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Sinopale 5 (Sinop Biennale)

Concept

by Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with T. Melih Görgün

12 July 2014 to 31 August 2014. Opening 19 July 2014

Clusters and Crystals: Observing at Point Zero

The 5th edition of Sinopale – International Sinop Biennial under the common title “Clusters and Crystals: Observing at Point Zero” will take place in Sinop, Turkey, from 12 July to 31 August 2014.

Building on its long-term, sustainable micro-political and emancipatory efforts as organizer of Sinopale, The European Cultural Association in co-operation with a team of international curators responsible for the selection of artists and the programming, take a pragmatic and functional collective approach to its exhibition, events and their thematic and discursive direction in order to generate a format of cross-cultural exchange with the local context.

Sinopale is an event-driven, process and site oriented biennial. It is important to us to emphasize its experimental character which encourages art practices to bring forth new modes of production, experience and circulation between the field of art and daily life, inspired by locality and its place. Sinopale consists of a multitude of events of different formats. The main Biennial exhibition takes place in the Hal market hall, in the old prison as well as various alternative venues. Simultaneously, in no hierarchy to the exhibition, ephemeral performative events spill out into the entire town of Sinop. In addition, a program of open-air film screenings, the educational programs of the Sinopale summer academy, Sinopale Kids, and workshops are open to a broad audience and communities.

We would like to emphasize the exhibition value of art and remain operative in building the horizontal structure of the aesthetic events, which display the value of direct presentism articulating a space of potentialities within the place and complexity of the town of Sinop. Sinopale blooms in this Biennial summer to bring together art practices in sharing, commonality, difference and knowledge as a space of aesthetic, social and political practices, as well as non-knowledge, which can be seen as the other direction of the same process, which is lived and learning experience of the knowledge of a specific place. Such presentist value is common to art and history, which are both spatial and non-linearly organized.

We undertake to Observe at Point Zero drawing on the genealogy of a method in which “no universal cartography exists” [1] in order to open up a field of generative pragmatics in which art practices can be seen as transversal tools for social change that can dissolve in the existing context as they externalize and modulate it and can productively cast new bridges to reconnect the land-space-town. Clusters and Crystals both refer to our immaterial and environmental commons and the “immeasurability of the common, which constitutes the very fabric of the making and unmaking of being.” [2]

With ethnographic and archeological enthusiasm, we explore the material traces of clouds and clusters of knowledge formations and their embodiments and metamorphoses in the local, and inquire how values crystallize and can be stocks of energy and provisions. Marx refers to commodities as “crystals of this social substance [i.e., human labor] which is common to them all, they are values – commodity values.” The crystal is the ideal model for a potential energy store. It alludes to the general law of transformation and conservation of energy.

Energy is never lost or gained, but only transformed from one form to another. One of the concerns of contemporary physics is how to store energy, since energy has the tendency to change its form and dissipate. This transformation phenomenon relates to the flows of physical energy and social energy and labor, which produce reality in their processual interaction. The energy of a space perpetuates the affective nature of the substantial reality of the space, as space is a product of energy, and in its turn, space produces energy, back and forth. Observing at Point Zero explores the relation between energy and knowledge within space/place and time.

Mapping – with functionalist diagramatization we draw the sketches of joy’s future

Applying the method of functionalist diagramatism we draw sketches of ‘a joyous future,’ a leap into qualitative spatial practices, taking advantage of its two-fold character which presupposes that one be at the same time ‘analyzer’ and ‘inventor-creator.’ To this end, we trace social and aesthetic pragmatics, which is the same as tracing a performance, taking on a ‘performative’ position, putting them on the map, or mapping local competence, which consists of both material and immaterial elements from which collective enunciations can emerge.

As Félix Guattari says, “maps are themselves like laboratories where experimentations on tracing are set in interaction.” [3] They constitute at once social analytical, aesthetic and political practices. Mappings are event-driven processes that open up potentialities from which arise diagrammatic effects capable of bringing forth their own semiotics which cannot be simply reduced to any kind of totalization, fixation or chronology, but involve other non-human flows in social, biological, poetic, cosmic and other registers – signals and voices. The map provides many ways of inventing a multitude of modulated becomings, an expression of the multiplicity of exits which are the map’s nature. It is an instrument for organizing exits and flights, both aesthetic and scientific, art, and theory oriented. It can always be inverted, rotated or re-evaluated, which opens up the system of diagrammatic propositions to new and non-localizable connections of transformational trajectories, which are new a-signifying diagrammatic coordinates that express the passion of creating individuated fields. [4]

Observing at Point Zero – an analytico-polemic and aesthetico-productive practice

We take the risk to focus our emancipatory efforts into looking. The classical perspective, in which the viewing point is a hole – a peephole [5] – presupposes observation from the outside into the mirroring (or reflexive) surface. It is constructed around the theoretical identity between viewpoint and vanishing point in geometrical symmetry. It contains the hidden assumption that the vanishing point is the goal of vision, which has the capacity, through its opening and closure, to offer a virtual space of temporality – an automated space of attraction that mesmerizes the eyes of the viewer, and fixes the gaze. It is not by accident if Michel Foucault, in his opening chapter of The Order of Things, [6] asks us to pay attention to the importance of looking in the production of the space of knowledge, the space of objective reflections arising from the relations of geometrical fixed points and their symbolic expression.

Point Zero is not appointed to discover a new Super Nova. It means expanded ‘Unfashionable Observations,’ [7] an untimely analytico-polemic and aesthetic-productive practice of a new form of vision based on ‘a 360-degree circumspection’ [8] that gives a critical and historical account of the observation process different from classical perspective, undoing the symmetry. When it comes to immaterial mental things, the ‘doctrine of categorization’ does not apply – they are part of presence, and need other methods if they are to be grasped. Observing at Point Zero means working in an emergency, in order to overstep the limit and undertake an operative and diagrammatic practice of microcosmic and molecular pragmatism because of needs, not of lack. It can be characterized as spatial, as the environmental and substantial practice of a thousand eyes, a mixer of all possible perspectives and their mobile points, a singularized kaleidoscopic machinic eye which brings a new relationship between sensual experience and perception, unconscious and consciousness, between commons, community and difference.

Observing at Point Zero is not only a method proposing new multiplied ways of looking at the world. It means to be-in-the-world, not to be-in-front-of-the-world, a conception of the world in which a center does not exist. This new, unstable asymmetrical configuration shifts continuously, but goes beyond the distinction between activity and passivity. It means drawing a paradoxical spatial figure or diagramatization in simultaneity, like someone who can be at once in front and behind the curtain, as a double. Doubled like me and my other, doubled like same and same/different, like two exotic quarks from the zoo of subatomic particles exhibiting the same properties, identical mass, but different electric charge [– and +]. Or like identical twins, or Kafka’s two bureaucrats which are actually agents or virtual objects that activate the system of mental processes. Or like the elusive electron in the two-slit experiment, which according to the tunneling effect or wave form aspect will exhibit a diffraction pattern as it goes through both slits at once, but if one observes which slit it goes through, it entirely changes its behavior and shows only its particle form aspect, as it then goes through only one of the slits.

Such a diagrammatic way of looking plays into daily life as well. In the spontaneity of the child encountering reality and cutting it in fragments that reorganize its surrounding. In the anxiety of the farmer on the field watching clouds appear against a blue sky. In the fisherman on the open sea seeing the storm coming. In the curiosity of the scientist observing the stars of the night sky and just discovering that the sun and earth lie in the suburbs of the Milky Way. In the innocence of the poet looking at the green bursting of leaf-buds.

In this regard, we are interested in all the imperceptible ways of the experience of looking at mental phenomena with one’s eyes closed, not dissimilar to the ‘oceanic’ feeling of religious experience of the mystic with her view turned into herself, or to the animated steps on the path of the sleep-walker, de-automatizing the way that one looks at reality and all its phenomena. De-automatizing differentiates the mechanical aspects of perception from ideation and mental processes, in that “perception indicates the grasping of an object, ideation the relationship formed between consciousness and an object” [9] and the flows of the machinic unconscious.

How to develop molecular perceptions and why

Observing at Point Zero is a practice of diagramatization, which aims to develop a molecular perception, which in its in-betweenness not only observes data, but is an activity of ideation, operative in all creative aspects of a generative practice. It opens up towards the aesthetic, political, and historical ontological horizon of the event. The space in-between – within and outside the universe – is the passage whose nature it is to link and connect, which makes the process of such observation invisible to an outside observer. When it comes to the exploration of invisible phenomena, this is the most prominent observation that one can undertake.

The experience in-between constitutes a fantastic and plastic space, an impersonal field of individuation entirely produced by the relations of collective needs and acting matter. “From the most fantastic possible to the most irreversible materialization” as a constitutive collective practice it produces the world as an open ended dynamic activity and multiplicity within its historical and political horizon, where “everything in between is possible.” [10] This field of individuation is a space of liberation and alternatives from which new realities emerge via their metabolization, the substantial and effectual reality of one’s own thought, a space traversed by productive flows, where things are themselves historical because they are fluid and undefinable – that is ‘pure’ energization of the social field by the power of living knowledge and living subjectivity.

It means to vectorize political sequences and take orientation, as a ‘possibilitization’ and multiplication of stratifications and circulation of (a-signifying) particles that are neither subjects nor objects – pure quanta of potential deterritorialization which are the building blocks of the universe, the very same we are ourselves made of. They retain the power to effect ruptures, as they traverse the real world in a critical fashion, and encompass the creative historical ontological horizon of all “collective matter that acts in history.” [11] This is an act of both imagination and creation, with the whole vital energy of resistance of poetic and theoretical thought, whose reference points come from and follow real social connections.

A method of freeing energy – charting onto the void

Observing at Point Zero shares some similarities with Writing Degree Zero, [12] but is a different peculiar method of freeing up zero-point energy, which is to achieve the impossible. Zero-point energy is also the residual energy of the void. As scientists hypothesize, the energy of the universe remains zero in the balance between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravity. Zero energy density is microcosmic and substantial – primary matter. Observing at Point Zero is a practice of charting onto the void, diagrammatizing the void as the opposite of nothingness. It is the alternative to the void, a plenum. It means a practice that positively opens up to fullness, to the flows of materials, a practice of continuous construction of space for life as a presence constituted in plenitude. Such a conceptualization of substances and their metabolistic presence in matter gives us the possibility to approach being as a bio-political figure. “That is what the biopolitical production of the multitude consists in: stretching itself out from fullness to emptiness so as to fill the void” [13] to extend and intensify the ontological practice of the appearance of a deterritorializing line of flight.

Astrophysicists state that when an event occurs within the boundary of the event horizon of the black hole, that event cannot reach an outside observer, making it impossible to determine if such an event has indeed occurred. In Observing at Point Zero, we allude to the effect of the event horizon of the black hole, which means such an observation takes different focal points out of their symmetry. In such an observation the observer takes place and takes part in the field of observation without critical distance, i.e., not from a privileged standpoint with representative and symbolic arguments with respect to an object, blurring the boundaries between the knowing subject and known object. Such a position in-between is to be present and to be located, which always calls for an aesthetic event with its polemic presentism. Such presentism creates a new space or a field, in which “subjectivation as a process, and ‘Self’ as a relation (a relation to oneself) […] a relation of a force to itself” [14] occur, and political and aesthetic practices of subjectivity can take place. “Subjectivation isn’t even anything to do with a ‘person’: it’s a specific or collective individuation relating to an event (a time of day, a river, a wind, a life…). It’s a mode of intensity, not a personal subject.” [15]

Black holes: the event horizon as cosmic vault from where there is no return – the eternal return as phantasm

Scientists describe black holes with their potential for catastrophe as a gravitational collapse giving rise to a mathematically defined surface called the event horizon that marks a point of no return, from the inside of which not even light can escape, and to a distortion of the uniformity of space-time relations following Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory. Black holes are perfect cosmic vaults, reservoirs for meaningless matter – strongly condensed space which shows the mathematical appropriation of space by contemporary science.

Félix Guattari invents the subjective black hole of the micro-political of the social space. In order to understand how its function is reorganized therein, how centrifugal forces can mix matter and substance and inspire our collective creativity in action, one can take a look at the holes in the face with their triangularity. We propose this time to concentrate on the mouth, to evoke the vision of an abyss – the mouth of darkness that can swallow, but also open to say a word, to speak, to leave a trace, to trace a secret upon the space, or perform work in common, communicate forms of utterances which are graphic over phonic, as the voices pass through space and bodies and possess them, resonating at times in a polyphonic echo. What can be cast against the void, and what can pass the threshold of reality and return back? In this line of thought, we ask how the eternal return can be evoked from the vacuum.

This eternal return is not the reversal of an event but its eternal return as a phantasm, which is the condition for the imaginary that Foucault calls our “non-human otherness,” with all its immaterial and dreaming aspects and virtual objects that create machinic movement, “a consciousness that is firmly anchored in the existing world, thus allowing for a form of doubling to occur by making the imaginary appear against the backdrop of that very reality.”[16] This phantasm is in fact not a return but induces an irreversible inversion of pure becoming, as a constant progression of subjectivity that reveals and deploys itself in the space, and grows with the space. Our essential experience of reality is growth – for example, the inflation of the universe in constant progression. How is this entangled with the immanent growth of our responsibility and practices of political subjectivity, and how can it be opposed to the inflation of the black holes of the economic crisis with their financialization, mediatization, securitization and gentrification of our existential conditions? How can it counter the distortions of our realities? Such effort explores the open-ended dependencies, embraces all doubles and ambiguity of meaning and history, which is actually dispersed into our (essential) nonhuman otherness that always embraces me and the other as a positive and affirmative position of all mixed perspectives to grasp the idea of a fourth dimensions.

How to invert the negativity of the crisis – subjective resonance as the echo of the social black hole

We all face the environmental crisis and the crisis of worldwide economy that turns abstractions into a flood of liquid that threatens to drown us. The different dimensions of the global crisis permanently hit the locality, accelerating entropic processes under the negative impact of its gravity, which captures and freezes the positive energy produced by all of us, singularly and collectively. This leads to the exhaustion of productive forces and enclosures of subjectivity for unidirectional economic benefits, and has a destructive impact on the conditions of re-production of the social bond, at a continuously rising social and environmental cost.

The question is how we can turn the negativity of the crisis into a positive within the ontological horizon of the event of the creative act provoked by the double bind. [17] Our creative activity can erupt in an ephemeral monument with the doubleness of its explosive ground zero that can trigger an irreversible transformation process with the capacity to invert the repression into creation and invention. In an emergency we have to collectively learn how to reorganize the forces to invert the crisis into productive and co-operative work. Observing at Point Zero means to learn to use the contradictions of the doubleness of the crisis to create a boomerang effect from the perspective of the ‘real’ context, which means intervening on the plane of micropolitics, involving all creative flows of rhythms, inductions, viscosities.

Subjective resonance is the echo of a black hole, in Félix Guattari’s conception, [18] which opens the threshold of reality for the passage of creative chaos with its dynamic flows of exchange connecting past and future in order to produce a substantial present, through which all active and positive energizing quantitative and creative matter flows. This milieu in which all singularities are plunged, constitutes their difference, and common resources which can induce a broader re-distribution of knowledge and power. The forces of the ocean of creative chaos diffuse the network of power through weak forces and quantum fluctuations. It is the materia prima from which we can cut off a piece to produce a space, to compose it as an aesthetic paradigm of organization by giving it a form, putting into operation a diagrammatic practice. It is a space/place that holds our concrete scaffolding, not giving support because it is cloudy and fuzzy like discursive formations, but able to constitute reality.

The Degree Zero of Learning – an organizing pattern encompassing living and non-living matter

Observing at Degree Zero forms a pattern of resonance with zero-learning [19] as “hysteresis,” [20] which displays the learning capabilities and memory patterns of non-organic matter, as exhibited in the experiments with non-organic assemblages that result in Chladni figures – metal plates covered with dust interacting with a violin bow or a stick reorganize the dust in figures and “remember” what patterns of vibration they were made to produce yesterday, so that those patterns can be more easily produced today.

Zero-learning changes the definition of “learning” or “in-formation,” which cannot be attached as a property only to living matter, but determines physical changes that can be defined as learning within the organism, or any other system composed of organic and nonorganic fragments or elements, and their ecology or machinic existence, their circuits of exchange between their different fragments and networks. It encompasses and organizes together living and non-living matter: “nonorganic learning or learning by systems containing complex combinations of organic and nonorganic components.” [21] The concept can be extended to the sociology of Bruno Latour as presented in Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. [22] According to Karl Pribram, the hysteresis of resonance patterns applies to memory itself, which is “at least in part, achieved by something like hologram formation in the brain. A ‘mental hologram’ is […] a complex, four-dimensional pattern of resonance in a three-dimensional neural network.” [23]

Minor forms of learning – concrete resistance

Here we would like to refer to Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, [24] which opens a process of self-valorization and self-determination from which we have much to learn. It gives us instruments not only to reconstruct our common wealth, but also to invent new forms of solidarity as a quality of relations that can produce new commons. This requires a profound transformation of our attitudes to the care of the self as self-responsibility, i.e., responsibility to social relations constituting both aesthetics and politics, “from which countless waves ripple outward into other domains” [25] concerning entire re-productive fields and forces. The other important question that arises is how we can recognize history as the principle of a collective project of sharing and solidarity, not oriented to the past but to the future. Such practices are cooperative work, involving education and learning, not only as responsibilities to each other but responsibility toward the earth, the forest, the sea, the air, and immaterial commons, like knowledge and subjectivity.

In order to produce new statements we do not start from ‘the great politics’ but from a process that was marginal at first, from the minor forms, with the argument that the minor implies the concrete. Hence there is no panoramic view of human conditions. Nonetheless, paradoxically, minor forms can never be outside history, because they are concrete resistance, and as such produce history. Minor learning processes provide the major movement of thoughts, its vital energy. Learning concerns all living matter and systems of interaction of human and non-human networks, following Bateson’s lesson that we can learn from everything around us, from a dog, from a stone, from a child.

All of us are in a life-long learning process, which is the main property of all living matter, necessary to its survival and adaption to a specific environment. Learning is life’s organizing and self-corrective practice, responsible for generating internal qualities and extensions. It is a metabolistic practice of aesthetic existence of autopoetic machines (Humberto Maturana) [26] and their paradoxical poetic attachment to the present realities that permeates the whole of life as a narrative flow in bursts of serial aesthetic impulses of creative resistance. Aesthetics as an organizing principle comprises the co-existence of what is mutually exclusive in power, to create context and learn from it. It is the passion to individuate fields of singularization and location. In other words, the minor movements of our desires to learn are a first step toward a major vitalist thinking.

We want to approach freedom as a concept of a new invention that is not consumerism or a good, but stays on the side of creation, of creative fulfillment. Freedom and responsibility are mutual to each other. The more freedom we gain, the more reciprocally our responsibility grows, in rhythmic steps, one for freedom, the next for responsibility. We have to cultivate our gardens and fields, to stoically wait for them to bear fruit, which is inseparable from our immediate passion to decolonize our thinking to imagine and create new existential territories. In this process, how can we be governed by our pragmatic needs and directly address our day-to-day living by inventing new styles of life? Michel Foucault’s statement of ‘life as a work of art’ [27] refers us to a form of aesthetics of existence, to a life in which one exists not as a subject, but as a work of art.

Ruptures and passions for renewal – how to reconstruct the quality of daily life

This century is one of ruptures and passions for renewal, from South to North, from East to West and back in a flux of extraordinary pulsations and intensifications. The deterritorializing flow of energizations passes through these ruptures to cross the abyss of the crisis and constitute the present, and vitalize and allow breeding new sensibilities, new intelligence, a new generosity. We would like to ‘engineer’ the gears of a motor of desiring deterritorialization that can animate various levels of reality to take part in the capture of the ‘inexhaustible unconscious wealth’ in the hope of re-inventing life. We have to pay attention to these ruptures which occur with ever increasing strength, proliferate and bifurcate – new revolutions, new independence, new alternatives with their ecologicalstrategies – and strive to induce new relations between the communities and governmental techniques. There is a pragmatic need for intensified diagrammatic lessons to constitute new alliances between the re-productive and political forces. Let us call it the right of re-production of the community, and life itself.

The diagrammatic proposition of revolutionary passions has the potentiality to open up new evolutionary trajectories, to permeate with all this creative potentiality every aspect of life and to go back to the solidity of daily life with its prosaic rhythms. Let us use our desires and passion to re-construct the quality and consistency of our daily life. In the sense not only of putting our flesh on the lonely skeleton of truth in order to build a new concrete in some future, but to keep the two-folded character of the event and its potentiality for rupture in order to construct a present harbor that will give a space for peacefullife, which has to be a real enjoyable co-operative invention that provides great conditions for swimming in the ripples of the water under the gentle sun, lying down on its warm stones in our leisure time. We urgently need both, the refrain of our working days and all the free time we can enjoy after work.

From the beginning of these processes we need a rock upon which we can construct reality, [28] an adaptive and resistive reality. We also need all quantitative creative material and singular numbers that encompass the whole quality and quantity of life which comes from the bio matrix and biopower, as a positive affirmation of life in all its forms. Gregory Bateson determines that value in biology is not a linear function, but a matter of an optimum which is extremely local. What is good in one situation can be toxic in another. He contrasts this with the world of political economy: “This characteristic of biological value does not hold for money.” [29] This connects to Deleuze’s analysis of the bio matrix, in which he defines biopower as “the truth of embryology.” [30] The larva’s need of transformation comes as a potentiality and power from inside and cannot be stopped. The larval subject of the creative revolution is the production of subjectivity as a ‘biopolitical being’ in an active ‘transformative transvaluation’ of all strata through a microcosmic vitalism which gives a new meaning to life.

Learning as a process of change – knowledge of a space

We are interested in bringing together this year at Sinopale forms of art that induce a common awareness very much connected with ‘learning.’ Learning as a process of change comprises both learning and unlearning, some would say gaining in-formation from and feeding back into that environment, to develop extensions “already covered by qualities,” e.g., knowledge, living knowledge, all the common knowledge that we need to invent common notions to deploy a politics of the common, both singularly and collectively produced, that can connect. Which means that we strive to define a field of knowledge of place where we can come together, which determines both the commons of a project and a project of the commons. We are interested in that knowledge able to resist, because resistance can be understood as a productive practice in common in all its ecological domains, both a poetic paradox of substance and theoretical thought, as an ontological practice and biopower.

The creativity we put in our care and work can bring together craftsmanship, which is under long-term pressure from corporate post-industrial mass production and tends to disappear, with contemporary artistic practices in their heterogeneous singularities of affective presence and effectual reality. We ask how the exchange between them can give an account of the imaginary faculty with its realist horizon, the most prominent faculty of the extraordinary school of life in which the creative potentiality of learning can unfold as a self-activating entity to empower minor educational strategies that can be all the more effective that they emerge from their own context, produced in their environment for that environment.

This edition of Sinopale is entirely dedicated to taking care of minor forms of learning, to supporting alternative community education and providing equal access to art and knowledge produced on site. With this we hope to increase the awareness of the present, in favor of a social development respectful of and inspired by ecologies, which can draw on and re-evaluate that knowledge that has been marginalized, excluded, and forgotten, and recycle wasted materials to give them new life and functions.

Text: Dimitrina Sevova in collaboration with T. Melih Görgün

– Revolution of Forms (http://www.revolutionofforms.com)
– Village Institutes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Institutes)
– Bauhaus (http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus)
Common Spaces, Artist Initiatives, Public Projects, Development Projects
Common Ideological Spaces or Survival Strategies
Collecting the Future (http://collectingthefuture.europist.net/).