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Beginnings | Advertisement | Farocki’s practice was not about perfecting one craft—it was rather about perfecting the art of inventing and adding new ones. Even when he became a master of his craft he didn’t stop. He just kept going. He became an eternal beginner. Had he lived another 25 years he might have started making Theremin films with bare hands, by focusing his mind, paying attention to the glitches of a new technology most probably developed for a stunning form of consumeroriented warfare. |
Beginnings | How to begin, again? | In 1992, a title of one of Farocki’s texts makes a curious declaration: “Reality would have to begin.” It implies that reality hasn’t even started. It is a puzzling statement indeed; especially from someone already considered an influential documentary filmmaker. Farocki suggests that reality might have to be brought about by resisting military infrastructure, its tools of vision and knowledge. But the quote also clearly declares that reality does not yet exist; at least not in any form that deserves the name. And let’s face it: Aren’t we still confronted with the same wretched impositions trying to pass as reality these days? Just now it’s being sweated over at Foxconn and sedimented on secret Snapchat servers: a Netflix soap featuring ISIS as teenage Deleuzian war machine. In earlier decades, Facebook might have been called Springer Press (not least in West Germany), ISIS called SA, and the USAF, well, USAF. The names of war change just as as war itself does. Reality’s absence stays put. |
Beginnings | This beginning takes the form of a statement: | One of Farocki’s first films, The Words of the Chairman (Die Worte des Vorsitzenden), is a legendary agitprop short. A Mao bible is torn up, its pages folded into a paper airplane hurled at a Shah dummy.Words… argues that statements by authorities need to be messed with and set in motion. Texts and images must be used unexpectedly, tossed into the world—both commandeered and set free. Settings, views, and attitudes taken for granted have to be rigorously dissected, torn apart, reconfigured. There are no teachers or parents to lead the way. Throughout Farocki’s work, conflict will continue to manifest in mundane objects and situations. In this case, a simple sheet of paper. Conflict is not only part of the content, but also of the production setting. Worte des Vorsitzenden is made in collaboration with both Otto Schily—later to become German interior minister—and Holger Meins, who died in a prison hunger strike as a member of the Red Army Faction. One would become the face of the state, the other would die as its enemy. Production holds conflict. It is its most basic form. |
Beginnings | This beginning takes the form of a statement: | The hero is thrown into his world. The hero has no parents and no teachers. He has to learn by himself which roles are valid. |
Beginnings | This beginning takes the form of a statement: | One of Farocki’s first films, The Words of the Chairman (Die Worte des Vorsitzenden), is a legendary agitprop short. A Mao bible is torn up, its pages folded into a paper airplane hurled at a Shah dummy.Words… argues that statements by authorities need to be messed with and set in motion. Texts and images must be used unexpectedly, tossed into the world—both commandeered and set free. Settings, views, and attitudes taken for granted have to be rigorously dissected, torn apart, reconfigured. There are no teachers or parents to lead the way. Throughout Farocki’s work, conflict will continue to manifest in mundane objects and situations. In this case, a simple sheet of paper. Conflict is not only part of the content, but also of the production setting. Worte des Vorsitzenden is made in collaboration with both Otto Schily—later to become German interior minister—and Holger Meins, who died in a prison hunger strike as a member of the Red Army Faction. One would become the face of the state, the other would die as its enemy. Production holds conflict. It is its most basic form. |
Beginnings | Another beginning | Does the world exist, if I am not watching it? This beginning is among his last: it is part of the brilliant series Paralell I–IV dealing with computer generated gameimagery. This series reflects on elements of game worlds, on polygons, NPC’s, 8bit graphics, arse physics and unilateral surfaces. Ok, I made up the arse physics, sorry. Paralell I–IV sketches the first draft of a history of computergenerated images that is still emerging as we speak. It skims the surfaces of virtual worlds and coolly scans their glitches. Paralell I–IV is so humble, so concise, so charming and bloody fantastic that I could go on about it for hours. You are so lucky it hasn’t got arse physics or else I would. |
Beginnings | Another beginning | In 1992, Videograms of a Revolution, codirected with Andrei Ujică, captured a similar moment of emergence. The seminal work compiles material from over 125 hours of TV broadcasts and amateur footage of the ’89 Romanian uprisings. It demonstrates how TV stops recording reality and starts creating it instead. Videograms asks: Why did insurgents not storm the presidential palace, but the TV station? At the very moment the social revolution of 1917 ended irrevocably, a new and equally ambivalent technological revolution took place. People ask for bread: they end up with camcorders. TV studios host revolts. Reality is created by representation—Farocki, Flusser, and others were among the first to report this sea change as it happened. As things become visible, they also become real. Protesters jump through TV screens and spill out onto streets. This is because the surface of the screen is broken: content can no longer be contained when protest, rare animals, breakfast cereals, prime time, and TV test patterns escape the flatness of 2D representation. In 1989, protesters storm TV stations. In 1989, Tim BernersLee invents the World Wide Web. Twentyfive years later, oligarchs start to ask: If people don’t have bread, why don’t they eat their browsers instead? |
Beginnings | Another beginning | These works are building blocks. One can start building now. But what, exactly? Farocki starts building parallels. Shot on left monitor, countershot to the right. Montage arranged as solid bricks of spatialized narration. On the Construction of Griffith’s Films uses Hantarex cubes as construction material. Cinema is now rephrased as architecture. |
Beginnings | Another beginning | There used to be one TV per flat. Now there are many. Political systems dwindle; screens multiply.Workers Leaving the Factory begins several times: a perfect grammar of cinema’s spatial turn. The first version of the work is single screen. The second version turns into twelve monitors simultaneously playing workers leaving the factory in different periods of twentieth century film history. Dialectics explodes into dodecalectics. Farocki multiplies the exits and the worlds of labor multiply in turn. Workers leave the factory to become actors—and to play themselves. Factories turn into theaters of operation. From 1987 on, Farocki also filmed how work puts on a show by way of exhibition. More than a dozen cinema verité films exhibit training, pitches, meetings, people striving to perform: The Appearance, The Interview, Nothing Ventured. People pitch campaigns and projects as if their life depends on it. The staging of labor precedes commodity infatuation. The Leading Role (Die Führende Rolle,1994) shows the design of GDR May Day parades while the Berlin wall was already crumbling. Think of a televised ballet performed by a fantasy military sports brigade. |
Beginnings | Another beginning | Another group of works investigates how buildings train bodies, reflexes, and perception. A prison: how to lock up by looking; a shopping mall: how to choreograph clients; brick factories around the world: how to make bricks manually, by machine, and through 3D printing. This was the plan at least. The 3D printed bricks didn’t make it into the film after all—the technology was too slow to keep up with Farocki’s furious pace. |
Beginnings | Another beginning | In its inception, parallel montage arose alongside conveyor belts—an industrial form of production across different locations arranged one after another. Its spatial turn arrived with major transformations: deindustrialization. Labor as spectacle. Factories turned museums. Conveyor belts dismantled and reinstalled in China, where megamuseums rise in parallel. Production persists in worlds split off by oneway mirrors. Surfaces glisten, spaces disconnect amongst commodity addiction, cheap airfare, and attention deficit: the new normal. Farocki looks, listens, demonstrates, aligns. At one point, he goes quiet. Respitehas no soundtrack whatsoever. In the video, Farocki shows silent footage extorted from a detainee at Westerbork deportation camp for purposes of Nazi infotainment. He peels away the staging of normalcy covering genocide layer by layer. The absence of sound is the film’s most striking documentary layer; it records the silence of the audience that took Nazi stagecraft for reality. |
Beginnings | Another beginning | In its inception, parallel montage arose alongside conveyor belts—an industrial form of production across different locations arranged one after another. Its spatial turn arrived with major transformations: deindustrialization. Labor as spectacle. Factories turned museums. Conveyor belts dismantled and reinstalled in China, where megamuseums rise in parallel. Production persists in worlds split off by oneway mirrors. Surfaces glisten, spaces disconnect amongst commodity addiction, cheap airfare, and attention deficit: the new normal. Farocki looks, listens, demonstrates, aligns. At one point, he goes quiet. Respitehas no soundtrack whatsoever. In the video, Farocki shows silent footage extorted from a detainee at Westerbork deportation camp for purposes of Nazi infotainment. He peels away the staging of normalcy covering genocide layer by layer. The absence of sound is the film’s most striking documentary layer; it records the silence of the audience that took Nazi stagecraft for reality. Reality would have to begin. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | Looks like it might have just been a glitch. A soldier drives a tank through a virtual landscape. After asymmetrical US warfare in Vietnam, the ongoing Cold War of the ’80s has given way to a permanent asymmetrical war against “Terror.” War has changed. It also remains the same. In the twentieth century, Farocki suggests resisting a military reconnaissance that uses analog aerial photography. In the twentyfirst century, Farocki observes armies that rely on simulations. Photography records a present situation. Simulations rehearse a future to be. They push out representations and make worlds, pixel by pixel, bit by bit—building by destruction and subtraction. Cameras do not only record, they also track and guide. They scan and project. They seek and destroy. War has changed. It also has remained the same: complicit with business interests, deeply entrenched within the most mundane details of everyday reality—now generated by images. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | Like warfare, Farocki’s work has changed. Like warfare, it has remained the same. Harun’s latest works were always the most advanced, pushing the edge of analysis and vision. One can’t afford nostalgia when dealing with the tools of permanent workfare: transmission, rephrasing, modeling. Like in Words of the Chairman when a page of paper is folded to become a weapon. The printed page has turned into a set of polygons. It can be folded into fighter jets, runway handbags, or furry Disney creatures. They could be part of education, games, or military operations. Just like the paper airplane, by the way. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | In an interview published after his death, Farocki says of Words of the Chairman: |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | It was about a utopian moment suddenly projected into the world. One couldn’t see it in the outside world; at least one couldn’t record it with a camera. And in this case—and I still feel this way—I was able to produce an entirely artificial world, something like a 3D animation. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | Filmmakers have hitherto only represented the world in various ways; the point is to generate worlds differently. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | Paradoxically the beginning is also often the last part to be created, since it has to anticipate everything. But Farocki’s late works are not just new versions of old beginnings. They started smiling. The late works radiated playfulness not in spite of their profoundness or seriousness but precisely because of it: from Serious Games to just games. From Deep Play to play proper. They also became more relevant and exciting by the minute. Farocki got closer to the beginner’s spirit day by day. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | Today, workers are leaving the factory to play Metal Gear Solid in the parking lot. They got confused because the disco grid installed for office raves was hacked and now shows ISIS fashion week ads. Today workers are players, proxies, pitchers, soldiers, dancers, spammers, bots, and refugees. Ballistics is upgraded with arse physics. TVs are built with Minecraft blocks. Reality is still missing in action. Harun’s work is more necessary than ever and I am gutted that he is no longer here. |
Beginnings | Another of Farocki’s beginnings | I know I am not alone in this. From Berlin to Beirut to Kolkata, Mexico, Gwangju, and wherever airlines and wifi travel, Harun’s work struck a chord and brought people together: from Straub and Huillet nerds to Tumblr impressionists and drone opponents. From West Berlin to the West Bank. From salon bolsheviks, dialup activists, and SketchUp gallerinas. From portable film clubs to mobile phone browsers. I personally know at least one militia member who was floored by his work. Harun was his own UN smoking lounge in an imaginary corridor shared by the offices of the technology, Security Council, soccer, and moving image subcommittees. His work lives on invincible; his convertible is killing it still. People faint every time it comes down KarlMarxAllee. |
Beginnings | All of us are now in a position to answer your question: | Does the world exist, if I am not watching it?Reality would first have to begin. And perhaps, by beginning over and over again, reality can finally be brought about. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | On the same day, four youths assaulted a fiftyyearold German of Chinese origin in Munich. After yelling “foreign pig” at him, they hit him until he was bleeding. I wonder: has the victim got a culture? Or in this case: which culture got hold of him? And what kind of culture is racism? |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | Culture is a broad concept. A filmmaker from Chad notes: in my country, war has become a culture. In the Global North, however, culture is supposed to promote civilization, democracy, and progress. The same concept is interpreted as a chance at emancipation as well as oppression and violence. Some call it culture—some call it crime. Whatever is designated by the concept of culture is set between these two extremes. If one is to avoid essentialist concepts of culture, then whatever is being mediated by this concept is to be understood as culture. Violence forms part of it. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | I made a film a few years ago, called Homo Viator, dealing with pilgrimage churches. It turned out that in most cases, the ritual of pilgrimage had been established on the site of a crime. Earlier pilgrims had been slain on these sites, because they were foreigners. They had been burnt, beaten to death, strangled, or simply lynched. The killings served to establish a coherent community as well as a network of places, where these crimes came to be idolatrized, therefore providing a framework of geographical orientation. The Austrian national sanctuary of Melk pertains to this tradition of tribalization as well. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | Culture is founded precisely upon this act of exclusion. Culture is based on crime. The most basic example of an act of culture is a crime committed in common. To yell out “foreign pig” is an instance of this case. A common ground is being established by violently setting the boundaries of social distinction. Culture arises out of the tension between distinction and discrimination. It is an uneasy reaction formed in the light of impending murder. Culture means ritualized violence. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | This becomes apparent if we leave the narrow conceptual boundaries of the Global North. Feminist writers of the South have often described certain cultural formations as relations of violence, especially towards women. Brutal violations of bodily integrity such as genital mutilation, the immolation of widows, bride sale, or domestic violence are made socially acceptable as customs and traditions by means of cultural concepts. Crime is normalized as culture. This strategy is not restricted to the South. After all, the foundational myth of European culture is based on the story of the abduction and rape of Europe. Whatever is labeled as European culture is set on the background of this outrage. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | The categories of culture are evoked in the constructions of all the tacit divisions enabling oppression and violence. Good. Evil. Normal. Abnormal. Honor. Shame. It is in the name of culture that women are kept in the violent darkness of the domestic sphere. That they are silenced, mutilated, and exploited. It is to oppose tradition, ritual, and culture that women migrate and break the bonds of tacit consent. |
Culture and Crime | The Realm of Privacy | Culture as crime happens under specific conditions. One of them is a specific concept of timespace. It is characterized by an eternal repetition of habits, which construct a privatized space. The space of the private denotes the absence of public control. It refers to domestication. Hannah Arendt sharply distinguishes this sphere from the political arena. Where privacy becomes a principle, slavery and arbitrariness rule. This oppressive relation is glorified as a law of nature. It is the founding principle of economy which is legitimized by naturalized needs. |
Culture and Crime | The Realm of Privacy | Arendt insists that the temporal and spatial organization of the private sphere is based on the realm of economy and its underlying eternal circulation of production and consumption. It is the place where time is violently curbed into a deadend cycle, so as to repress any potential for change. It is the place where nature rules through ritual, repetition, and reproduction. An eternal repetition echoed by industrial production, still ruling the spaces of global peripheries. Reproduction meaning the production of children, nutrition, health, and care, in short all types of work which are being devalued and naturalized by the double bind of nationalist heterosexual ideology and the capitalist division of labor. Reproduction therefore primarily refers to the process of the reproduction of power relations as pertaining to the laws of nature. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | With the global spread of capitalist forms of production, the zones of privatization have dramatically increased. The realm of privacy is wherever the political sphere has been dismantled and lawlessness rules: in war and civil war as well as through global hyperexploitation in semiprivatized free trade zones, halfcolonies, and protectorates. In the location of domestic violence. In “nationally liberated zones” as well as in deportation jails. Privacy rules where politics have been purged and the laws of the tribe and the racket prevail.The meaning of the private is to be deprived of any opportunity for change and to be barred from the realm of politics. This is the original meaning of the word “privatio”: to be deprived of something and to suffer a loss, in this case the loss of any alternative. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | “Culture means not a better but a nobler world: a world, which is not supposed to be created by a radical change of material living conditions, but by proceedings within the soul of the individual.” (Herbert Marcuse) . But the desire for a better life is not a piece of furniture adorning the bourgeois interior. On the contrary, this desire has been confined to the dark hole of culture in order to make sure that it will not be realized. The domestication of utopian desire took place because its confinement within the boundaries of privacy precisely ensured that there it could not cause any change of political and economic power structures. The proliferation of individualistic lifestyle identity politics is such an instance of the domestication of desire. It is the interior design of utopian liberalism, dominated by the rules of economy and its tacit consent with oppression. |
Culture and Crime | Is napalm his culture? | Considering this background, it seems paradoxical that of all things it was the realm of privacy which was heralded as the arena of liberation by the new social movements. The private is political—this slogan of the 1970s now sounds like a threatening prophecy. It was not realized by the politization of the private but by the opposite—the privatization of the political. In this context the culturalist practices of individual identity politics can be. compared with other privatization raids, for example the massive privatization of public space, the media, social duties, or even whole states and territories. It seems as if the realm of privacy has been massively expanded, including its underlying principle of a naturalized economy. In the Global North, this sphere of privacy offers a whole range of different lifestyles. They suggest the complete freedom to design one’s own living conditions—provided that they remain private and remain restricted to the recognition of individually culturalized identities. Difference is tolerated within the system of cultural domestication—but not as opposition to the system itself. Opposition is thus replaced by cultural difference. It is this constant appropriation and integration into the sphere of economy and privacy which characterizes the method of cultural domestication. Whoever opts for cultural identity is accepted in regard to his or her private lifestyle—while consenting to remain indifferent towards their political framework. Cultural difference thus translates into political indifference. |
Culture and Crime | The Law of “Uneven Development” | What is necessarily marginalized in the discourse of cultural difference are its political conditions: in the context of an international division of labor, only the privileged are in a position to use culture as a tool of individual emancipation. The material conditions of a white middleclass existence in the North, regardless whether male or female, hetero or homosexual, are provided by the simultaneous exploitation of, above all, women from the South. The construction of the former’s identity takes place at the expense of the latter. Thus, even the most intimate identity politics are involved in the modes of production of global capitalism. What appears as cultural difference for some means social, political, and economic inequality for others. This permanent reproduction of inequality forms the principle of “uneven development” in the context of global capitalism. This “uneven development,” the law of economic apartheid, is the reason for global polarization, discrimination, and exploitation. Therefore, the relationship between culture and crime, which seemed to result from an overly broad concept of culture, is proven valid in the context of global modes of production. Slavoj Žižek writes: “The postmodern multicultural politics of identity, this ever growing blossom of groups and subgroups with their hybrid and fluid identities, each of them insisting on their specific life styles and on their rights to act out their specific cultures—this type of incessant diversification is conceivable only within the context of capitalist globalization.” The indifference of cultural relativism masks this fundamental difference: the massive discrepancies in regard to selfdetermination, agency, and the covering of basic needs. The notion of culture transforms the hierarchies of global privilege into a horizontal array of mutually indifferent cultures. It replaces the notion of class—but not its rule. |
Culture and Crime | Negative Universalism | In contrast, feminist critics of domestication are not concerned with culture, but with the crime which is habitually committed in its name. It is those who are forcefully particularized, who demand universal standards. They address human rights, politics, the public sphere, ethics, and justice. But nobody listens. The ones who are being addressed have preferred to transform themselves into tribes obsessed with culture and wallowing in privacy. Global inequality is expressed in cultural terms and is reified as a fetish object. It is transformed into an ahistoric essence or into an exotic commodity and therefore treated as a positive quantity. The universalism on which the particularized keep insisting has been culturally relativized—as an Eurocentric ideology of the West. Nobody would deny that. But the consequence of this conclusion, namely indifference, has to be refuted. |
Culture and Crime | Negative Universalism | But if the concept of difference is to be respected, it has to remain negative, in its political form of inequality. This concept refers to the only universals which are valid on a global level nowadays: to oppression, exploitation, discrimination, and subjection—in one word, to different positionings within the global class hierarchy and subsequent inequalities in regard to the access to education, work, health care, and selfdetermination. A universalist discourse which refers to these differences is a negative universalism. It is in itself a historical category. It is not based on metaphysical assumptions or cultural analogies but starts from the fact that the modes of production of global capitalism concern almost every human being today: to some they appear as culture—to others as crime. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | First Art World: The Carnivore Art World | The participants |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | First Art World: The Carnivore Art World | Dream and die, eaten alive |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | First Art World: The Carnivore Art World | Art world victims are |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | First Art World: The Carnivore Art World | Consisting of an excavating apparatus (a kind of turbine, with blades) that, in revolving, crushes rock, forcing all matter towards the center of the cylinder and through a duct up to the ground. The art world happens when new contingents of participants are led underground using the winding screw as a pathway. The procession into the underworld is arranged at 6:00 p.m., and a choreography dictates a precise sequence of movements which participants have to execute, each imitating a small personal robot walking next to them. The traces they leave behind, slime, blood, and other biological fluids, are photographed, censored, and broadcast over a network as a QR code. Once the participants in the procession reach the bottom, they fall asleep and dream of an entirely different art world. They awake refreshed and then are eaten alive by the art world to sustain itself. An orifice 7.22 meters in diameter opens up temporarily on the level below participants. Their biological matter is digested by the machine while their dreams are marketed on some Discord channel. The carnivore art world is constantly creating new images and objects, and reproducing itself. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Second Art World: The Colosseum Art World | An island adorned |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Second Art World: The Colosseum Art World | Public shaming feasts |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Second Art World: The Colosseum Art World | Art is a circus |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Second Art World: The Colosseum Art World | The art world lies on an artificial island built by refugees from civilizational collapse. It is embedded in an urban system erected on poles made of tree trunks from virgin forests. Its modules are adorned with elements obtained through robbery, plunder, and forgery. On a quiet day, it basks in the ocean sunlight, which is artificially constrained by teleoperated modules of steel painted yellow. At its center stands a dome ten meter in diameter and a hundred meters tall, from which a putrefying odor emerges every two years. At this sign, participants start descending onto the art world. A feast is held for a period of many months. Its purpose is the playtesting of new modes of oppression. To this extent, participants crown temporary royalty and cancel all others. The public shaming and humiliation are recorded on the Solana blockchain and auctioned off. Famous people die in this art world: they come to study its rituals, but then the art world takes its revenge and kills them by eating their guts. As the public playtesting is taking place, the art world becomes a big circus with an outer ring and an inner one, connected by nonfunctional elevators and Ferris wheels. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Third Art World: The Museum of Modern Art Art World | Arcane maze MoMA |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Third Art World: The Museum of Modern Art Art World | Shells and bureaucracy are |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Third Art World: The Museum of Modern Art Art World | The art we consume |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Third Art World: The Museum of Modern Art Art World | In the most disfigured, listless, and numb area of that real estate that once was New York, and, more precisely, where MoMA once was at about 83rd Street, this art world is incorporated as a cluster of shell entities. The structure is a 3D hologram with a length, width, and height of 180 feet, consisting of readymade junkspace cubicles, in each of which there is a lens nine inches in diameter. This structure contains shell cubicles which in turn contain cubicles in an infinite regress. Inside the cubicles, bureaucratic rituals take place under the pretext of child abuse. This activity sustains this art world, but actually, no one in the world understands its arcane, toxic, and superstitious nature. The metabolism of this structure is performed by Picasso and Cezanne artworks circulating in between the shells, fueled by energized impunity. Systems of incorporated art advisories inserted in various points of the shell cluster enable them to communicate directly. At the center of the art world is a shell. On the ground level, a series of gates lead to a labyrinth of rooms, corridors, staircases, and basements. The building is completely sealed off from the outside reality. The whole building is one huge maze. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Third Art World: The Museum of Modern Art Art World | In the most disfigured, listless, and numb area of that real estate that once was New York, and, more precisely, where MoMA once was at about 83rd Street, this art world is incorporated as a cluster of shell entities. The structure is a 3D hologram with a length, width, and height of 180 feet, consisting of readymade junkspace cubicles, in each of which there is a lens nine inches in diameter. This structure contains shell cubicles which in turn contain cubicles in an infinite regress. Inside the cubicles, bureaucratic rituals take place under the pretext of child abuse. This activity sustains this art world, but actually, no one in the world understands its arcane, toxic, and superstitious nature. The metabolism of this structure is performed by Picasso and Cezanne artworks circulating in between the shells, fueled by energized impunity. Systems of incorporated art advisories inserted in various points of the shell cluster enable them to communicate directly. At the center of the art world is a shell. On the ground level, a series of gates lead to a labyrinth of rooms, corridors, staircases, and basements. The building is completely sealed off from the outside reality. The whole building is one huge maze. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | The Fourth Art World: The Pword Art World | Shame for the P |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | The Fourth Art World: The Pword Art World | The P has been forgotten |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | The Fourth Art World: The Pword Art World | Debt dissipated |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | The Fourth Art World: The Pword Art World | is built on the strict command never to articulate the forbidden word starting with “P.” This law has existed for so long that everyone has forgotten what this word originally used to be. Every year, a growing number of people are executed under the suspicion to have harbored thoughts about the Pword. They are first ritually thrown into debt, symbolically eradicated by numbering their due in shame coins, and then have to confess. A conveyor belt grabs them and strips them of any remaining data. They can return now to the overground but as a sort of virtual leper. In this world, special forms of madness are known. The most persistent plague is the roletarian fever, followed by the recarious rash. People who get infected are interned into huge quarantine facilities, shut in, and forgotten about. This art world is based on strict laws, which are only made clear in case of an emergency. These laws are written in the Oword art world. In this world, every time someone utters the forbidden word, the art world itself splits into two. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fifth Art World: The Booty Art World | There are 815 billion Nomads (NMS) and thirteen billion Exiles (EXS). The Exiles are an independent faction that can only be created in the world of the same name, which is the only planet in the system not controlled by a major auction house. The Exiles have a base at the furthest point from the system’s star, in a distant cold area of the system. “Exile” is a common term for a person who has been forced to leave their homeland in order to escape legal prosecution or political oppression. In the case of “No Man’s Sky,” the Exiles are a faction of former NMS players who became separated from the main body of people who once played the game, and were forced into exile by being misminted. There are ninety Type As and Bs, fifteen Type Xs, four Type Rs, one Type H, R, X, and 4,817 Type Ws. For example, Type As provide 0.7 percent of all BOO sold in the World (in USDC), whereas Type Ws (for the region of Colonio LTX) provide a share of 0.1 percent of all BOO sold, plus 1 percent of all LIB redeemed (in USDC world credits). If you are part of any private militia, you get an additional five hundred voting weight. The most popular weapon is the “Autocrat Expressionism” canon, with usage of 2,466,321. The least popular is the “Zombie Formalism Offloaded” pistol, with a usage of fiftynine. The most popular attack module is the Primitive Accumulation Blaster. If money, according to Augier, “comes into the world with a congenital bloodstain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fifth Art World: The Booty Art World | An Exile can be seen briefly in the game’s intro video on the beach of the first planet the player visits, although it is unclear whether this is actually a live player character or an NPC character. “The floodgates of the privileged few have been opened, and the flood is just beginning.” |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Sixth Art World: La VilleMachine Habitée | This art world city is |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Sixth Art World: La VilleMachine Habitée | Apparatus Maximus |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Sixth Art World: La VilleMachine Habitée | Feeds from blood and lead |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Sixth Art World: La VilleMachine Habitée | The art world is a machine, such a large machine that not even its inhabitants know its size. The participants are bureaucrats who live in the machine endlessly dragged along by conveyor belts, chutes, and pneumatic tubes from the time of birth to the time of death. The machine takes care of everything, along the innumerable routes which intersect, unite, and divide according to its incomprehensible programming and endless forms. The machine is selfsufficient, it takes from the outside world only the lifeblood of artists and a little lead. This triggers enough animosity for the art world to continue its drab and shabby existence, which would be missed by few people. The first thing that strikes us when we arrive in this art world is the silence. The silence is the result of the art world’s isolation, the absence of any contact with the outside world. The art world is isolated by a barrier of concrete, barbed wire, and guard towers. This barrier is not a natural boundary; it was built by the art world itself, and it is maintained by the art world alone. The art world is selfsufficient, but its inhabitants have always known that its way of life is fragile, and that the slightest contact with the outside world would mean the end of the art world. The art world is fed by two pipelines, which emerge from the ground in the middle of the wall and stretch away into the distance. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Seventh Art World: The War Art World | Military shows |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Seventh Art World: The War Art World | Violence, supply, demand |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Seventh Art World: The War Art World | Are in essence art |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Seventh Art World: The War Art World | This art world consists of war shows. Battles and skirmishes are staged for the whole purpose of creating design objects, performative assets, by means of generative destruction. The bones of the dead are studied by artworld haruspices auguring the advent of art prices and auction sales. War art world is the most recent of the art worlds. Its short history starts with the First World War and ends with the War on Terror. War art world is a state of mind. This art world is a hybrid world where the art world and war world overlap. One might say it is the ultimate artistic expression of military necessity. Art galleries are affected by the law of supply and demand and flooded by artworks. Their value is increased if they can be traced back to a conflict. Such institutions offer institutionalized violence for creating art objects. The origin of this art world type is based in “an objective mimetic standard of value for art.” In the course of history the relation between carnage and art changed from a biological relationship—that is, where war is performed for the sake of the survival of a certain group—to a causally artistic one, where violence is staged for the purpose of art production. This form of art is called “deart” since it is an art object which was produced due to a violent act. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eighth Art World: The Mutant Art World | Anarchy, lawlessness |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eighth Art World: The Mutant Art World | Art is in a mutant form |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eighth Art World: The Mutant Art World | No slaves of any debt |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eighth Art World: The Mutant Art World | The eighth art world is wild and lawless, where artists and writers are embedded with cultural guerrillas who are setting up alternative communities, which aim to be selfsufficient, beyond any form of governance or law. They want to be free from any form of government or financial debt and they don’t want to be taken over by corporate powers. Here “art” takes the form of a mutant genetic algorithm that also functions as a means of communication in guerrilla cells. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eighth Art World: The Mutant Art World | The eighth art world is wild and lawless, where artists and writers are embedded with cultural guerrillas who are setting up alternative communities, which aim to be selfsufficient, beyond any form of governance or law. They want to be free from any form of government or financial debt and they don’t want to be taken over by corporate powers. Here “art” takes the form of a mutant genetic algorithm that also functions as a means of communication in guerrilla cells. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eighth Art World: The Mutant Art World | The eighth art world is wild and lawless, where artists and writers are embedded with cultural guerrillas who are setting up alternative communities, which aim to be selfsufficient, beyond any form of governance or law. They want to be free from any form of government or financial debt and they don’t want to be taken over by corporate powers. Here “art” takes the form of a mutant genetic algorithm that also functions as a means of communication in guerrilla cells. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Ninth Art World: The City of Art | Debt and loans in the cube |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Ninth Art World: The City of Art | And artistic credit scores |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Ninth Art World: The City of Art | Bankrupt very soon |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Ninth Art World: The City of Art | It is embedded in the great cube. It is in fact an autonomous art cluster, but as it is part of the greater structure, it is both dependent on and independent from it. There are three parts to the city. First is the art market, where artworks are traded and commissions are agreed on. Second is the museum district, where works are exhibited and sold. Third is the residential district, where artists live and work. The artists, as long as they live in the city, will always be in debt to it. Artists who produce more works than required by the city will have their credit rating lowered, and will not be able to borrow money or exhibit in the city anymore. Artworks produced by artists who have been blacklisted by the city are considered worthless and cannot be traded anywhere else either. Artists can apply for loans from the central planning office in exchange for a percentage of future revenue on their works. Loans are paid back in ten years with an annual interest of 12 percent. If the artist can’t pay back the loan, the works produced with the loan will be auctioned off to the market, and the money will be used to repay the loan. Every seven years, everyone goes bankrupt but the banks. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Tenth Art World: The Last Art World | At the end of time |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Tenth Art World: The Last Art World | Capitalism will fall down |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Tenth Art World: The Last Art World | Art goes extinct now /fork gets extruded |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Tenth Art World: The Last Art World | The tenth art world is the last art world. When the capitalist system collapses, there will be no more art worlds /fork too many art worlds. The art worlds will fade away into the dark ages. The art worlds will become extinct like dinosaurs and woolly mammoths. The art worlds will become fossils that are found in museums /fork they will be museums that are found in fossils. When capitalism collapses, people will no longer be able to live off the art worlds. They will no longer be able to make a living from their art. /fork people will finally be able to capitalize on collapse. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eleventh Art World: The Animated Van Gogh Art World | An apparatus |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eleventh Art World: The Animated Van Gogh Art World | Van Gogh copies ad nauseam |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eleventh Art World: The Animated Van Gogh Art World | Chop an ear off here |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Eleventh Art World: The Animated Van Gogh Art World | The art world consists of an inflatable structure of dimensions 10 × 200 meters. In this structure lies enclosed an immersive scenario in which Van Gogh artworks are projected on every available surface. Under the inflatable structure lies a small torture chamber in which Xerox copies of Van Gogh paintings are tortured by rotating them between acid tanks and electroshock machinery. The frequencies detected are then turned into 3D animations, sexed up with maximum Fresnel levels and sheen, and forced into mobility. Meanwhile, the original paintings lie entombed in concrete rods swaying with the rumble of earthquakes. In this artwork you can pretend to be Van Gogh by cutting off replacement ears rendered in 3D. Additional wounds are optional. A good hole in the stomach will cost you only $300. The artwork is composed of a series of interconnected rooms, one of which has been designed to be a crime scene. The victim lies on the floor, and the bullet hole can be seen in the stomach. The bullet hole is an opening into a secret room, where the original painting lies. Visitors can cut off the ear of the original painting and take it with them as proof of their visit to the art world. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | Hedge and invest art |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | Sell and buy a token war |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | No exit ahead |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | A cryptoexclusive fund that fuses infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estates. The twelfth art world is decolonial defi. We are in the process of constructing a cryptomuseum that is not only digital but also psychical. A place where our culture is preserved and protected. It will be a place where our culture is bought and sold. It will be a place where our culture is traded and transferred. It will be a place where our culture is stolen and returned. It will be a place where our culture is destroyed and ruined. It will be a place where our culture is protected and destroyed. It will be a place where our culture is decentralized and stolen. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | It is an art world that is not only highly ambitious, but also extremely violent and deadly, so much so that it has been called a “war of tokens,” not to mention that it has been reported that there have been over three thousand casualties and more than eleven thousand arrests. The Global South is the laboratory for the establishment of an art world whose goal is to be a permanent state of exception. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Twelfth Art World: The VC Art World | Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. I am not a qualified financial advisor. You should seek the advice of a professional financial advisor before investing in anything. |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fourteenth Art World: The Metamorphosis Art World | Locked up in MoMA |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fourteenth Art World: The Metamorphosis Art World | Living is a performance |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fourteenth Art World: The Metamorphosis Art World | A sentence for life |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fourteenth Art World: The Metamorphosis Art World | It is a month after the opening of the “Metamorphosis” exhibition, and ten artists have been recruited by the MoMA board to create a performance that rethinks the museum. The ten artists are: |
TwentyOne Art Worlds: A Game Map, | Fourteenth Art World: The Metamorphosis Art World | It is a month after the opening of the “Metamorphosis” exhibition, and ten artists have been recruited by the MoMA board to create a performance that rethinks the museum. The ten artists are: |
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