OCCUPOLOGY, SWARMOLOGY, WHATEVEROLOGY: the city of (dis)order versus the people’s archive
i The archive, with its icy temperature and motionless repose, may seem like an unlikely place to begin thinking about Occupy Wall Street (OWS), a dynamic and still-unfolding phenomenon whose precise nature appears impossible to determine, let alone file away … READ MORE
Experimentation and Tradition: The Avant-Garde Play Pierrot Lunaire by Jikken Kōbō and Takechi Tetsuji
During the 1950s, after the devastating defeat in World War II, Japan exerted itself to regain political and economic confidence. Arts and culture played a key role in the country’s recovery: the image of a belligerent nation in the recent … READ MORE
Thek’s “As If”
“What is alive cannot signify—and vice versa.”[1. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 146.] Roland Barthes’s pithy thesis from his seminal essay “The Reality Effect” (1968) reveals what might be called the vitalist basis of modernist indeterminacy. Countless artists in the 1960s … READ MORE
Take It to the Air: Radio as Public Art
First staged in the main railroad station in Hamburg in 2002, the Leipzig version of Radio Ballet was performed the following year. Subtitled “Übung in nichtbestimmungsgemäßem Verweilen,” or “Exercise in Lingering Not According to the Rules,” the piece gathered people in the Leipzig station for a group radio listening experience. Using handheld radios, people listened to LIGNA’s critique of the normative ordering of public space … READ MORE
