New Page — MARC LAFIA

Participation The Project for Collective Becoming/The Society of Individuals
marc lafia
(read through Lygia Clarke, Claire Bishop, Relational Aesthetics, Precariousness, Hal Foster, Giorgio Agamben, and Brian Holmes)

1.
If we look at the proliferation of collaborative art practices today, it seems that many no longer have the oppositional and anti-authoritarian punch they had in the late 1960s and 1970s – when radical theatre, community arts and critical pedagogy emerged in opposition to dominant modes of social control. Today participation is used by business as a tool for improving efficiency and workforce morale; it is all pervasive in the mass-media in the form of reality television; and it is a privileged medium for government funding agencies seeking to create the impression of social inclusion. Collaborative practices need to take this knot of conventions on board if they are to have critical bite.

It would argue that the best socially collaborative art does not derive from a superegoic injunction to "love thy neighbor," but from the position of "do not give up on your desire." In other words, pursue your unconscious desire, as far as you can.
https://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php

2.
So what are we looking for?
'Rethinking the conventions of participation, which are today somewhat orthodox.'

3.
Looking for what's rotting:
The inner disgust, appetite
We have only to look at the new French extremity in cinema, the new brutalism (Briallet, etc..)
Excess (Artaud, Grotowski, Beck, Bataille…)

4.
Perhaps experimental living situations that will help us understand our place in the world

5.
An outbreak of mass surrealism

6.
Genuine participation of citizens in the processes of political will-formation
Within the "confusion" of ruling elites and the "violence" of global capital and the neoliberal battle cry "There is no such thing as society.'

6a.
To examine Authenticity, individuality, difference, and rebellion

7
To get close to our bodies, perceptions and senses to dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of the body

8.
"To think about the body energized is to think about discarded body practices in the West. It is to think about how body-energetics is a concept radically refigured with the constitution of modernity and Enlightenment to become something exclusively physical. There are no spiritual, immanent, or transcendental energies allowed to operate within the discourse of subjectivity in modernity. There are only physical energies - which are the relentless subject of policies, regulations, medicine, and war.
http://www.in-transit.de/2004/content/en/productions/lab.html

9.
To revisit Lygia Clarke
'They consist of nothing else but the use by others, according to certain rules determined by the artist, of various easily replicated props - such as a pebble and a plastic bag filled with one's own warm breath and tied with a rubber band. (This becomes a "proposition" only when one places the pebble on the corner of the inflated bag, letting it sink in a bit, and maintains the precarious equilibrium by gently holding the bag with both hands: The slightest pressure makes the pebble pop up and down, like a fisherman's bob
ArtForum, Jan, 1999 by Yve-Alain Bois

9a
Clark, by contrast, defined the concept of endless space as a succession of paradoxical relationships to be directly experienced in the body. Her propositions acknowledged the coexistence of opposites within the same space: internal and external, subjective and objective, metaphorical and literal, male and female. For Clark, the radical new space of the Möbius strip called for new forms of production and communication impossible to explore within traditional artistic categories and practices.
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

10.
To really look and be with others
"In some way we come to exist in the moment of being addressed," Judith Butler writes, "and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails." In "Precarious Life" (2004), her brief essay on Emmanuel Levinas, Butler explores the notion of "the face," which the French philosopher poses as the very image of "the extreme precariousness of the other." "To respond to the face, to understand its meaning," Butler argues, "means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself."
https://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_48/ai_n56388185/?tag=content;col1
Precarious: Hal Foster on the art of the decade
ArtForum, Dec, 2009 by Hal Foster

11.
1 came to the term precarious via Thomas Hirschhorn, and many of his projects, such as Musee Precaire Albinet, staged in the Aubervilliers banlieue of Paris in 2004, are very much to the point here; his sometime collaborator the French poet Manuel Joseph has also used the term, in a short text on la precarite "as a political and aesthetic apparatus." (8) Yet what I want to underscore in the word is already present in the OED: "Precarious: from the Latin precarius, obtained by entreaty, depending on the favor of another, hence uncertain, precarious, from precem, prayer." This implies that this state of insecurity is not natural but constructed--a political condition produced by a power on whose favor we depend and which we can only petition. To act out the precarious, then, is not only to evoke its perilous and privative effects but also to intimate how and why they are produced--and thus to implicate the authority that imposes this antisocial contract of "revocable tolerance" (as Joseph puts it). The note of entreaty is largely lost in the English word, yet it is strong in the installations I mentioned above. (9) Sometimes it is mournful (as in Gober and Chan), sometimes desperate (as in Kessler, Wallinger, and Genzken), but in all instances this importunate quality implies that the entreaty carries the force of accusation as well--an attesting to the violence done to basic principles of human responsibility.
from
https://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_4_48/ai_n56388185/?tag=content;col1
Precarious: Hal Foster on the art of the decade
ArtForum, Dec, 2009 by Hal Foster

7.
“It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbors in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows”
(RA, p. 45). This DIY, microtopian ethos is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of relational aesthetics.

7a.
But moving beyond the 'scenarios' of relational aesthetics we call for a participation that is performed for its rewards and perhaps even more so its deceptions and delusions its hidden agendas, its covert political subtexts.

8.
Some argue this is not enough
As art
As critique
As being
As being engaged
As becoming

9.
We want a body unbecoming
Art like a building:
Work of art as a (un-designed) system.
Art like a society:
Art describes a social context like a (designed) system.
We want an unbecoming. A collective vomiting. An emphasize of the fluidity of life.

10.
How do you make something that is woven into the practice of daily life—not just something on a screen that you click through and then forget? Something that is more than information, content? The issue is one of substance, agency, and form.

How are we something more than identikits reworked and reconstituted through information networks through apparatuses?

11.
By forming to critique and understand the self-becoming in the network but through the body.

12.
The body and its body politic, the politic, the apparati that shape the body.

13.
To live past and through the shaping of the formal and architectural processes of the global body and sense shaping.

14
To understand these limits
To accommodate these limits
To exceed this limits
To explode this limits

15.
To become the being-protagonist to some kind of understanding - of the story, of the software, of the this layering of network and control – and something more.

16.
To pay a considered attention to the agency of things and the material manifestation of our being not to be taken for granted, or simply smoothed over, or rendered interoperable via the flat surfaces of computer displays.

17.
To do so, to gather reflect, commune, take action, invent being is to resist, and interrogate, the demands of digital culture.

18.
This interest in the contingencies of a “relationship between”—rather than the object itself—is a hallmark of Gillick’s work and of his interest in collaborative practice as a whole. This idea of considering the work of art as a potential trigger for participation is hardly new—think of Happenings, Fluxus instructions, 1970s performance art, and Joseph Beuys’s declaration that “everyone is an artist.”
*Claire Bishop, antagonism and relational aesthetics

19.
"Working online I oftentimes feel disconnected from my body, Half-engaged in a stream of weightless graphics and information, it’s easy to lose track of the screen’s physical parameters—and your own, says Erin Shirreff, recounting the familiar experience of restlessly navigating virtual space.

20
Not participation but embodiment, being bodies, knowing being as such.

This entire experience into which art flows, the issue of liberty itself, of the expansion of the individual's consciousness, of the return to myth, the rediscovery of rhythm, dance, the body, the senses, which finally are what we have as weapons of direct, perceptual, participatory knowledge . . . is revolutionary in the total sense of behavior … Helio Oiticica
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

21.
Umberto Eco, 'The Open Work' – The Open Body
In short, it installs a new relationship between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.

Eco regarded the work of art as a reflection of the conditions of our existence in a fragmented modern culture, while Bourriaud sees the work of art producing these conditions. The interactivity of relational art is therefore superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a “social form” capable of producing positive human relationships. As a consequence, the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect.
*Claire Bishop, antagonism and relational aesthetics

22
The principal virtue of this show lies in its understanding of the participatory dimension of Clark’s work. With this in mind, the curators (Manuel Borja-Villel, Nuria Enguita and Luciano Figueiredo) have made replicas of the jumpsuits, dust guards, masks, gloves and other utensils that Clark employed in order to combine sensorial exploration and therapy. The first floor of the Fundació Tápies was thus transformed into a laboratory of tactile, sensual experiments in which viewers could don masks and jumpsuits. Finally, it seems, Clark’s notion has been realised: that the festive, healing qualities of art overcome the importance of the artistic object, and that art serve the people.
https://www.frieze.com/issue/review/lygia_clark/

23.
Perhaps the work here is contemplation and being. And so to recover discover the body in us in others in bodies in space in the network. To rename agency to become agency.

24
Brazilian artists Lygia Clark (1920-1988) and Hélio Oiticica from different perspectives, they contributed to the development of an original vocabulary of interactivity. Clark, merging the body/mind duality, focused primarily on the subjective and psychological dimensions of sensorial experimentation, while Oiticica engaged in sensorial explorations involving social, cultural, architectural and environmental spaces.
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

25
Reality and artifice, structuring the event
On Jeremy Deller's "The Battle of Orgreave," which was a reenactment of a 1984 English miners' confrontation with police, complete with participation by a historical reenactment society...
"Their work joins a tradition of highly authored situations that fuse social reality with carefully calculated artifice," Bishop says of Deller and the others. Like Dadaism before them, they created "intersubjective relations (that) weren't an end in themselves but rather served to unfold a more complex knot of concerns about pleasure, visibility, engagement, and the conventions of social interaction."
https://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2006/07/socially_engage.php

26.
Clark and Oiticica questioned representation in art by examining ideas inherited from modern avant-garde movements--Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Suprematism and Concrete Art--that broke with mimesis and assumptions of realism. In the late 1950s, they reframed modernist notions of universal aesthetics by translating them directly into life and the body. Weaving a web of relationships around the body's internal and external spaces, they relayed a Modern European geometric abstract tradition to Brazilian vernacular culture. This syncretic process fused two very different traditions--a Western aesthetic canon that privileges vision and metaphysical knowledge, and Afro-Indigenous oral traditions in which knowledge and history are encoded in the body and ritual is profoundly concrete [3]. It must be noted that, in a true syncretic spirit, both traditions have always coexisted in Brazilian society at large, but it was not until Oiticica began working that this syncretism was methodically investigated in the visual arts.

Clark's and Oiticica's creations, as they changed the traditional role of the viewer and the status of the artistic object, confronting in the process the function of artistic institutions, redefined the identity of the artist and the idea of authorship. Emphasizing viewer participation and material precariousness, their works continue to resist being frozen in museum displays as relics of past actions. Their move from hard to soft and ephemeral materials clearly establishes a historical link to the current immaterial and software-based practices of electronic art.
https://www.leonardo.info/isast/spec.projects/osthoff/osthoff.html

26A.
It is primarily Boltanski and Chiapello's analytical division of the resistance movements of the sixties into the two strands of artistic and social critique that allows us to understand how the specific aesthetic dispositions and organizational structures of the flexible personality began to crystallize from the mid-1980s onward, to complete capitalism's recuperation of—and from—the democratic turmoil of the 1960s. https://www.16beavergroup.org/brian/

27.
An effective cultural critique
To be effective, a cultural critique must show the links between the major articulations of power and the more-or-less trivial aesthetics of everyday life. It must reveal the systematicity of social relations and their compelling character for everyone involved, even while it points to the specific discourses, images and emotional attitudes that hide inequality and raw violence. It must shatter the balance of consent, by flooding daylight on exactly what a society consents to, how it tolerates the intolerable. Such a critique is difficult to put into practice because it must work on two opposed levels, coming close enough to grips with the complexity of social processes to convince the researchers whose specialized knowledge it needs, while finding striking enough expressions of its conclusions to sway the people whom it claims to describe—those upon whose behavior the transformation of the status quo depends.

The Flexible Personality:
When it emerged in the late fifties, British cultural studies tried to reverse aesthetic hierarchies by turning the sophisticated language of literary criticism onto working-class practices and forms. Elevating popular expressions by a process of contamination that also transformed the elite culture, it sought to create positive alternatives to the new kinds of domination projected by the mass media. The approach greatly diversified the range of legitimate subjects and academic styles, thereby making a real contribution to the ideal of popular education.2 What is more, cultural studies constituted a veritable school on the intellectual left, developing a strategic intention. However, its key theoretical tool was the notion of a differential reception, or "negotiated reading"—a personal touch given to the message by the receiver. The notion was originally used to reveal working-class interpretations of dominant messages, in a model still based on class consciousness.3 But when the emphasis on reception was detached from the dynamics of class, in the course of the 1980s, cultural studies became one long celebration of the particular twist that each individual or group could add to the globalized media product. In this way, it gave legitimacy to a new, transnational consumer ideology.4 This is the discourse of alienation perfected, appropriated, individualized, ethnicized, made one's own.

With these last considerations we have obviously changed scales, shifting from the psychosocial to the geopolitical. But to make the ideal type work correctly, one should never forget the hardened political and economic frames within which the flexible personality evolves. Piore and Sabel point out that what they call "flexible specialization" was only one side of the response that emerged to the regulation crisis and recession of the 1970s. The other strategy is global. It "aims at extending the mass-production model. It does so by linking the production facilities and markets of the advanced countries with the fastest-growing third-world countries. This response amounts to the use of the corporation (now a multinational entity) to stabilize markets in a world where the forms of cooperation among states can no longer do the job."41 In effect, the transnational corporation, piloted by the financial markets, and backed up by the military power and legal architecture of the G-7 states, has taken over the economic governance of the world from the former colonial-imperialist structures. It has installed, not the "multinational Keynesianism" that Piore and Sabel considered possible—an arrangement which would have entailed regulatory mechanisms to ensure consumer demand throughout the world—but instead, a system of predatory investment, calculated for maximum shareholder return, where macro-economic regulation functions only to insure minimal inflation, tariff-free exchange, and low labor costs. The "military-industrial complex," decried as the fountainhead of power in the days of the authoritarian personality, has been superseded by what is now being called the "Wall Street-Treasury complex"—"a power elite a la C. Wright Mills, a definite networking of like-minded luminaries among the institutions—Wall Street, the Treasury Department, the State Department, the IMF, and the World Bank most prominent among them."42
What kind of labor regime is produced by this transnational networking among the power elite? On June 13, 2001, one could read in the newspaper that a sharp drop in computer sales had triggered layoffs of 10% of Compaq's world-wide workforce, and 5% of Hewlet Packard's—7,000 and 4,700 jobs respectively. In this situation, the highly mobile Dell corporation was poised to draw a competitive advantage from its versatile workforce: "Robots are just not flexible enough, whereas each computer is unique," explained the president of Dell Europe.43 With its just-in-time production process, Dell can immediately pass along the drop in component prices to consumers, because it has no old product lying around in warehouses; at the same time, it is under no obligation to pay idle hands for regular 8-hour shifts when there is no work. Thus it has already grabbed the number-1 position from Compaq and it is hungry for more. "It's going to be like Bosnia," gloated an upper manager. "Taking such market shares is the chance of a lifetime."
This kind of ruthless pleasure, against a background of exploitation and exclusion, has become entirely typical—an example of the opportunism and cynicism that the flexible personality tolerates.44 But was this what we really expected from the critique of authority in the 1960s?

The re-creation of an oppositional culture, in forms specifically conceived to resist the inevitable attempts at co-optation.47 The figure of the flexible personality can be publicly ridiculed, satirized, its supporting institutions can be attacked on political and economic grounds, its traits can be exposed in cultural and artistic productions, its description and the search for alternatives to its reign can be conceived not as another academic industry—and another potential locus of immaterial productivism—but instead as a chance to help create new forms of intellectual solidarity, a collective project for a better society. When it is carried out in a perspective of social transformation, the exercise of negative critique itself can have a powerful subjectivizing force, it can become a way to shape oneself through the demands of a shared endeavor.48
https://www.16beavergroup.org/brian/
For a New Cultural Critique, Brian Holmes

27A.
Exploitation, exclusion, cynicism, ruthless pleasure, co-optations, social transformations, subjectivizing forces, the art object, material precariousness, precarity, unfold a complex knot, excess, self becoming, to awake to the other, the other in me, ones own warm breadth – how do these come to meaning how do we come to be being?

28
The most striking projects
that constitute the history of participatory art unseat all of the polarities on which this
discourse is founded (individual/collective, author/spectator, active/passive, real life/art)
but not with the goal of collapsing them. In so doing, they hold the artistic and social
critiques in tension. Felix Guattari’s paradigm of transversality offers one such way of
thinking through these artistic operations: he leaves art as a category in its place, but
insists upon its constant flight into and across other disciplines, putting both art and the
social into question, even while simultaneously reaffirming art as a universe of value.
Jacques Rancière offers another: the aesthetic regime is constitutively contradictory,
shuttling between autonomy and heteronomy (“the aesthetic experience is effective
inasmuch as it is the experience of that and”12).
He argues that in art and education alike,
there needs to be a mediating object—a spectacle that stands between the idea of the
artist and the feeling and interpretation of the spectator: “This spectacle is a third thing, to
which both parts can refer but which prevents any kind of ‘equal’ or ‘undistorted’
transmission. It is a mediation between them. […] The same thing which links them must
separate them.”13 In different ways, Rancière and Guattari offer alternative frameworks
for thinking the artistic and the social simultaneously; for both, art and the social are not
to be reconciled or collapsed, but sustained in continual tension. *bishop

29
That the “political” and “critical” have become
shibboleths of advanced art signals a lack of faith both in the intrinsic value of art as a dealienating
human endeavor (since art today is so intertwined with market systems
globally) and in democratic political processes (in whose name so many injustices and
barbarities are conducted).20 But rather than addressing this loss of faith by collapsing art
and ethics together, the task today is to produce a viable international alignment of leftist
political movements and a reassertion of art’s inventive forms of negation as valuable in
their own right.21 We need to recognize art as a form of experimental activity overlapping
with the world, whose negativity may lend support towards a political project (without
bearing the sole responsibility for devising and implementing it), and—more radically—
we need to support the progressive transformation of existing institutions through the
transversal encroachment of ideas whose boldness is related to (and at times greater than)
that of artistic imagination.

30.
By using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological
status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it. As such, it has the
capacity to communicate on two levels—to participants and to spectators—the paradoxes
that are repressed in everyday discourse, and to elicit perverse, disturbing, and
pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations
anew. But to reach the second level requires a mediating third term—an object, image,
story, film, even a spectacle—that permits this experience to have a purchase on the
public imaginary. Participatory art is not a privileged political medium, nor a ready-made
solution to a society of the spectacle, but is as uncertain and precarious as democracy
itself; neither are legitimated in advance but need continually to be performed and tested
in every specific context.
Claire Bishop
Lecture for Creative Time’s Living as Form
Cooper Union, New York, May 2011

The Project for Collective Becoming/The Society of Individuals
Philosophy of Platform
Marc Lafia

What it is?
We are creating a series of global gatherings to introduce and connect people through sociability, philosophic revelry, enjoyment, reflection and action. It involves both private and public actions, projects of collaborations and solitude, including on the go projects, critical and cross media research and investigations that are site specific to places, groups and individuals.

Taking the experience of making films, online publishing, artist residencies, social media projects, emergent knowledge archives and teaching, and further them to create a platform to produce a new medium of encounter at the juncture of research and recordings.

The aim is to produce projects that bring its participants into a larger participation and awareness of context of the world. To create projects realized individually and collaboratively that give a relational sense of the all-at-once-ness of things.

The platform is a program to create and observe an emergent narrative in the distributed space of the personal and collective. To work at Self-transformation which involves self-destruction. Coming-to-be – passing-away. To be attuned to a beauty and value that lies precisely in its potential for unexpected flights, moments of self-reflection, and whimsy.

It is not about product not productivity. It is about being present to the particular and creating with the lightest touch a new kind of being space, a new kind of archive, a series of performative exercises to find the shape of ourselves in contact with varied realities.

The two (three) year project involves traveling to 15 countries, where a gatherings of 15 to 35 people get together for 3 days and through a series of exercises create a variety of mixed media works that in their aggregate create an index or portrait of a simultaneity of being in the world.

Part anthropology, performance art, documentary, happening, systems analysis, self-critique

The idea is to heighten the sense of being public and private, individual and collective. It is a desire is to create a series of maps, equations to visualize the mesh within our selves of overlapping system, for the project to map these on the go collectives as nodes in a global system to take an index of our contemporary environment.

To be in the presence of those moments, to get closer to our subjective and psychological states, to value and attune to those energies, to heighten those states.
It is attuned equally to reading and un-reading those systems and multitude of apparatuses that capture our sensorium, the digital, architectural, environmental.

The project is a tuning into the mapping of the inner and outer edges of ourselves, psychically, emotionally, and geographically.

What informs the project?
– The project is a call to re-evaluate the mental conditioning imposed on us by our technology and media, our internalize beliefs, our national beliefs. The bearings that give us our sense.

- The looking at our world and ourselves is shaped not just by ideas, but by the way we are habituated to perceive.

- Seeing the seeing in and of ourselves, our culture, our technologies, our sciences, our very status of being and becoming catalyses the project

- Want to produce new architectures of the social encounter, encounters no longer tethered by the familiar anchors of place, class, clique, place in the sexual hierarchy, or financial transaction. Or to see the very tethering of each and every encounter as necessary and irreversible.

-A call to imagine the future in terms of the repeated deconstruction and reconstruction of the “local” and the “subject,” and to actively discover the things that are “coming” and “forthcoming”.

Why we are doing it?
We want with each other to see our perception, to see the frameworks in which we see and apprehend the world.

We want to discover a new kind of being space, a new kind of archive, and shapes of ourselves in contact with varied realities.

We want to unfold our fictions and fact, our everyday with the invented, imagination and reality, our inner and outer selves, the stories that haunt us, the narratives in front of us.
In what context and how
Alone and in the social.

With ourselves, with our media.

In the media of the body, in the being of the body, in the body being, in the digital, the computational, and our global and networked world, we must begin to find new ways of living, new ways to produce experience, to have experience of being, to ask new questions:

In an age of digital proliferation, what becomes of our representations, our constructs of knowledge that are always already reproduced to infinity, always already iterating and undoing themselves?

With our constant contact with others in the network, where exactly is the place of experience of being with another, of being in love, of being a body politic?

What happens to individuality as we collectively create and curate ourselves within the global network?

As our world accumulates and proliferates images, and information, what new kinds of sense-making emerge? What kind of social body emerges? What kind of social agency can have voice and power?

Around these questions a network of individuals and collective actions will emerge coming together to investigate a state of things, their condition of being.

It is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, organizing and being in the world. The work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.

What is it that we are doing that others can do something with?
We want to create tools, contexts, models, methods, system, approaches – as much as works as much as just be,

The project explores, explodes, and performs these questions of systems and events, systems that create events that proliferate, produce, and organize the world.

We want to present the seeing and being of the world, that is this world and a possible new world.

Why a collective?
The collective puts into practice the social, conversational and distributed aspect of the network.

Only by gathering together to know ourselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net can we see ourselves.

As much as we insist on our individualism we are a social body, networks of social bodies and systems.

How it works
The process sets out a way to inhabiting and producing time, new ways to record observe and invent.

Drawing on exercises, instructions, scripts, images, readings, an ongoing group investigate their 'private lives', ‘private moments’, ‘friends’, ‘families’ and ‘governments’ ‘corporations’.

It is a being that reflects the new modes of personal recording, personal revelation.

Let’s say we know Federico in Rome, we meet in Rome with his creative friends and others. We set about to do 3 creative projects in the course of 4 days.

It is an event open to everyone, anyone that shows up. No applications, no reviews, no program, no show times.

Part workshop, part party, it is an accounting of things. We make a film, have a happening, a party and meet friends to discover each other’s agendas.

Over the course of traveling the world, the collective works of the events are put together in a film, online, in an exhibition.

What it is not
It’s not an art biennial, an academic conference, a spiritual retreat, a WTO protest, the tour-de-France

It’s not an
-An institution

-Glamming onto a cause
-That is there are no causes
-There are no performances no works proscribed a head of time
-No VIP dinners
-No spectatorship

This not a one to many, a speaker talking to people or exhibition with select artists, nor a residency - it's really very group focus, participation focus.

The group aims to mark and transcend worn-out and authoritarian models opting for playful and performative modes of being

Again what it is.
What it is
-An ongoing recording
-Discovery
-Listening
-Encountering
-Self-criticism
-Self-actualization

The project is about enacting, doing, becoming.

How it will work
Over the next two years groups of people yet known to each other will gather in 18 cities around the world. Their purpose is to discover each other, the places they live and the momentary beingness of being

Part performance, part research group, on the go performative troupes who self select themselves will gather in Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Tierra Del Fuego, the South Pacific, places all over the world. They gather to know themselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net.

Preparations before we met
-Invitations (ongoing)
-Locations a place to meet, a place to work
-A set of readings
-A set of instructions, a trajectory
-Coordinated online

How will people know about it?
We hope to create a method and perhaps even a movement.

To document and create varied works and touch points for people to connect.

-Art exhibitions
-Workshops
-Film festivals

Recordings, Performances, Videos are made from all 15 places around the world to create a ongoing index or snapshot of the state of things, year in and year out.
Some precedents for this include TEDX, The Living Theatre, the many art Biennales going on, Burning Man
A online archive of the project with readings, videos, images and project will be produced on an ongoing basis.

The project will continually put all its works online, including its methods and instruction and references. It will use its online site as an ongoing archive and communications point so that more and more groups can facilitate their own groups.

The project is based on a series of exercises, games and situations that heighten the participants sense of being, space and place. There are no spectators, no specialists and open to all. The time spent together is project based.
How to get involved
At given time we have different projects going. Have a look at our project list and see what interest you.

Themes
The projects explore the mythic and very real contrast of appetites and typologies of an international condition of globalization.
The body as a metaphor for political organization
Self-transformation was the logical outcome of self-caring
The global and local,
The mobility of language,
Multiple myths,
The simultaneity of things,
Philosophic reflections on infinity, the panoptic, the horizon,
Revolt, the post colonial,
Our networked conditions, control, space, language, art and cinema.
Gods and the death of gods;
The persistence of avarice, equally distributed in all men;
Carnival, festival; the intimacy of personal death;
The absent center;
Sex as theatre;
The simultaneity of difference;
The horizon and the notion of infinites;
Pirates
The transgressive as social becoming;
Revolutionary emblems;

Outlaws and in-laws;
The horizon and the infinite;
The sea;
Murder as the willfulness of assertion of being;
The imagination and real,
Adolescence; old age;
The panoptic as the collapse of the geographic horizon;
Control as the eradication of difference;
The horror of the void;
Cinema as an instrumental optic;
The Asylum and the moral instruction of normalcy;
The invention of moral order;
The theatre as a frame;
The social proscription of decorum;
Representation and artifice,
Cinema and its event.

Marc Lafia
Marc Lafia has created collectives of artistic groups as an artist and filmmaker, and distributed authoring environments as a software designer. He is taking this participatory approach of forming on-the-go collectives that investigate themselves into a multiyear global project to create a platform to focus on encounter as a medium at the juncture of research and recordings. The groups and projects are the production of encounters as simultaneously forging a present moment, a recording event and event of system of narration.
The group looks both to themselves and those around them to create and observe, and to question what is it to be, what is our social contract, the relation between the civic and the private.
His work brings together both computational and cultural ideas of distributed authorship, relational knowledge, repetition, difference, instructions, inscriptions, context and the self.
The group takes up the body, perception and being and the tools of cinema, network media, photography, urban design, the visual arts and information design in order to explore possibilities of the being and image, of narrative, of art, of knowledge and sense making, of media itself. The work and research is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, and organizing the world. The work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.