen. For instance, theneighborhood in Tokyo I live now is the sameneighborhood where I was born so I sometimes stumble across people I know from myelementary school days. But I remain a kid forthem and it’s the same about them for me. Otherwise, what I feel is the gap between now andthen. And those are the moments when I feelthe passing of time. Not that these are rare moments; they have become extremely frequent
happenstances in this age of social media.
NC Well, it’s probably more accurate to saythat consciousness only has a present than thatit lacks time altogether. And again, there is al-ways something that cannot be encompassedin that present. This could be yourself from theelementary school days or a person who sees
you as such. These things that lie beyond thescope of your present—which is what the term
“World” generally refers to—is what conditions history. History, in this sense, is the otherof present/consciousness. To paraphrase froma different angle, this is the issue of how to deal
with the history and context that others frame
you with when they see your works or readyour writings. This problem exists on a different level from how you think about history
and context. And history and context usually
come from the outside—they are what others project onto you. No matter how free andatemporal you think and feel you are, you will
always be historicized and contextualized bythose who cannot be contained in your present. The problem of the “Other” that Derrida
and others have spilled so much ink over reallycomes down to the simple issue of how to deal
with this nuisance that not only is impossible
to control, but also regulates you according to
its interests and biases. Like your friend fromelementary school, a past that you had forgotten suddenly intervenes in your present, distorting and relativizing its closure. They bug
you, in other words. And when it does, thatexterior factor indeed appears to you as a bug,as an object-like creature, and you are in turn
treated as such. For instance, I [Ai Chinen]
stopped living with my parents when I was 15.
So for them, I have been turned into a timelessobject from that age. But while I despise this,that is precisely the attitude we permanently⠼⠁⠉⠃

Unconditional Restoration

hold against objects: we regard them as timeless—which is really to say bodyless—since
their present lies outside ours. The objects areconstantly transforming but we do not perceive that and simply regard them as being atemporal.
ST For example, being disconnected from thesewer pipes and signed “R.Mutt” must be annoying for the porcelain urinal itself. Objects
that have been deprived of their function andreduced to “anything” or “no particular thing”
now fill up art museums as an ideal—whichis to say harmless—interior decoration. Even
if one learned the technique of display from
Minimalism or whatnot and exhibited a variety of readymade objects and fragments ina modular fashion, it might help to make theinstallation appear as art, but does nothing to
disguise the fundamental lack of ideas. Instead,I like the model that You [Nakai] once wrote
in an article on John Cage, of seeing every object in the world as serving as a clock for something else.(7) If the oscillation and vibration ofanother object appears to me as a clock, thenit would be natural to reverse that and thinkof myself as acting as a clock for some otherobject. Everyone hastily criticizes and denies
anthropocentrism, but the desire and abilityof humans to revert the subject-object relationship—to objectify the subject and subjectify the object—seems very important to me.
Anti-anthropocentrism always makes a leap toextreme questions of how the position of humans can be relativized, or how the ineffableand non-representable can be thought (orRene Magritte, “The Titanic Days” (1928)not), but there are many things one can do before reaching those ultimatums. Without delving straight into the essence of things, humans
can methodologically reverse the subject-object relationship. It could even be said that thepeculiarity of humans lies in our capacity to see
humans in non-humans. But this reversal is not
simply a relativization. It is a more critical andrisky act in which the predator suddenly becomes the prey. It’s like when a bird that went
for a small fish gets eaten by a bigger fish at theexact moment it swallowed the small one.

(7) You Nakai, “So to Speak: John Cage and The Problem of Improvisation,” Eureka: Journal of Poetry and Criticism, 44 (2012):
151-158.

⠼⠁⠉⠉

No Collective x Shinichi Takashima

NC In other words, the subject-object reversal involves a shift of scales, just like the body
becoming the environment and body parts becoming the body. At the same time, however,the basic approach in Unconditional Restoration was to take this ability for reversal and see
what happens if it were reversed and endowed
to the side of insects or objects. And as a result,
you found out that this feedback with a reversal—a negative feedback, if you will—always
involved uncanny distortions generated by the
specific nature and history of the particular objects.
ST The reason we got interested in the modelof biology is because we thought that the extraordinary difference of bodily structures andforms must result in utterly different forms of
cognition and thought. For example, somefrogs can pull out their belly inside-out fromtheir mouth to extract an alien substance thatentered their body. It’s an amazing form ofvomiting! The exposure of internal organs to
the exterior world must obviously be dangerous and this seems far from being an optimal
behavior. But for me, it is more interesting tothink of what humans can do when they employ this ability of the frog as a model, rather
than being satisfied with the standard form of,
let’s say, making an airplane by studying how
birds to fly. That’s why I agree with Tatsumi
Hijikata when he claimed that dancers shouldhave eyes that can observe the inconvenience ofa flying dragonfly. This “inconvenience” is always present as long as things and organisms
are endowed with a specific form. And as Tol-stoy famously remarked: “All happy families arealike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.”(8) The image of freedom deprived ofinconveniences tends to converge into a moreor less same monotonous picture, whereas theparticular inconveniences that every organismand object carries within itself are truly diverseand different from one another.

Sometimes being blindis the only way to see

NC That distinction between freedom andinconvenience is analogous to the two formsof objectivity we talked about in the first discussion: the generalized objectivity that transcends the particularities of individual objects
and the specific objectivity that is derived fromthe situatedness of each object. At the sametime, the process of turning an object into amodel does involve a certain loss of its initial
particularity, which is to say, inconvenience.
In that sense, the two kinds of objectivity arealways in a flux, shifting from one to the otherand back again.
ST So we can say that idiosyncrasy lies in theparticular ways of sensing particular inconveniences or unhappiness—I suppose that’s one
observation we failed to pursue throughout
these three discussions, precisely because we
let analogies and models take the lead.

v(8) Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (London: Alma Classics. 2008),
3.

⠼⠁⠉⠙

Painters rely on as much blindness as on vision. As portrayed in a famous woodcut by Albrecht Dürer, the development of perspective was tied to various viewing apparatuses thatparalyzed the painter’s eyes. The era of perspective may be long gone, but after a generationof painters who radicalized the erasure of depth, the methodological impairment of sight inorder to see better remains ever more an issue today. What you don’t see conditions what
you see.
In this era of post-perspectivism, we present MAGIC CIRCLE®, a 360-degrees blinder for
painters. This contraption effectively cancels out all the unnecessary regions of the vision
field, allowing hightened focus and intensified control. Especially fit for murals painted fromafar and drawings that expand above the eye level, this long-kept secret among the geniusesof modern art is available for purchase at last. Order your own MAGIC CIRCLE® today andobserve that there are things you can only see by becoming blind.

P L A Y B A C K

T

H

E

A

Ever since Greek tragedy, the fundamental engine of Western theater, both in

CREON: Then they soon will grant thy plea.

terms of content and form, has been the notion of irreversibility. Drama oc-

OEDIPUS: But I am the gods’ abhorrence.

curs because events happen in a specific order, and once they do, there is no

CREON: Ask this of the gods, not me.

way to efface their effects. Consequences, is the word. Without the initial

OEDIPUS: Send me from the land an exile.

attempt to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy, the specific chain of

CREON: What thy terms for going, say.

events that led to the tragedy of Oedipus would never have been triggered.

OEDIPUS: Well I go, but on conditions.

T

E

R

CREON: Weep not, everything must have its day.
Playback Theatre intends to upset this axiomatic causality in theatre by en-

OEDIPUS: I must obey, though ‘tis grievous.

acting the scripts of classical plays in reverse, line by line. Thus, whereas

CREON: Thou hast had enough of weeping; pass within.

Oedipus Rex begins by showing King Oedipus standing before the people of Thebes and listening to their complaint about the plague, “Xer Supideo” starts

So far we have reverse-enacted Oedipus Rex as “Xer Supideo” and Antigone asfrom the following fantastic dialogue:“Enogitna”. Our plan is to move on to modern plays, starting perhaps with
Ibsen’s A Doll House, which when reversed gives a strangely Scandinavian

OEDIPUS: Rob me not of these my children!

sounding title: “Esuoh Llod A.”

CREON: Come, but let thy children go.
OEDIPUS: Lead me hence, then, I am willing.

⠼⠁⠉⠚-Retaeh T. Zhang⠼⠁⠉⠛

DEATH VALLEYSANDANSCORESBAJA CALIFORNIA(December 2014)+ (October 2016)

BY Una Nancy Owen

+ Some Beach Birds+ A Local Dog+ Sidewinders+ Desert Pocket Mouse

⠼⠁⠉⠓

⠼⠁⠉⠊

Una Nancy Owen

Sandanscores

⠼⠁⠙⠚

⠼⠁⠙⠁

Sandanscores

NOTES ON NOTATION: SANDANSCORESKay Festa

At the heart of the problem of notation lies the issue of degree of abstraction. A score cannot document every single aspect of a given work, so
one must choose what to notate and what to leave out. What is left out will
either be (A) complemented by convention and/or oral instruction, or (B)consigned to the creativity of the performer(s). In any case, what is not notated contributes to the final form of the work as much as what is notated.
In dance as well as in music, the most common focus of notation are thepoints of change, the pivots of movement (bodily or sonic) that define thecontours of what is to be seen and/or heard. To paraphrase using the termsof graphic design, notation tends to be a system of vector paths (whereas
recording tends to be that of pixels).
Una Nancy Owen’s SANDANSCORES play along with this nature of notation by documenting solely the points at which the bodies of movers camein contact with the ground, and the force with which the contact was made(through the depth of each mark). The rest, if these marks are to be used
as notation, is up for the re-enactor to imagine or invent anew. The overall
duration and speed of movement must also be deduced from the marks.
Because of the necessity to interact directly with the materiality of thescore, each reenactment inevitably distorts and alters the previous documentation, consequently increasing the overall complexity of the dance,and leading to the ultimate destruction (erasure) of the score itself.

⠼⠁⠙⠃

⠼⠁⠙⠉

Una Nancy Owen

⠼⠁⠙⠙

8x8

⠼⠁⠙⠋

⠼⠁⠙⠛

by

⠼⠁⠙⠓

Takuma⠼⠁⠙⠊Ishikawa

Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

As It Turns Out
A: Like a haphazard happy-ending, nightmarish reality passes by without any warning. There was noend in sight in the midst of it, and it felt as if it would go on forever. But the world changed abruptly,
just like that. And the chance to start again is given.
B: What is lost will not come back. The fear swells up before the change. But if the change is accepted,
it becomes ordinary (the coldness of the pool water is soon forgotten). And a new task is discoveredfrom the new scenery.
C: A state in which every single thing is being dragged around. It is not that something will happen
immediately; everything proceeds in a tentative manner leaving the possibility for a reversal at any
moment.

Excerpts from Lecture Notes
1: It is always unclear as to where fables come from. And despite things being added, trimmed, orchanged, a fable always demonstrates a complete form; it reveals a density of time. A fable does notmake its readers aware of the writing style, which means that style is not an issue for the process ofliterary compression. There is no transcendental author to whom the fable can be traced back. The
entrance is always already closed, but there is always also a crack and more than one way to sneak in.
2: When the underlying fissure of a community became exposed through a catastrophe, it generated a strong demand for reactivating an image that is shared by everybody. Even if the fissure was caused by structural reasons and not imaginary ones, what was sought as resolution
was always something imaginary. At this point the mixing of problems became a lubricant for all.

D: An unexpected event happens at an unexpected place, and people are swayed by its contingency.
They stray into a parallel world.

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⠼⠁⠑⠁

Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Information (1939)
The Creed of a Poet
—Rest assured, our conversation will never leave this room. You clearly have critical opinions about
the present government in addition to detailed knowledge about the relationship between politics
and art, yet you stopped presenting your works or engaging in any kind of social activity.
Poet: Under the present situation, it has become impossible for me to engage in such activities. Nevertheless, I am making works ever more vigorously, and I am always pressed for time.
—Is that based on an indifference to politics?
Poet: No. I am aiming for a political change by solving artistic problems. I am still an artist with avery high political conscience. Thinking freely or renewing my problems are more important thanpresenting my works. If I managed to solve an artistic problem, the world cannot erase that fact, even
if it was not made public. If one created the cause, the effect will appear in one form or another. It
will inevitably affect the world.

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⠼⠁⠑⠉

Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Hands and Eyes and SpaceEven If You Are Not Impatient, This Is...

Painter: The preceding generation turned painting into something tactile in order to radicalize theerasure of depth and the emphasis of flatness. Consequently, the kind of depth that even the painterhimself could not reach was lost from the space of painting. That is why I came up with the idea of
painting from afar, without touching the canvas.

The issue of “sooner or later” arouses the feeling of wanting to have things happen sooner rather thanlater even if that worked against your own advantage. When the effect of choice is weakened, action
demands speed.

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Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Promises of Children

Obedience

Children make reckless promises. It is impossible for them to accurately sense the length of time inlife. Unable to endure the situation of postponement caused by being irresponsible about time, they
make promises. However, even if children’s promises are reckless, they are not always impossible,
and some are even kept.

So they do not sit because they are tired, but are made to sit because there is a chair, and made tosleep because there is a bed. They are made to go out because there is a door, and are locked out
because there is an entrance. They are made to climb because there are stairs, and made to circulate
because there is a sculpture.

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⠼⠁⠑⠛

Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Illegal Occupants (1919)

Truth and Time
(What felt like) truth becomes stripped away right in front of me—a change in the color of my eyes.

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Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Rehearsing Satire

The Swelling of the World

Hold on to a pillar and do not let go / Bury your mind in concrete / Pull out the bathtub cover andboil water / Hold metal until it melts / Hang the globe upside down / Stand between two tables /Block each other’s noses with each other’s noses / The broom dances and stirs up dust / Chase aburglar into a safe / Catch the raven on your head / Find a key in a key hole / Sitting down on coal

All designs attempted to do away as much as possible with asperity and base themselves in smoothstreamlines. As a result, the shape of many things started to appear swollen. Since the time they started continuously feeding me somebody else’s choice that resembles mine, I began to appear swollen
to my own eyes.

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Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Lecture - The Circular Flow of Vampires and Zombies
A vampire has an evident weakness. The reason they have survived is due to their intellect and technology—they escape all kinds of traps and entrap the humans in return. The basic profile of a vampire is that of an elite class with feudalistic ideas, who are endowed with various special abilities
including immortality. Since vampires have lived sequestered from society, they do not confront
the government or the army but only prey discretely on individuals without turning their activities
into a public threat. The communal and ethnic characteristics of vampire are relativized and cannot
be flatly negated, anthropologically speaking. The viewers appreciate the convenient adoration andpathos towards vampires’ character in the form of fantasy.
On the other hand, zombies do not have the capacity to think and they also lack physical capabilities. The origin of zombies is always depicted in movies and their number increase exponentiallywithin a very short time. As a result, the power of zombies lies, without a doubt, in their number andability to act without reservation. Their threat extends beyond the individual citizens to the entire
nation. And the tendency is for the main characters to take on the role of de facto governors in astate of emergency or after the collapse of the government. The viewers can empathize with the catastrophe of human society caused by zombies but cannot empathize with the zombies themselves.
Therefore, the viewer’s fantasy is projected upon the communality of humans (who are the elite classconstituting society) who have been released from the usual restraint of exercising violence. No matter how violent they themselves become, the resurrection of world order is impossible without theiractions.

⠼⠁⠋⠃

Getting Rid of Humanism“It is always the case that once humans enter the picture it becomes impossible to think in an articulate manner, so let’s start thinking by detaching humans from the problem.” (The creation of distanceweakens the sense of resistance)⠼⠁⠋⠉Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Still Life (Secret Pleasures of Anthrophobia)

On Still Lives
If I say that I don’t believe in chance who might believe me? / It was a malfunction due to a glitch inthe security device / What you must be careful about when grafting is the relation between affinity
and non-affinity of tree types / Similar things tend to gather in similar places / You cannot extracta ripple from a puddle / How can you say you understand when you haven’t seen everything / The
relationship between the denominator and the numerator influences the sense of distance / I always
end up skipping the gaps since it is impossible to always be conscious

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Takuma Ishikawa

Still Life (Devout Activity Protected by Partitions)⠼⠁⠋⠋

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Still Life (Neurotic Attitude Derived from Allergic Reaction)⠼⠁⠋⠛

Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Two Things the Mind’s Voice Always Whispers

Extreme Supply Does Not Necessarily Mean Sufficiency

Voice 1: If you look forward you won’t bump into things
Voice 2: If you look down you won’t trip over things

Not so much that absence is absent, but rather a situation where one doesn’t realize that absence isright in front of you.

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Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Bed-making
Automatism
A dead body is speaking. Not from memory, but whatever comes to mind.

⠼⠁⠛⠚

Some thoughts arose while he was making the bed. How much presence of the person who used thisbed still lingers in this room? For instance, an animal with an acute sense of smell might still be able
to perceive the person. If the police collected finger prints, they would probably find one pertaining
to that person. Furthermore, how much of my own presence would remain in the room after I finish
cleaning and leave? Of course, if I drop a hair or something, there will immediately be a complaint.
The new customer knows that previous customers or cleaners like me have been in the room untilvery recently, but refuses to think about it. If somebody’s presence remains in the room, the customer
will feel uncomfortable and restless. Then, would the room be filled with someone’s presence between the time I finish cleaning and leave, and the time the next customer comes in?

⠼⠁⠛⠁Takuma Ishikawa

If We Ask Questions to Others, Our Knowledge Will Increase

Movies That Require Alertness

Endlessness
There is no one who can endure the utter absence of endings. Affirmation is always transformed into
negation and then into trauma.

⠼⠁⠛⠃

A: The characters in the movie disappear without any reason, as if they were just stepping out for a
moment. A sense of absence pertaining to someone who can reappear at any time.
B: A movie with the feeling that at any moment the story can end and the end-rolls start, without
reaching a satisfying conclusion.

⠼⠁⠛⠉

Takuma Ishikawa

THE SCARIEST MOVIEIN THE WHOLE WORLD

Bonfire (1923)

Among all genres of cinematography it is porn and horror that stand out as
being (or needing to be) thoroughly conceptual. For both of these genres muststruggle with making the audience forget that they are watching a film; they
are the genres that most require the collapse of the fourth wall in order tofunction. Many intricate methods and interesting techniques have been developed in both genres for this purpose.
Imagine a horror movie that starts with a static shot of people sitting ina movie theatre. For the audience, therefore, the screen appears as a mirror
image of themselves. In the movie, there is a killer among the audience whogets up and starts killing the other movie goers one by one. This goes on
for about 30 minutes. Then the screen abruptly blackens out. The rest of themovie happens in total silence and darkness, letting the audience members
desperately wonder about what is happening and when they should suspend theirsuspension of disbelief.
—Earle Lipski

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⠼⠁⠛⠑

A Tree is not Still,
still Not a Tree
Interview with Hilde Walden-Pequod
by Dee Ali
Hilde Walden-Pequod has been making Invisible
Choreographies—expressive movement which becomes so embedded in an environment so as to blend
imperceptibly into it—in collaboration with plants.
Due to this camouflagic nature, Walden-Pequod’s
works remain elusive and difficult to pin down.
Tipped off by a friend who recently stumbled upon
the choreographer in the wilderness, Dee Ali from No
Collective traveled to Arizona to talk with WaldenPequod about her peculiar approach to dance.

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⠼⠁⠛⠛

Hilde Walden-Pequod x Dee Ali

DEE ALI So how did you get to your originalidea for Forest Dances?
HILDE WALDEN-PEQUOD I grew up in aplace called Lummi Island in Washington, andmy father was a fisherman there, both by trade,and for sport. I grew up fly fishing the rivers
with him, and I learned about tricking the fish.
There are so many amazing strategies for fly
fishing, but one of the primary things necessary to the sport is invisible fishing line. And
I always thought that was interesting—fishingline makes a connection between the fish, thefly, and the person, but that connection is notsupposed to be seen by the fish (i.e., the audience). Fishing line connects the gesture of myarm to the movement of the fly—it relocates
my movement into another thing, which because it is different than I am, behaves differently. It’s a bit like puppeteering, I think. But
anyway, when I started doing Forest Dances, it
was because I didn’t have any dancers to workwith. I’m not that friendly, I’m quiet, and I liketrees, quite a lot. In other words, I’m a party
animal. Anyway, I was on a walk through thewoods one day, and it just kind of occurred tome. So I tried it. I found a field with trees on
all sides, I tied the strongest fishing line I could
find to various branches, and strung the lines
back to the center of the field. Then, I basicallytied myself into all the loose ends of the fishing line, stood in the middle of the field, andorchestrated the trees into dancing.
DA When I first saw your Forest Dances, I was
pretty interested in how the fishing line allowed

you to directly conduct the movement of the ‘tree
performers.’ Other choreographers, who workwith human bodies, they seem to only be able
to instruct dancers, rather than physically cause
them to move. Was that on your mind at all in creating the piece?
HW-P Yes, well, I’ve also always been reallyinterested in that problem with dance. In mostcases, choreographers and rehearsal directors work with dancers to help them learn thepiece, through demonstration, videos, verbal
descriptions, cues—all ways of working that
require the dancers to behave themselves, anddo what they’re told. And improvisation, it
seems to exist as a way of pushing back againstthat kind of instruction. Dancers are given
more freedom to interpret when they improvise, or at least, that’s the idea. But trees—theirbodies are so different than our own, they
just respond with movement to the influenceof physical factors: wind, soil conditions, theproximity of other trees. My own body can’t
choreograph them in very interesting ways,
but through the medium of a fishing line, mybody basically expands in scale—it becomesbig enough to move the branches of a bunchof different trees at once. And that creates reciprocal dances—my dance, in relationship tothat of the trees. They move because I move;and because branches are heavy, I move because they move. They pull back.
DA What other ways were you thinking about
the issues of scale?

⠼⠁⠛⠓

A Tree Is Not Still, Still Not a Tree

HW-P Well, scale is one aspect of a bigger
question that I think is actually a lot more important. Typically, when humans have looked
at landscapes and forests, they’ve looked atsuch things as vast expanses. The bigger, thegrander, the better. I’m guilty of the samething—I have looked down from a lot of cliffs
in my life, to see the view. And looking out atthe ‘size of nature,’ I’ve always noticed, at thatscale, I can see choreography. In other words,
the wind makes choreography when a bunchof trees move together. Birds make choreography when a bunch of birds flock together.
Grass makes choreography when it ripples inthe breeze, all those blades, moving together.
Single trees, single animals, they’re not so choreographic because the system of their movement isn’t the most apparent aspect about
them. In groups, across expanses, that’s wherechoreography arises. And I think there’s a lot
to say about how human dance falls in linewith that, at least, historically. The grande courde ballet, the balls, the festival dances. Danceswere historically for groups. So, I think that theissue of scale, in Forest Dances, has to do with
the issue of orchestration. Trees have to move
together in groups to be dancing. But no matter how many of them are moving, there’s justone of me—the sole choreographer, the manipulator.
DA That sounds a little ominous…
HW-P And it should! I think the notion ofthe ‘choreographer’ is precisely what kills themagic of dance! It’s so obvious in the Forest

Dances! A forest moving in unison would bemuch more magical without the visible choreographer in the middle of the field, pulling
strings. The choreographer is a buzz-kill. The
choreographer is the problem. And that’s why
I made Forest Dances, and then moved on. I
wanted to do other things. I went to work instead with cacti.
DA Your works with cacti are much less known.
Why is that?
HW-P Well, because I don’t try to make mypresence known. It’s the funny thing about theart world: It’s no big news if there’s no artist to
pin it to. Or, it’s not even art if there’s no artist
to recognize. My work with cacti is incognito.
You can’t see the dance with the naked eye.
You can just read about it, so I guess it’s a literary project.
DA Can you at least describe what you did?
HW-P Well, cacti don’t move the way thattrees do. They just kind of stand there. That’s
the reason I was drawn to them, especially to
the Saguaro, or the Organ Pipe Cacti of Arizona. So I traveled there. Arizona was anything
but Washington, a totally different landscape,and I had to think about movement in a totallydifferent way in order to work with the Saguaros. They even grow really slow— monumentally slow. That’s why they’re having so many
problems keeping them going in Arizona. I
couldn’t really get the Saguaro to visibly move,so I had to think about choreography in a dif-⠼⠁⠛⠊

Hilde Walden-Pequod x Dee Ali

A Tree Is Not Still, Still Not a Treenothing to show after the initial set-up. It’s likesomebody raised the curtain on them in thatpose and they just froze there.
DA It sounds like you really anthropomorphized
the Saguaro as performers.
HW-P Yeah, I started noticing my anthropomorphism of the Saguaro, which is unavoidable, I think anybody who works with plants
or animals does it. So, I decided the Saguarodeserved a score. A choreographic score. And
that’s where I started—I made them a scorethat they could follow.
DA And they’re following it?

Cacti Score (2012)

ferent way. How could I orchestrate the movement of the Saguaros in a meaningful way, asa dance, when they barely grow perceptibly ina year?
DA So basically the desire to choreograph Saguaros was a big problem for you?
HW-P The thing I like about working withplants, choreographing plants, instead of humans, is that you have to think really differently about movement, what it means, and what it
does, how it’s done. I really like things to move
together, that’s just my preference, I know a lotof choreographers don’t share it. But Saguaros
are both so deeply together, and so profoundly
distinct, even without moving. Because each
one is so different, you notice their togetherness. It seems, for example, that they’re in configurations, spaced apart from each other insuch a bizarrely regular fashion, standing there,
posed. It’s as if they all planned out the designof their space, “you go here, I go here, that guy
goes there,” it’s so organized. And then, they
just stand there, with their arms in the air, in
stillness. They’re very comedic. I mean—in
a way, they’re already really choreographic,
they set their scene, and they pose. There’s just⠼⠁⠓⠚

HW-P Well, it depends again on how you see
it. I chose an acre of Saguaro to work with. It
just seemed like the right amount of space,since an acre is a measurement of human labor in relationship to land. As a measurementof land, it was calculated in the middle ages as
the amount that could be ploughed in a day.
So, that was my first imposition on them—I
made a bunch of Saguaro into my performers
in a human-scale space, a staged-space within
their larger one.
DA So you ignore all the Saguaro not in your“staged area?”
HW-P Yeah, only the ones within my “stagedspace” are my Saguaro. I suppose I have a senseof ownership over them because I mapped
all the Saguaro within that space, I measured

and documented their heights and the widthsof their trunks at each foot from the groundup until they split off into their various arms.
And counted the number of arms. I drew eachof them, rendering them as closely as possible
with my poor drawing skills, noting their distinct characteristics. Then, I chose a ‘front’ anda ‘back’ of the stage space. I chronicled theirposes, as particular events, to conceive of thelarger dance. And then I waited a year. WhenI came back, I have to say, they hadn’t grownmuch. Instead, some of them had holes left behind by animals, things like that. The biggest
changes, they were subjected to; they’re really passive beings. So, the dance thus far—it’ssimply a score, it’s passive too—it involves all
kinds of work simply to document the changes
that happen to an acre of them in a year’s time.
It’s a score responding to a dance, but I havechosen to understand it as a score that conducts a dance. Once you’ve written something
down, you can’t tell if it’s responding to facts, orcreating them. I treat the score as an instructorof the cacti, rather than the other way around.
DA So what’s the big deal about that, I meanit’s like hyper-vigilant forest management with atwist of fiction?
HW-P Well I think sometimes a choreographer can make a dance, but sometimes a choreographer just has to go looking for a dance.
When you go looking for a dance, like I alreadyhave by turning away from human dancers,
you find it wherever you look. In fact, that aspect of dance has always been central to how⠼⠁⠓⠁Hilde Walden-Pequod x Dee Ali

it is understood—dancing is so metaphorical,
people are always writing in books, “the danceof this, the dance of that,” to be poetic. I simply
took that seriously. But there’s something I’mlearning about working with Saguaros, which
are strange trees in that their individuality is
so easy to see because their forms are simple.
At any given moment in time, the differences
between their similar poses is what makes itinteresting to look at them as a forest. Other
trees aren’t so much like that. Even Bob Ross
painted his trees with a certain generalizing
technique: “Once you can do one, you canpaint them all.” Saguaros stand against that. So
they disrupt my thoughts about togetherness
as the best thing about choreography. They are
together, as I said before, but there’s nothing
more interesting about looking at Saguaros
than seeing their various differences. I’m now
trying to give that ‘individuality’ of Saguaros
movement, by tracking it over long periods oftime, by scoring it.

dancers are large plant life. But I think its only
a matter of time before I devise a way to bechoreographed by a tree. And, as I said before,
I already began to touch on the issue with theForest Dances, because the weight of branches
would also pull on me, in response to being
pulled. Their weight moved me around a lot,sometimes I would fall down when a branchwould snap back after I pulled on it. It’s surprisingly forceful.

DA So your current choreography could also justbe considered dance notation?
HW-P Yeah, I guess I’m quite a convoluting
force, because I see the various roles played indance as interchangeable: choreographer canbe dance notator can be dancer.

Animal Border Controlv

All lines have a certain materiality though we tend to forget or dismiss thissimple fact, as if physical borders could be reduced to mathmatical abstraction. But what if a national border is itself an active matter? What if allnational borders were composed of animals? The border would be constantly
moving and migrating according to the season and other reasons. And insteadof border police, the government will send people with bird calls and dog
whistles to control the living border. Border control will become musical.
Animal Border will also contribute to solving environmental issues, sinceborder control must now deal with the state of natural resources that accommodate and invite animals to one place and not the other. If a country
desired territorial expansion (which countries often do) the best strategy
would be to make the environment of its neighboring country as attractive
as possible so that animals would be allured to move in that direction. One

DA Except you’re still not a tree?

could also smuggle a piece of the border into another country.

HW-P Right, I’ve made a problem for myself
in that I can only convolute the roles that aren’t
dancer, because I’ve decided for now that my⠼⠁⠓⠃— Ai Chinen⠼⠁⠓⠉

GroupExhibition

FAR

FROM

by

Satoshi

Hashimoto

In June 2012, Satoshi Hashimoto participatedin the group exhibition FAR FROM, presented
simultaneously in Liverpool and Hong Kong
with a complementary structure and accompanying rules. Shortly after his return to Tokyo,
Hashimoto organized an event at the art school
blanClass entitled YOU BURY XXX (TENTATIVELY), where he talked about his experienceat the parallel exhibition and sold works he exhibited. Assembled here are stillshots from YOU
BURY XXX. (TENTATIVELY) and two reviewsof Hashimoto’s works by two curators.

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⠼⠁⠓⠑

Satoshi Hashimoto

Far From

General rules of FAR FROM
- The curators are all based in Hong Kong and have never visited the UK in thepast. During the exhibition, they stay in the UK.
- The participants are artists who have visited neither the UK nor Hong Kong in thepast. During the exhibition they stay in Hong Kong, but never visit the UK.
- The curators and participants never meet in person or talk over the phone. They
only communicate via email.

A - Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Liverpool- The participants may never visit the UK for the preparation, set-up, or installation of the exhibition. They are also not allowed to enter the UK until the end of theexhibition.
- Under this condition, the artists plan a work that specifically deals with Liverpool, give instructions to the curators and have them realize the exhibition. Everything besides the instruction must be arranged by the curators in the UK. Mailingthings is not allowed.

B - Exhibition taking place all over Hong Kong
- The participants visit Hong Kong individually during the exhibition period, conduct research by themselves, and realize a project that relates to the city. Since all
the curators will be setting up the exhibition in Liverpool, none of them can be inHong Kong.
- Each participant must write an article on what he or she did, and publish it in thelocal newspaper. The readers of this article may access what is announced or visit
the site where the participant has done something. This whole process is regarded
as an exhibition.
- The collection of newspaper articles, including reviews and reactions, is regarded
as the exhibition catalogue.

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Satoshi Hashimoto

Art by Telephone /Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone
During the brief period of the exhibition, Hashimoto realized many works in both Liverpool andHong Kong. I would like to discuss two of them that involved telephones.
Art by Telephone (Liverpool):
A telephone is installed in the exhibition place, along with the caption that “when the artist calls thisphone you may pick it up.” Until one of the visitors asked me, “didn’t Yoko Ono do this already?” I
was not aware of the other Japanese artist’s piece using a telephone. Walter Weiss, the curator for
Hashimoto, told me to just wait and see what happens. But even after a week no one had witnessed
the phone ring. I e-mailed Hashimoto and told him, “you should really call sometimes.” However,
he replied “I always do, every afternoon.” This
made me realize what was happening: there
is a nine-hour time difference between Liverpool and Japan (eight-hours with HongKong), and the phone was ringing every
night after everybody had gone home.
My first thought was that Hashimoto wanted
to mess with the rule of the exhibition, nameArt by Telephone, 2012
ly that “the artists never visit the UK, andnever contacts the curators except by email.”But I noted that as long as nobody stays inside the exhibition space over night to pick up the phone,
the rule still applied. By adhering to the same format of work as the one created by the most famous
widow in Liverpool, Hashimoto’s piece also responded in a complex manner to the assigned task of“dealing with Liverpool.” Furthermore, his project in Hong Kong also consisted in calling unknown
people!

Far From

Familiar Numbers, Unknown Telephone (Hong Kong):
After arriving to Hong Kong, Hashimoto found a bus stop served by four bus routes, 91, 91M, 92,
and 96R, and thought this combination of numbers is very similar to a mobile telephone number.
When he dialed those numbers, someone picked up, and Hashimoto told him he saw his telephone
number on the bust stop. He couldn’t believe it. He asked, “Is it part of an advertisement?” Hashimoto said, “No, it’s like a silkscreen print on the bus stop.” Although Hashimoto’s English is not
so good, they continued this kind of silly dialogue
for several minutes and he recorded everything.
Afterwards, he published the transcript of theconversation in a local newspaper. Hashimoto
learned that some people actually tried dialing thenumber themselves, so he called the man back toapologize.
The calls to the telephone installed in Liverpool,
destined to be picked up by no one, comes full circle with Familiar Numbers in Hong Kong. HashiFamilar Numbers, Unknown Telephone, 2012
moto says he got on and off buses aimlessly. The
aimlessness of his trajectory resulted in converting common numbers into telephone numbers. The
bus network led him to the owner of that number: the sole person Hashimoto “encountered” during his stay in Hong Kong—he met neither the curators nor other participants, nor even spectators.
Moreover, Hashimoto did not meet the readers of his article, but caused the owner of the number toencounter several strangers.
Now, perhaps the term Unknown Telephone refers not only to that guy’s telephone, but also to thefact that we know nothing about Hashimoto’s phone (or the number of the Liverpool phone). His
actions enticed the desire of the readers of his newspaper article to confirm whether such a thing really occurred, leading them to call the same number. But I can’t help but think that Hashimoto had
assumed the good nature of the man he called and intentionally prompted his readers to make thecall. Or could it be that he had already obtained permission from the man in advance? Now I’m feeling the urge to make a phone call.

But is he really calling every day? Since he knows that there will be no one in the space, he doesn’t
have to actually make the call. Perhaps I should sleep-in at the museum to confirm this.

⠼⠁⠓⠓Maria Sheung Chuen, June 2012⠼⠁⠓⠊

Satoshi Hashimoto

Sun, Moon and Stars
In Sun, Moon and Stars, Hashimoto collected various advertisements on magazines in the UK anddisplayed reproductions of them at the exhibition space in Liverpool.
When you go to a kiosk there are all sorts of magazines, and inside them are all kinds of advertisements. The newsstand is essentially an encyclopedia of the present: mobile phones, coffee, food,fly-fishing, weapons, vases, birds, cats…you name it, they have it. Something like 90 percent of magazine income or more comes from ad revenue, not from sales at the kiosk. It is not uncommon to fillup more than half of a magazine with ads. In other words, their primary customer is not the readers
but the advertisers, and what they really sell is not the ad but the readers—a strange reversal. So what
if one extracts only ads from these magazines?
Usually the readers of a magazine do not pay much attention to the ads, focusing instead on the articles. This is comparable to the fact that in their daily lives people spend most of their time focusing
on what is happening on the groundand not the sky. Perhaps this was what
led Hashimoto to choose a title that
implied a reversal of perspectives:
Sun, Moon and Stars.
Now, Hashimoto created two works
involving telephones in Hong Kong
Sun, Moon and Stars, 2012and Liverpool. I had initially thought
this third work had nothing to do with
telephone. But upon close observation I noticed a curious connection: all ads contain a telephone
number (or some kind of address)! In contrast, there are no other works in the museum—paintings,
drawings, photographs—with telephone numbers written on them. I had been thinking about thedifference between ads and artworks on the level of their images, but it turns out that the majordifference between them is the presence or absence of telephone numbers (and/or addresses). An
ad is like a business card that allows its readers to make contact. All of them contain a name (of the
product and/or the company). Suddenly the ads changed from being a mass of images to a mass ofbusiness cards (the uniformity of size is also effective to this perceptual transition).

⠼⠁⠊⠚

Far From

Seen from this perspective, I could not help but think that the telephone installed in the next room
as Art by Telephone is actually not waiting for a call, but for audience members to call the massive
number of addresses that lay before them. No matter how long you wait, the call from the artist never
happens (he actually calls in the middle of the night when there is nobody to pick the phone up), but
you can instead call the number on the ads! Upon thisrealization, I decided to call a number I saw. “Yes, this isx” “I’m calling because I found your number.” “What?”“What kind of thing do you do?” “We make and sellthings like x. May I ask where you found our number?”“At a museum.” “A museum?” The other people and theguards were looking at me suspiciously.
And now, I am filled with both anxiety and expectationthat maybe someone who reads this review will make acall from that telephone in the museum, just like Hashimoto’s article that he published in a Hong Kong newspaper about a telephone number of a stranger prompted
its readers to start calling the same number.
In any case, I am struck by how these three very simple
works by Hashimoto actually form a complex relationSun, Moon and Stars, 2012
ship with one another. Maybe this connection is expressed by the three words in the title Sun, Moon andStars. “Sun”: a single telephone number discovered at a bus stop in Hong Kong; “Moon”: the numberof the telephone installed at the Liverpool museum; “Stars”: the numbers on the various shiny ads
exhibited at the same museum. When the sun is out, the stars are not; when one is in Hong Kong,one cannot be in Liverpool. The time difference between the two locations flips night and day, andthe telephone call made in the Hong Kong afternoon ringing in the Liverpool midnight seems tosymbolize moonlight as a reflection of sunlight.
Satoshi, you told me I should “remain dubious,” but—have I solved the puzzle? Or am I completely
off the track?
Park Fischli, June 2012

⠼⠁⠊⠁

9÷3

⠼⠁⠊⠃

⠼⠁⠊⠉

The Rhetorics of Detective M.

The Rhetorics of Detective M.
by Rice Pekinpah (14 Years Old)

Quentin Meillassoux
The Number and the Siren:
A Decipherment ofMallarme’s Coup De Dés
Translated by Robin Mackay
Sequence/Urbanomic, 2012M

y mom gave me a book called“The Number and the Siren,”written by a French philosopher
named Quentin Meillassoux for my eleventhbirthday present. She thought it might be interesting since the publisher described his work
as “a detective story à la Edgar Allan Poe,” andI love detective stories. I thought the book was
exciting and I liked it very much. But when I
finished reading it, I was left with a lot of questions. When I talked with my mom about themshe told me it was very important that I write
my thoughts down. So that is what I am goingto do here.

⠼⠁⠊⠙

In this book, the author tries to decipher afamous poem that a French poet called Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in 1897. The title ofthe poem is ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira
le Hasard,’ which means ‘A Throw of Dice Will
Never Abolish Chance’ in English. It is a very
strange poem with words and sentences placedin different parts of the page instead of beingaligned neatly like other poetries I know of. I
had never seen anything like this but I thought
it looked quite pretty. Mallarmé’s work is very
famous, but it was also known to be a mysteryfor a long time because nobody really understood what he wanted to do by writing likethat. Meillassoux says that he is the first person who has succeeded in solving the secret ofthe poem, and that is what he writes about inthis book.
From what I understood, I think Meillassoux’s detective work tried to solve two mysteries at once. One was the question of “whatdid Mallarmé try to do in his poem?” and theother was the question of “why was Meillassoux able to decipher the secret of what Mallarmé tried to do in his poem?” Meillassoux
says that both of these questions have the sameanswer, which is the ‘absolutization of chance.’‘Chance’ is a word that describes the possibility of how things could have been, and canbe, completely different from what it is now.
‘Absolutization’ means that that possibility of
being different is true for everything, and that
this is the only thing that is true for everything(my mom told me this problem of ‘absolutechance’ was something that Meillassoux also
wrote about in his previous book called After

Finitude). So Meillassoux says that both mysteries have the same answer, but because they
have the same answer, he also thinks that they
are actually the same question. According to
Meillassoux, the answer to the second question of why he was able to decipher Mallarmé’s
secret is that it was by sheer chance. But thisanswer was already written inside the first mystery of what Mallarmé did in his poem, since
this poem is all about chance.
Meillassoux’s detective work is very exciting to read. His big discovery is that he finds
the number ‘707’ working like a secret key in
Mallarmé’s poem. He counts all the words inthe poem and there are 707 of them. He alsosays that the placement of letters and the order of the poem are also decided by using thenumber 707. That is why number 707 is very
meaningful. But because Meillassoux wants tosay that chance is also important in Mallarmé’s
poem, he adds two other things to his answer.
First, he says that if he counted slightly differently the number would have been other numbers close to 707, like 705 or 706. Second, hesays that in that case, the numbers would havebeen completely meaningless. According tohim, this is how Mallarmé put chance, whichis the possibility for things to have been completely different, into the core of his poem.
But here is where some questions came up
to me: If ‘absolute chance’ is really the secret
key here, wouldn’t that be a big problem for
Meillassoux’s own detective work? I think that
if everything could really have been different,
the secret number could have been any otherone, and be as meaningful as 707. The same⠼⠁⠊⠑

Rice Pekinpah

thing can be said about Meillassoux’s discovery of Mallarmé’s secret. If everything could
have been completely different, the possibility would have not only been that Meillassoux
might have never discovered Mallarmé’s secret. A stronger ‘chance’ would be the possibility that Meillassoux might have discovered
any another work, and found a secret that was
as meaningful as Mallarmé’s.
Now this is a bit funny because for me thetitle of Mallarmé’s poem already explains thisstronger ‘chance,’ especially when it is abbreviated to ‘Un Coup de Dés’ or ‘A Throw of Dice,’
like Meillassoux does many times in his book:“‘A Throw of the Dice’ (written by Mallarmé,and decoded by Meillassoux) will Never Abolish Chance.” I agree with Mallarmé, if this wasindeed what he wanted to say. This is because
I believe that the “wager system” Meillassoux
says the poet put into his poem, the system ofbetting on the possibility that the secret of an
artwork might be decoded long after the author dies, is not at all unique to “A Throw of
the Dice.” I think that is true for all artworks.
So if things can be totally different, not only
the secret code of Mallarmé’s work might nothave been ‘707,’ but Meillassoux’s book might
not have been on Mallarmé’s secret to begin
with. Not thinking about this possibility is
to use “absolutization by chance,” rather than“absolute chance.” That is also why I think theanswers to the two mysteries do not fit wellwith each other. Meillassoux can’t really saythat Mallarmé’s secret and his discovery of
the secret are both about absolute chance. If
Mallarmé’s chance is absolute, Meillassoux’s

discovery is not, and if the chance in Meillassoux’s discovery is absolute, then Mallarmé’s
secret is not. It’s one or the other.
But Meillassoux doesn’t explain why heplaces an odd limitation to how much he absolutizes ‘chance.’ He does say that the strange
logic of what he calls ‘retro-action’ might explain things: that the result of his discovery
itself explains the arbitrariness of Mallarmé’s
work backwards front. But for me this sounds
like a boring science fiction, and it feels like
he is cheating. I think the reason Meillassoux
does not write about this is more simple thanthat. It is because he does not write at all about
how he writes. The only reason Meillassoux
never thinks about other numbers being as
meaningful as ‘707’ is because he believes that‘707’ can be discovered in Mallarmé’s workby pure detective work. But what is a pure detective work? From what I understand, puredetective work is a very difficult thing to do
because it involves two claims that do not gowell with each other (just like Meillassoux!).
One, you have to say that whatever the detective finds was always there waiting to be found.
The secret can be cracked by doing very very
simple things that anyone can do, like counting words, or paying attention to one part ofa painting, or something like that. But at thesame time, you have to also say that the detective had to explain the secret, so that people
can actually see what they had not been able
to see. I have read many detective novels but
none explains this second claim in a clear way.
It is often just hidden to make only the firstclaim seem more important.

⠼⠁⠊⠋

The Rhetorics of Detective M.

I think that the problem of the second
claim has to do with ‘rhetoric’ that I learned inschool the other day. Rhetoric is the way words
are used to describe and convince the readerof what is written. If the work of rhetoric is
usually hidden in detective novels, I think it
is because they make full use of it. Rhetoric islike the secret engine of detective novels andthat is why they can’t talk about it. Anothervery interesting book that I read called “TheCryptographic Imagination: Secret Writingfrom Edgar Poe to the Internet,” written by
Shawn James Rosenheim, explained how Edgar Allan Poe, my favorite author who invented
detective novels, had a hard time dealing withthe ‘transparency’ of language. According to
Rosenheim, Poe had to use language to makehis detective ‘read’ physical clues on crime
scenes as signs, and then convince the others
about the ‘truth’ of the crime, but he also had
to make this language invisible. So detective
novels have been deeply connected to rhetoricfrom the beginning, but also disturbed by it.
Going back to Meillassoux, I think when
the reader starts thinking about rhetoric of
his writing, it becomes difficult to ignore thepossibility that there can be other rhetorics
connected to other secrets being told in aconvincing way. The absolutization of chance
makes other rhetorics as meaningful as theone Meillassoux chooses to absolutize. I think
the strange distinction Meillassoux makes
between the “real-” and “fictive (ideal)-” Mallarmé comes from him not really considering
his own rhetoric. Because when you think
about rhetoric the difference between real andShawn James Rosenheim“The Cryptographic Imagination”
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

fictive becomes blurry: any writing is fictive.
What interests me is that from what I learned
in my literature class, it was the French poetsof nineteenth century, including Mallarmé,
who did many interesting things with this possibility. For example, Charles Baudelaire wasa poet who influenced Mallarmé, and also theperson who translated Poe into French. WhenI read his essay called “The Painter of Modern
Life” written in 1863, it seemed to me thatwhat Baudelaire wanted to do was to make thepainter Constantin Guys and his works exist
through his writings. I thought this was a very
interesting experiment, especially because I
haven’t seen any of Guys’ paintings in real life.
So the distinction between real and fictive ismuch more complicated here than in the simple one made by Meillassoux.

⠼⠁⠊⠛

Rice Pekinpah

I think that even though Meillassoux talks
about the performance of Mallarmé’s writing,he never really thinks about the performanceof his own writing. That leaves him in a weakplace, because when you see what Meillassoux
is doing as a performance, you could say that
it is only another French philosopher talking about another French poet as the greatest
thing that happened in the nineteenth century
culture. Oh, the French! But I think the mostimportant thing about Mallarmé’s work, andwhat I learned from Meillassoux’s decoding ofMallarmé’s work, was that it didn’t really matter if Mallarmé was French or not. The “wager system” of Mallarmé, his act of throwing
himself into the ocean of posteriority, cannot
be fixed inside one country or culture. Hell, it
could have been some alien that wrote, found,and decoded his poem.
What I am trying to say is that Meillassoux’s detective work is very thorough, but it
has a hole precisely because it is thorough. The
answer to the mystery that he finds can be put
like this: 1) there is a definite answer that I discovered, and 2) there is no definite answer. But
from what I understood, the absolute result of
absolute chance is neither in absolute determinacy (of 707 or Meillassoux’s discovery of
Mallarmé’s secret), nor absolute indeterminacy (of the complete meaningless of 706 or
705, or the possibility of Meillassoux not discovering Mallarmé’s secret). The answer is not
split between an absolutely meaningful answer
and an absolutely meaningless one. Instead,the answer is that there are, and can be, several
meaningful answers and several determinacies.

Charles Baudelaire“The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays”
Phaidon, 1995

Maybe 7 is much more meaningful then 707,
or maybe the magic number is 700007, andmaybe Meillassoux or any other person canfind likely meaningful secrets in other artist’s
work in other times and other countries. And
if this is the true answer, then it opens up a
new question: how to choose one determinacy
over the other, and how to convey that choicein a convincing way to the readers. In this way
we are back into the world of rhetoric, which isalso a return to the world of “detective stories
à la Edgar Allan Poe.” So maybe it’s all good, inthe end.

⠼⠁⠊⠓v

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HOW TO DO THINGS

WITH

WORDS

Discussions about “audience participation” are usually boring since they

These observations point towards a form of audience participation that exam-

only focus on the level where participation is an acknowledged and inten-

ines and exploits involuntary/unconscious forms of engagement that is always

tional act. The particular outcomes of what an audience intends to do, andalready at work in a performance setting.

actually does, inside a performance, tend to be inconsequential, as these
are already buffered by so many preceding layers. Participation thus becomes“How To Do Things With Words” is a performance for selected audience members

a superficial event, entertaining perhaps, but not critical to the work inin a private location by two performers who are preferably in a romantic/

any sense. And many people are more than willing to paticipate on this level.

sexual relationship. One of the performers is entirely naked. The other performer starts telling the naked partner about his/her sexual fantasies with

But an audience is always already participating, forming a crucial part ofan audience member. S/he can spend any length of time on a given person, but

the performance, through the mere act of being there—why else would it bemust look directly into the eyes of the person s/he is fantasizing about.

customary for performances to wait until at least one audience has arrived?

The performance ends when all the audience members have been fantasized. The

This is the primordial level of (un)intentional action: people intend to

naked performer may physically react or not.

come, and they do so. And once they have arrived, they and their bodies cannot help but to influence and be influenced by their surroundings, each in a

—Kay Festa + You Nakai

distinct manner (through appearance, mood, scent, desires, etc).

⠼⠃⠚⠚

⠼⠃⠚⠁

BY NO COLLECTIVE
⠼⠃⠚⠃

⠼⠃⠚⠉

No Collective
No Text(ing) In Theaters Please!

1. Theater frames an event in order to detach a time-space from the given pre-established time-space that surrounds the spectator. It thereby attempts to create that utopic
freedom pertaining to ‘fictions’ in general, of being uninvolved (or involved differently)
in an already conglomerated situation, often addressed in comparison as ‘reality.’

2. This aim of theater can, and fundamentally speaking must, be pursued without ad-

7. The localized ignorances on stage, however, are overviewed by spectators who thus

play, unknowingly, the role of gods. But their divine perspective is supported
by two metamedia that enwrap the divergence of local realities: the stage and the text. The
imagined
unity of theater-as-building-type and that of theater-as-literary-form provides
an objective
correlative (spatial as well as temporal—since buildings have walls andtexts always
reach an end) to a unified ‘reality’ to which the spectator/reader can safely
return.

hering to the physical conditions of a given space. Therefore, against the conglomerateof theater-as-genre and theater-as-building-type (whose ‘reality’ is inscribed in themetonymic sharing of a common name), the problematics of genre can and should be
detached from that of building-type.

like each dramatis persona on stage, is always localized and partially ignoran

3. In the same way, theater can and should be detached from naive conceptions of ‘to-9. Theatrical realism lies in the ‘fictional’ framing of the dismantlement of a given con-morrow,’ if what is addressed by that term is merely an extension of the given realities
of a conglomerated ‘today.’ Theater resists the present in the present.

4. For instance: the prevalence of cell phones that every theater-goer today brings into
the venue suggests an alternative to the primacy of architecture. By connecting its user
to another space and time, cell phones disrupt and relativize the framing ability of theatre. In other words, this portable media smuggles another theater, cellular and mobile,
into the physical-psychological unity of conventional theater, relativizing the latter’s
singular reality. That is why they must be ostracized at all costs: “PLEASE SILENCE
YOUR CELL PHONES ONCE IN THE THEATER.”

5. To generalize: any physical-psychological unity of a given space-time (i.e. ‘reality’) isconstructed theatrically and is precisely therefore vulnerable to the intrusion of othertheaters.

8. The very conception of ‘spectators in general’ is fictional. For each audience member,t.

glomerated ‘reality.’ So what is necessary is to dismantle the very split between
the unityof spectators and the partiality of dramatis personae. For what is fictional isthe division
between fiction and reality and what is real is the possibility of rearranging
this division.
We thus fight one theater with another.

10. Consider the theatrical realities of an exhibition which attempts to frame various

localized objects and information into a conglomerate space-time unity.

11. The act of reading serves to detach the reader from a given space-time, as well as

to conglomerate physically disparate spaces and times. Long before cell phones,
books hadalready enabled a cellular and mobile theater. That is why theater must be
darkened;since if enough light is provided, any spectator may be absorbed into theframe of thetext and be detached from his or her theatrical surroundings—as you havebeen doing
for some time now.

v

6. Detachment from a seemingly conglomerated unity/reality has precisely been thesubject matter of theater since antiquity. Drama is always triggered and conditioned by
the localized nature of each character (partial knowledge and mutual ignorance) thatcannot be unified into a common reality. It is as if oedipus was on the phone all the time.

⠼⠃⠚⠙(Originally displayed at the exhibition “Theatres en Utopie: un parcours d’archi
tecturesvissionnaries [Theatres in Utopia: A Journey of Visionary Architecture]” in Nantes,
France,from June 22, 2013 to March 30, 2014)⠼⠃⠚⠑

Dramatis Personae
Art User Conference is an organization formed in
2014. Instead of participating in the grand narrativeof Art, AUC “uses” art in order to decompose reified artworks, dismantle the myth of creation into
the temporality of ready-mades, and debilitate theillusion of publicness. The ultimate aim for this“use” is to exhaust Art—to economize it and leadit to its death.
Aevi is a runner, counter, and a jumper born on December 15, 2010. He likes vehicles and going up in
the air. He can ride a bike with two wheels. He cansee better than anybodyelse (except for babies) because he is so little. Aevi has lived in Tokyo, Osaka,
Kashiba, Bali, Lisbon, and New York. Now he lives
in San Diego. He is the author of “Are We HereYet?” (Already Not Yet, 2016), and other books.
Dee Ali (No Collective) is a choreographer/dancetheorist currently based in Berlin who works primarily on dance films and social choreography. As
No Collective, she focuses on choreographies thatare woven into the fabric of situations until they
become imperceptible, or disappear into the expressivity of other art forms. These “infra-choreographies,” given the right compositional conditions,
can then be dragged back to the surface of a work.
Dee’s approach in No Collective is described in:
Ellen C. Covito, “The End of Choreography as We
Know It” (PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art,
MIT Press, 2016)
Jay Barnacle (No Collective) is a weekday soundengineer and weekend botanist based in Margate,
UK. Aside from his work with No Collective, hedoes research on plants and pollinators and othercuriosities and writes about his findings.
Ai Chinen (No Collective) is a native of Okinawa Island, singer, and a translator. Aside from her
work with No Collective, she organizes the acapellagroup “Unplugged Synths,” which covers masterpieces of experimental electronic music simulatedwith voice.
Ellen C. Covito is a composer/choreographer
known for her Composed Improvisation/ImprovisedComposition series. Her works have been performed
all over the world, including New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and London. She is also known as a theorist ofMusic and Dance. Her recent writings include “TheEnd of Choreography As We Know It” (PAJ: A
Journal of Performance and Art, MIT Press, 2016).
A compendium of her works has been publishedby No Collective as: Ellen C. Covito: Works After
Weather (Already Not Yet, 2014). http://ellenccovito.com
Lindsey Drury is an artist and academic, who creates systems in which bodies and their function
are conceived, deceived, received and perceived
anew. As an academic, she delves into the studyof historical conditions and processes concerning
ideas of body and its attributes, while in her dances,
she composes an assemblage of elements whichbecomes triggered by the inclusion of human performers to unfold in an unforeseeable manner.
Kay Festa (No Collective) is a theoretical dramaturg, independent scholar, and ambitious poet,
whose recent published writings include “A Closing Remark: On Several Technologies Inside theConcertos Series” (Leonardo Music Journal, MIT
Press, 2014), and “More Than Meets the Ears: An
Account of the Shared (Ac)counts of Cage andStravinsky” (TDR, MIT Press, 2015).
Melanie Fisher is a novelist and creator of “Fictional Speculation.” Her writing and speculative skills
were honed by her father, Camden, an obscure performance artist who spent his life fighting against“the tyranny of age specificity.” Melanie is cur-⠼⠃⠚⠋rently preparing her first and only novel The Agesof Melanie Fisher, a pseudo-auto-biography whose
chapters are each narrated by a Melanie of different
age. Now that the written chapters of the book havecaught up with her present life, she intends to workon one chapter every year until her death. Melanie
lives in Pittsburgh with her five-year-old son Camden, who is a very critical reader of Marcel Proust.
Matthew Gantt is a composer and conceptualist based in Brooklyn by way of Durham, North
Carolina. His creative practice focuses primarilyon (dis)embodiment in electronic music, media
in virtual space, and the procedural aggregation ofcultural content. Gantt holds an M.M. in composition from CUNY Brooklyn College and currently
works as a studio assistant to Morton Subotnick.
Miruku-Souko [Milk Storage] is a collective of
six artists formed in 2009 under the leadership of
Naotaka Miyazaki. Their works are inspired by the
network of tools and human bodies, and focus on
discovering potential functions of objects, and rearranging the infrastructures of existing buildings.
They run two spaces in Tokyo: a studio in Kodaira,and the event-space/studio milkyeast in Hacchobori. Solo Exhibitions include, “Inventory management is a running hot chariot” (3331 GALLERY,2016); Group exhibitions include “Art Program
Oume” (2012), and “Tokorozawa Biennale 2011.”
Naoki Matsumoto uses found materials and daily objects to decompose traditional techniquesof painting and plastic arts, and refabricate theirfunctions. Solo exhibitions include, “Sorcerer andWitch” (Nagano, 2014), “Strategy Twenty: Fishingin Troubled Waters” (Gallery Objective Correlative, 2007); group exhibitions include, “Self-Reference Reflexology” (milkyeast, 2016), “Matsushiro
Contemporary Art Festival” (Nagano, 2014). In
2015, Matsumoto formed the artist duo Coconuts
with musician Takuma Nishihama.
Satoshi Hashimoto is an artist based in Tokyo.
His exhibitions include, “Can’t Go, Please Come”(2010, ARCUS, Ibaraki), “‘Sell Me Your Concept’in India” (2011, India), “Arbitrary Decisions andPrejudices: I Divide the Audience” (2012, The National Art Center, Tokyo), “False name” (“14 EVENINGS,” The National Museum of Modern Art,
Tokyo), “I was Leonardo da Vinci. I sell my soul.
I sell heaven” (2013, AOYAMA | MEGURO, Tokyo), “Photographer (Art Market, Photographer):
Bodybuilder” (2014, Art Fair Tokyo), “Fw: Foreigncountry ( Japan - Malaysia)” (2016, International
Airport, Airplane, Malaysia, etc).
Takuma Ishikawa is an artist and art critic. His
recent exhibitions include, “Lessons and Conveyance” (Talion Gallery, Tokyo, 2016), “Takuma
Ishikawa x Yoshihiro Yamamoto: responsive/responsible” (Teko Gallery, Aomori, 2016), and “The
Camera Knows Everything” (Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, 2015).
DJ JD [Diji Judd] is a composer based in Austin
by way of Charleston, South Carolina. His creative practice focuses primarily on embodiment inelectronic music, media in real space, and the procedural aggregation of historic form. DJ JD holds
an M.M. in composition from University of Texas,
Austin.
Earle Lipski (No Collective) is an engineer,
programmer, and system architect. He is primarily intersted in the historical intersection between
performance art and systems theory, and devises
systems that are informed by this nexus.
You Nakai (No Collective) makes music(ians),dance(rs), and other kind of entities as part of No
Collective, or conducts research on wide range of
curiosities and writes about his findings. He is now
working on a book on the music of David Tudor(in contract with Oxford University Press), while
teaching math, logic, chess, cycling, and common
sense to his five-year-old son Aevi. His research iscurrently supported by the Society for the Promotion of Sciences.
Una Nancy Owen is an archaeologist and experimental dancer from Devon, UK. Her dance works
focus on the relationship between body movement
and ground, paying extreme attention to the effects⠼⠃⠚⠛

Rice Pekinpah likes to read and ponder about
what he has read. His favorite author is Jorge Luis
Borges, and his favorite book, The Chronicles of Bustos Domecq. He is currently reading Jean Piaget’s
The Child’s Conception of the World. His favorite
subject is engineering. His is worried about his declining sight.
Shinichi Takashima is an artist who has been creating performance and video works since 2003.
His motivation derives from the sensation of floating in zero-gravity, which is gained by distorting his
own body materially and functionally. He is also
active as a critic and curator. Recent performances
include Before or After (as the group Zen-Go with
Megumi Kamimura, blanClass, Yokohama, 2015),
and recent exhibitions include “Self-Reference Reflexology” (collaboration with Shu Nakagawa, mikyeast, Tokyo, 2016).
Hilde Walden-Pequod is a native of Lummi Island, a fisherman, and choreographer. Her works
address dance as a means for exploring the differentiation between bodies and species by systematically traversing forms of embodiment via media
that both instigates and responds to movement.
She currently lives in Arizona, but travels extensively within the US as a freelance field researcher
for environmental organizations.

Already Not Yet | http://alreadynotyet.org
ANY 01 | May 2014 | 180 PP (Full Color) | OPEN ACCESS

Ellen C. Covito: Works After Weather | Edited and compiled by No Collective
Argentinian composer/choreographer Ellen C. Covito has been gaining wide recognition in the recent years for her Composed Improvisation and Improvised Composition series. This book brings together for
the first time all her major works, along with theoretical essays thatanalyze her approach in depth and an exclusive interview with Covito
herself. Edited and compiled by No Collective, the group that hasorganized four concerts of Covito’s music and dance in New York,Tokyo, and Berlin, this is the definitive overview of one of the mostradical artists working today.
“As a rising star in the radical musical traditions […] Covito continues
the necessary investigation of the conditions of art” (TDR)

ISBN 978-1-312-45009-7

90000

9 781312 450097

ANY 02 | November 2015 | 278 PP

Museum of Unheard (of) Things | by Roland Albrecht | Translated by Alexander Booth and You Nakai
The catalogue raisonné of the world-famous “literary cabinet of curiosities” in Berlin, which holds the record of being the most visited
museum in the German capital (if one offsets the number of visitors
to the square meters of the exhibition space). The museum collects
unique objects to which curator Roland Albrecht has patiently lent his
ear in order to hear the unheard (of) story each of them has to tell. This
book is the first publication to assemble all the 78 stories in the current
collection, all categorized according to weight, translated into English
for the first time.
“Now for the first time, English-speakers have the chance to appreciate
the idiosyncrasy of Museum of Unheard (of) Things in its entirety. The
unheard (of) is finally rendered audible.” (Compulsive Reader)
ANY 03 | December 2016 | 112 PP

Are We Here Yet? | Questions and Answers and Drawings by Aevi (age 4 1/2)

AEVI

Are We Here Yet? is a picture book like no other: 26 sets of profoundly“ A Obeautifully
N C E - I N - illustrated
A-LIFETIME BOOK”
simple questions and answers formulated andby a very inquisitive four-and-a-half-year-old boy. Included are age-old
conundrums such as: What is the last number? Why do crayons havecolor? Why do doors open? Who made god? Why do I like things?
What happens when you die? Why do you have books? This is a philosophical and pedagogical inquiry based on earnest observation andfantastic leap of imagination only possible for a relatively newcomer
to our world that will by all means delight and fascinate thinkers of allages. [Works on Progress series: Book 1]

ARE WE HERE YET ?

Retaeh T. Zhang is the director of Playback Theater formed in 2005. PT aims to exhaust the engineof Western theater in order to decompose reified
dramaturgy, dismantle the narratorial basis of forward-driving temporality, and debilitate the illusion of deus ex machina. She also works as a hired
dramaturg in Europe, and has collaborated with
the Hard of Hearing Orchestra, led by the deaf
composer Noel Celtovic.

No Collective fabricates musical performances which explore and problematize both theconceptual and material infrastructures of music and performance. Some relatively unusual
formats employed over the years include playscripts, picture books, and haunted houses.
No Collective was featured in Leonardo Music
Journal (MIT Press) as one of the artists under
40 who are doing interesting things with technology. Works which have been most arduous
to make, include Vesna’s Fall ( Judson Church/Black Mountain College, 2014), a decidedly
Modernist dance piece made in collaboration
with Lindsey Drury, in which each dancer wears
a 13-feet movable, curtained stage and counts
the necessary counts for other dancers whothey cannot see (http://nocollective.com/v.
html), and Concertos No.4 (National Museumof Modern Art Tokyo, 2012), performed withball-shaped speakers kicked around by professional blind athletes in a completely darkened
16,000 square feet performance space. Recent
works that went rather well include House Music (C): Two Stories (Kulturraum, Berlin/University of the Arts, Helsinki, 2014-15), anothercollaboration with Drury (http://nocollective.com/hc.html). Publications include Concertos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), a bookwhich describes and prescribes the process of
preparation, execution, and documentationof a music concert in the form of a playscript,
and Sonnet for ‘Concertos No.4’ (National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, 2013), a score ofa nursery rhyme whose lyrics are the entire
instructions for making another ‘serious’ music concert. A brief and biased portrayal of No
Collective’s activities forms a part of an interview with You Nakai (Perspectives of New Music(Winter, 2013)). Extensive essays on No Collective’s works have been published in Performing Arts Journal (MIT Press) and TDR (MITPress). http://nocollective.com

WORKS ON PROGRESS [01]of body mass and weight on the surface and interior of earth, and the workings of gravity onto thephysicality of dancers. Una often collaborates withher husband Ulik Norman Owen who is a photographer.

ISBN 9781517248048

90000 >

already not yet

http://alreadynotyet.org“Nothing less than a once-in-a-lifetime book...” (Rice Peckinpah)⠼⠃⠚⠓

9 781517 248048

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n
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ARE WE HERE YETQUESTIONS + ANSWERS + DRAWINGS BY AEVI (AGE 4 1/2)

Matters of Act is a journal compiled by membersof No Collective. The assembled materials question
the general topic of fabrication and probe thedensity of various unrealities, covertly following
a different underlying concern in each issue. The
publication is a reservoir for accomplished actsand done ideas, and wishes to provide pretext for
daydreaming And resource for further PRODUCTION.
It hopes to come out at least every year.