Novad Transmissions/Anarchives [July 2012]
“We began as aimless (p)articles, wandering through the universe…we found ourselves pulled together towards the same center of gravity, a dream we could not forget, an unshakeable memory of a self that we had never noticed there.”
- Novad legend of the origins of Liberty Plaza“Time in the Mind of the Anarchives” is an illustration, anexploration, and participation in a new conception of the archive. It evolves out of a critique of the archive as a center of power, a tool for controlling the narrative of history, and removing objects from the present in order to preserve them for the future. In this show, the Occupational Art School will offer the opportunity to construct this radically inclusive, directly democratic, open-ended, and open-sourced archive that we call: the Anarchives.
The event we call Occupy Wall Street provides a unique monadic lens through which to view our concept of time, the archive and history. Despite the lack of one clear and distinct demand, individuals around the world recognized the importance of the event and flocked to Liberty Plaza, to the internet, to their livestream, and eventually to their own public squares, to see what was happening. As most unforeseen events do, this moment had changed the conversation and augmented our collective imagination: the spectrum of possibility had shifted.
“Time in the Mind of the Anarchives” will feature anarchival experiments in documentation including:
- projection and mobile screenings of Occupy-inspired films produced by Bold Jez, featuring Pre-Occupy Wall Street archival footage (from prior to September 17, 2011), excerpts from the 320 K(rystaleido)scope Xp-eriments, and other episodes from the Jez3Prez show
- a roving sound exhibit featuring music, interviews, and audio collected from participants from over the last 10 months of the Occupy movement
- a re-enactment of the Liberty Plaza sign-mural, exhibiting the rarely seen signs collected by the OWS Archives working group at Liberty Plaza
- a documentation station that will allow participants to access, explore, and add to the registers of the Anarchives as they encounter them throughout the eventRather than reflect upon a single previous idea of the past, the Anarchives hopes to refract the ideas of many individuals through one event and open new dimensions into the nature of Occupy Wall Street, Time, and history.
[Out of chronological order (in thread)]
… Guys,
this sounds exciting …Also, i´m reading jorge Luiz Borges and its super pertinent to this conversation. Jez, i´m reading the first half of the book we split in half, ha!
Ale
[∞]
what living freely means to the school, and to society? its the revolutionary spirit of OAS. through the sharpest weapon, (art) cutting through the most liquid and neuroplastic of all tissues, (culture) OAS revolutionary games found itself well acquainted with the anarchist tradition of temporary autonomous zones. by first suspending then abolishing the ruling code, creating a magical circle where Empire cannot enter and capital cannot exploit, area that escapes sterile spacetime.
imagine #jez3prez performing declarations or #atchu5prez doing neo-surrealist musical experiments into the streets? a bubble is created around the life-form that expresses itself freely. a state of bliss is a state of flow: in this we have a pluripotential space where art can emerge. allowing for a state-of-flow to come knocking by; lives creating in public together are extremely dangerous to the status quo. safe space, freedom, creation, invitation;
#poiesis & TAZs
* open the TAZ
* abandon yourself to a state of flow
* create, create, create (#poiesis)
any form of creation: when done publicly represents danger to Empire because it necessarily breaks the fabric of sameness, of the abhorrent Spectacle, and irrupts literature. when this tactics of opening a TAZ for gaining safe space for pure creation is done collectively, there is nothing that can stop us.
ale
PS> adding Rob, from the Direct Action Flaneurs. long time i wished to put MacLean and Rob in the same temporary space of this thread!
[∞]
Hey All:
Well said, Ale. One TAC (temporary autonomous caveat) though—and it’s one that Andrea (copied on this message) has been struggling with and trying to spark more dialogue on: how does the temporary spark something permanent. Yes, any temporary distortion in the totalizing movement of capital (which we call capitalism) is a threat to the dominant system. But, unless we are opening so many temporary autonomous zones that it becomes an increasingly futile game of whack-a-mole for the authorities, they learn how to cope.
So, a few key questions:
how to grow? how to give people a sense of empowerment.
how to keep hope alive? how to give people enduring momentum and connection and the vision of minuscule incremental change
how art can be so powerful that it is action, that it embodies social change? how simply experiencing something can be doing something without knowing you’re doing it.
how to make change specific and concrete without getting sidetracked into specialized policy issues tied to bureaucracy and rules.
Onward!
Rob
[∞]
Fellows, this is only what’s on my mind this morning, which is not so bad, because I’m doing excellent stuff over in the other corner. What follows is no commentary on anything anyone has written in the thread, which is so profound as to make one’s soul ache and vibrate.
Baudrillard:
The social void is scattered with interstitial objects and crystalline clusters which spin around and coalesce in a cerebral chiaroscuro. So is the mass, an in vacuo aggregation of individual particles, refuse of the social and of media impulses: an opaque nebula whose growing density absorbs all the surrounding energy and light rays, to collapse finally under its own weight. A black hole which engulfs the social.
[In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities]
The masses IMHO to mobilize are a myth and mythos, and an ouroboros. Bukowski had a nice poem about the average and hate’s perfection:
So,
I’m learning a lot from you all, but also my 6.5 month-old son…Whatever anyone else might be thinking of, I only want to make great and even greatest most brilliant art so fantastic the viewer falls to her knees to weep with joy & the only noise she can utter in her stupefaction is beautiful natural poetry and I’m sure this is not ambition, after 30 years + it is a gift and a charter & I am not interested in the therapeutic nature of the exchange so much as I am dedicated to infusing all of me into it until there is not even a mote of dust left of what I might have once thought I was, which is not art, either///
We have much advice from wise people [Tao te Ching, eg] on how to cope with corruption of the people and our institutions. If we are discussing this much, we have choices, as to what we [each of us, and all together, or at least somewhat] could conceive to do, and no certainty at all of the outcome, over time. … I have to stop now, but let’s all do something fantastic and unexpected today, something memorable. Something with and of love.
Some kind thing.
some gift.
love,
p
[∞]
