CURRENT LINE/WORK OF FLIGHT and TERRANOVA'S MOVE TOWARD 'PUBIC' OR Do you Prefer the seductive power of the spectacle?

{{{{ CURRENT LINE/work OF FLIGHT FOR THIS WEEK: This week I am making a piece called, ‘Sex’ Display (in part inspired by Deleuze and Guattari as well as sections of this weeks reading). The work fits into a larger on going body of work that is called Video/Arcade (Imaging entering into a strange video installation. You first hit a concession stand that has work made out of chocolate credit cards, or what I call ‘Free Credit’ . The concession stand also has a magazine rack with, Issues of Art, which are collages made out of issues of art forum. After Issues of Art the viewer is hit with the, ‘Sex’ Display. After the ‘Sex’ Display the viewer enters in to the main space. What I would like to call a body without organs. In the end there will be 4 video booths one on each wall, about 600 balloons on the floor and hopefully some passing intensities).

‘Sex’ Display is an installation consisting of about 30 painted white boxes. These boxes are 7” by 9” (somewhere in between the size of a cereal box and a dishwashing soap box). They are arranged like a supermarket pyramid display that is over 5 feet tall. Then there is the word Sex spray painted on with black and gold (its aesthetic of an 80s DIY/Punk). The work has a great sense of humor as you can already tell yet there is a certain approach that reveals a mixed painful/liberating part of our ‘reality’. }}}}

TERRANOVA's MOVE TOWARD 'PUBLIC'
In the work as well as in the readings I began to gravitate to some of the aims that Terranova sets up in the introduction and the elements at work in chapter five.
In the introduction Terranova touches on thinking about ‘network culture’ as simultaneously thinking about the singular and the multiple (Question I raise: How do we see ‘Sex’ at once yet at the same time see all the multiplicities of ‘sex’? What happens to the viewer? What happens when ‘Sex’ is given a common form we recognize yet different than what is expected . . . the super market display. Yet the aesthetics are a cross-pollinations of modernism/minimalism and early 80s stencil/punk. What about the economy of sex or the tangled role of economics and sex )

Terranova makes this shift from singular and multiple to the common and the unique. Terranova describes our lens as a Kaleidoscope and that what is appearing before us is a ‘meshwork of overlapping cultural formations, of hybrid reinventions, cross-pollinations and singular variations. From this point Terranova speaks to our awareness of increasing interconnectedness but in the same breath we start to see this idea of “tendencies” start to emerge in the discourse of information. Tendencies is also brought up when the discourse turns to the internet and biophysical “tendencies” or open systems. As an off shoot to my original interests in Terranova’s work, the presence and acknowledgment of tendencies might be of importance in understanding the dynamics of information flows.

Terranova continues by stating, “Every cultural production or formation, any production of meaning, that is, is increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of images and words, sounds and affects across a hyper connected planet.”

I think that in unpacking this last thought one can look to chapter five. Terranova taps into the following main points from my perspective: concerning ‘media as public sphere’, the division of the educated facebookers vs the TV babies turned adult TV junkies. Terranova points us toward ‘reappropriation of the properties of the ‘mass’ can help untangle the semantic properties of communication (meaningful) from its intensive, affective ones.' (***Passing line of fight: My interpretation of this is like watching the Dave Chappelle Show where every moment of that show is devoted to media spoofs and parodies, inversions of stereotypes and Chappelle's approach to reflexively in his humor point to his spectacular ability to reappropriate and own and recognize the masses 'envelop the media')

In Communication Biopower, Terranova gets into a tangle of paramount importance: the relationship between communication and democracy with the ‘public domain’. The discourse starts with the communication we have rebelled against at some point---communication as manipulation, censorship, propaganda and spin. The mechanics of the “public’ and that Terranova calls “ the impossible task of the public sphere thus becomes that of returning communication to an older purer function by combating the corrupting influences of manipulation, censorship, propaganda and spin.” What could the counter be from a ‘new media’ stand point? Terranova points to the possibilities of the internet but raises the issue of the masses and “seductive power of spectacle” and the masses that ‘envelop the media’. One possibility is the role of media art in 'public' and performance on line. Maybe the key is reappropriation in calculated excess.
(FYI the last issue of Wire had a great article on Egyptian Facebookers that were using it as communication medium for organizing progressive social movements.)