It is evident that artist-academics and those who value the role of an artist as an oppositional intellectual question the populist cultural politics and the “dumbing-down” ethos that prevails in our universities. We know that the post studio arts are as valuable as the humanities and the sciences, but they need to be understood within their socio-historical contexts. The unquestioned straight-jacketing of the contemporary arts within the traditional academic, research, and pedagogic paradigms is individually and institutionally denying us the opportunity to enhance our creativity and our intellectual life and is, critically, negating the possibilities of producing new publics.
Brad Buckley and John Conomos in Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD and the Academy
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The switchboard operator’s bad case of off-topic
I wander the web. Sometimes for hours on end. I read about something somewhere, then I click the links and move on somewhere else. Sometimes I read about something that interest me on one site, type a couple of phrases into Google, and move on, going wherever my fancy takes me. After a couple of hours I forget what started me on this wander in the first place.
Going off-topic
I had a primary school teacher named Mr Farebrother. He was also a character in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Mr Farebrother used to rattle on to us in class in a sort of stream of consciousness. He would famously go off-topic, constantly linking one thing to another, before he would stop and say, “Wait, what is it we are meant to be talking about, we’ve gone off-topic again.”
I loved that term. Off-topic. Offtopic. The guilty way he would say it. It sounded like a rare tropical disease that had suddenly broken out all over our skin. We would need to be rushed to the school nurse because we had suddenly gone offtopic.
As a 10-year-old I marveled at Mr Farebrother’s ability to go off-topic. He would wave his hands about like some sort of sorcerer conjuring up invisible chains that could link one thing to the next. We would start talking about mosquito larvae and end up talking about the dark side of the moon, yet it never felt we had jumped from one topic to the next, it was a smooth and seamless meander across the world of knowledge.
Off-topic is where I wanted to go. On-topic always felt like we were standing still. Stagnant. I wanted to wander out of the stuffy confines of the classroom into the buzzing laneways of the off-topic metropolis.
But I wasn’t allowed out. Off-topic wasn’t learning. Off-topic was wasting time. As I entered high school, I was coached into keeping on-topic in my examination essays. My essays would return with large blocks of text crossed out with red pen, sometimes accompanied with an ‘irrelevant’ scrawled next to the offending paragraphs, but more often than not, just a simple question mark. A question mark that queried why 19th century poetry was relevant to the escalation of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The switchboard operator
At art school I had a little more freedom, off-topic was even encouraged. My theory lecturer John Conomos would often say to us that as artists and thinkers of the 21st century, we needed to act as switchboard operators, taking up one idea and connecting to another idea across the other side of the board.
In his essay ‘The Moving Image and the Academy’ that was included in the catalogue to an exhibition I was featured in,’Who Do We think You Are’, Conomos elaborated on his imagery of the switchboard operator. Conomos says that a ‘mercurial interdisciplinary approach’ needs to be undertaken that resembles ‘Michel Serre’s multi-faceted comparativism that is based on the zig-zag pattern of a fly.’
This means having the inventive ability to traverse across many spaces of interference located between many different things making different connections. Serre’s distinctive indifference to temporal distance suggests that he can make unpredictable connections (all within the same time frame) between numerous authors, texts, genres and myths.
For Serres the past is never out of date nor is an artform like classical narrative cinema or video art: like Hermes (the operator who brings things together) Serre’s provocative concept of theory as a rapid reflexive time machine scanning texts and signs across different artistic, cultural and temporarl contexts implies a fluid capacity to treat complex subjects conceptualised to be the result of noise, chaos and chance with lightness, speed and simplicity.
We need to be switchboard operators across culture, space and time, border crossers without a passport, always questioning our own cultural baggage. Conomos (2005)
As I wander across the web I often remember these words of John Conomos. The era of instant information led to a vast scattering of knowledge. I always thought this new structure of knowledge, this surface knowledge, was similar to stretching across a spill. Knowledge had tumbled out of its containers. Jars that had sat on dusty shelves with labels stuck on, identifying this particular field of knowledge from that particular field of knowledge. In the past you could only open one jar at a time. Stay on topic. But now the jars have all tumbled off their shelves and we are left to play Twister in the puddle. Reaching one arm over here, splashing another leg over there. We attempt to join the big red dots and big yellow dots in the hope we can create a clear picture, but soon we collapse as we over reach. It was such a clumsy metaphor, in more ways than one, that I would always attempt to reframe my role as web wanderer as that of switchboard operator. As a switchboard operator I seemed to have some semblance of control.
When I began my PhD this year, the concept of finding a niche to specialise in terrified me. I had to make an ‘original contribution to knowledge’ and I felt it involved scouring the shelves of jars to find one jar that was still half empty. I could then get to work and fill it. Deep knowledge. On topic. It seemed arcane. The world isn’t like that anymore, those in the ivory towers have been usurped, for better or worse. So I decided to be a switchboard operator and work with what I know. Surface knowledge. Revel in the off-topic.
The danger is that the puddle will be too shallow.
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New Urbanism and Liquid Modernity
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry” (Ivan Chtcheglov -- Formulary for a New Urbanism)
Still from the 17-minute animated film Logorama made by the French collective H5.
In Formulary for a New Urbanism, the 1953 essay that inspired the Letterist International and the Situationist International, Chtcheglov conjures up an image of a rigid city where we need to ‘strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards’. He speaks of ‘mechanistic civilizations’ with ‘frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure’. A city of abstraction, ‘…inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye.’ A city of towers with toes dressed in cement shoes. Stuck. Sunk. Burdened by banalization. A city where everyone is ‘hypnotized by production and conveniences’. Chtcheglov proposes a new architecture to cure the city of this ‘mental disease’.A new architecture can express nothing less than a new civilization (Chtcheglov)
Chtcheglov’s ‘new architecture’ will ‘be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action.’ Chtcheglov may have been writing about architecture, about buildings and physical space, but the technological developments that he said would ‘make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality’ did not appear in the brick pits. The ‘new architecture’ that featured mobile houses mounted on tracks that could ‘go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening’ did not appear on wheels. The ‘new architecure’ appeared on telephone wires.
It was the new communication technologies that emerged in the late twentieth century, the internet, the mobile phone, wireless, and then the smart phone, that infiltrated ‘architectural space’ and extended it with ‘virtual space’. Chtcheglov’s city districts that would rise from the ‘new architecture’ did not appear in the urban environment, but the virtual environment. The Bizarre Quarter, the Sinister Quarter, and the Useful Quarter all appeared as communities online. Chtcheglov expects that ‘the main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING’ and that ‘the changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation’. Drifting online. Surfing online. Oozing online.
The new architecture in the virtual space was built for ‘speed, escape, passivity’ (Richard Sennett) and this allowed ‘the system and free agents to remain radically disengaged, to by-pass each other instead of meeting’ (Zygmunt Bauman). Chtcheglov argues that drifting ‘is a good replacement for a Mass,’ as ‘it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.’
This has led me to adapt the concept of drifiting -- the dérive, developed by Chtcheglov in Formulary for a New Urbanism, to the concepts outlined by Bauman in Liquid Modernity. It appears that the period of liquid modernity, the period of modernity we currently inhabit, is an opportune time to revive the dérive. Viva le dérive.
This a short film in which Ivan Chtcheglov speaks to camera. Made after his institutionalization. Provenance unknown.