2020-11-04
Hello Elaine,
Many thanks again - I am really looking forward to this!
Btw., are you familiar with Ulises Carrión projected courier system
E.A.M.I.S. (\"Erratic Art Mail International System\") from 1977? It was
preceded by an essay \"Mail Art and the Big Monster\" in which he wrote:
\"Mail art uses as support the postal system --- a complex,
international system of trans-
port, including thousands of people, buildings, machinery, world
treaties, and God\
knows what.\
The proof that the post is not the medium is that to use it, an artist
doesn't need to\
understand how it functions. Even in the utopic possibility that the
artist reaches\
complete understanding of the system, he cannot control it. \[\...\]\
What about the mailing? Then we are not free, we are subject to certain
rules estab-\
lished beforehand. \[\...\]\
Seen from this point of view, mail art is no longer something easy,
cheap, unpreten-\
tious and unimportant. Mail art knocks at the door of the castle where
the Big Mon-\
ster lives. You can tell the monster anything you like, according to
your experiences\
and beliefs. But the fact is that the Big Monster lives and oppresses
us. \[\...\]\
What or who is the monster I am talking about? Do I mean the postmaster?
Post office\
clerks? Do I mean the minister of communications? Or, do I mean the
technology\
they use and control? Do I mean those little, colorful pieces of glued
paper that we\
must buy every time we post something? To tell you the truth, I do not
know exactly\
what or whom I am talking about. All I know is that there is a Monster,
and that by\
posting all sorts of mail pieces, I am knocking at his door.\"
Here\'s the EAMIS manifesto:\\
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
An alternative to the official Post Offices.
1. The E.A.M.I.S will carry messages in any format cards, letters,
parcels, etc, and realised in any medium book, cassette, tape,
film, etc.
2. The message must reach the E.A.M.I.S office by any way other than
the official Post Offices. It can be delivered by the author or by
any other person.
3. The E.A.M.I.S is free of charge. Any piece, however, intended for
delivery should be accompanied by a second copy or duplicate. This
second copy or duplicate shall be kept in the archives of the
E.A.M.I.S after delivery of the original.
4. The E.A.M.I.S guarantees delivery of the entrusted pieces by any
means other than the official Post Offices. If for any reason a
piece remains 3 years undelivered, it will be sent back to the
author by any means other than the official Post Office.
5. The E.A.M.I.S will keep on its premises, open to any potential
receiver, a stock of yet undelivered pieces. On the other hand, it
is not necessary to be a potential receiver in order to visit the
archives.
6. Mail pieces are accepted regardless of size, country of origin and
country of destination.
7. The E.A.M.I.S is not responsible for fakes and falsifiers. Every
piece from the E.A.M.I.S must carry our own stamps and seals.
8. By using the E.A.M.I.S you support the only alternative to the
national bureaucracies and you strengthen the international artists
community.
Ulises Carrión\
*(Post Master)*
\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
(I will also attach my unpublished lecture notes of a talk I gave in
Bucharest and Vancouver on Mail Art, where this is being covered.)
-F
2020-11-11
and back on this thread,
no, I did not know about Ulises Carrión\'s project, very impressive!
My good friend Goodiepal (musician, one-of-a-kind-person and community
activist from Denmark, currently having an exhibition
here: )
runs a similar courier system where people send postal mail to his
mother or grandmother \[he doesn\'t have an e-mail address\], friends
pick it up and physically deliver it to him wherever in the world he is.
His collective (\"Goodiepal & Pals\") now also runs a courier/smuggling
operation to bring refugees over the EU border in Serbia.
\- I\'m also reminded of Thomas Pynchon\'s novel \'The Crying of Lot
49\' and its underground postal system Tristero. I guess you\'re
familiar with it?
And thank you for sharing your paper, have only skimmed it, but the
conclusion you end on is quite sad somehow, as in the crux problem of
technology as an ideology to improve human life and yet we never solve
the real problems of living with one another.
This is just based on my own experience of collective projects always
failing in the one or the other way. But for me, this still leaves the
question how to free oneself from the logic of success vs. failure that
ultimately puts such endeavors into deadlocks.
today i had an interesting conversation with members of the Laboratory
of Insurrectionary Imagination and a few others, and JJ mentioned about
how when they were doing interventions in the finance district in NY, i
think in the early 2000s, and he wanted to learn all about finance as a
way to learn how to dismantle the system, but later he changed his mind
to think that you don\'t need to understand the system if you really
want to smash it, because it goes beyond reform, that they would want to
build up something completely other\...
But aren\'t you then doomed to repeat the mistakes of the system you
haven\'t studied/analyzed? I find this particularly striking in the case
of the Occupy NYC movement; among others, in Occupy activists
who advocated libertarian recipes for dismantling the system, which in
my opinion would have replaced it with something much worse. (Bitcoin as
a replacement of \"fiat currencies\" and a central bank financial system
through a peer-to-peer decentralized one being perhaps the best
example.) Or those in the movement who blamed the evils of the financial
system on interest - but now that we\'re living in times of low, zero or
even negative interest, things are even worse, because investment
capital looks for other venues of profit (such as housing real estate).
i don\'t necessarily agree with this thought, though the degree of *how
much* one should understand what one wants to infiltrate, rework,
dismantle, etc. needs to be addressed. it\'s quite interesting that
Carrión also premises the ignorance of the artist as part of the
premise.
Yes, and it is interesting to see how that work that he didn\'t want to
do ended up being done by hacker activists since the 1980s, but not with
better results. This, btw., was the logo of the (semi-legendary, still
existing) German hacker association Chaos Computer Club:
{width="49.25mm"
height="36.99mm"}
\...a riff on the logo of the German Postal Service:
{width="49.25mm"
height="49.25mm"}
there was a period in my logistics fervour that i wanted to take online
courses in industrial logistics in order to understand better,
hahaha\...
I understand that Kate Rich is now doing just that - pursuing a PhD in
economics (if I remember correctly; after yesterday night, I don\'t
trust my head any more). Her contribution to the conference next week
will be 1:1 business consultations!
but perhaps intuitively the scale didn\'t reach me down in the shadows
of our realm\... but [i have done some cross border parallel trading of
cosmetics and milk
powder](https://displaydistribute.com/2018/05/hql-227/), though!
I guess this is related to the concerns in HK about contaminated milk
powder produced in the PRC?
is it still the thought that this exchange should find its way into
keywords and such? let me know what is still possible or already way
beyond the deadline\...?
It could still go into the publication next year. Honestly, I will just
be happy if the conference will take place in a graceful, meaningful and
sufficiently rewarding manner, since its planning in the lockdown times
wasn\'t exactly great (and our organization-by-collective approach
didn\'t really make things smoother, to say the least\... Which brings
me back to the issues of collective organization mentioned above).
-F
{width="28.52mm"
height="13.81mm"}
2020-11-18
Dear Elaine,
Through my partner in Taiwan, I heard that there will be a reiteration,
or reflection, on the project \"Kingdom of Piracy\" that was begun by
Shu Lea Cheang in 2003 and which also involved Audrey Tang (and me as a
ghost on the alleged, likely pro-forma advisory board that never met or
did anything, because it was probably only a pirate move for obtaining
funding). In December, there will be an online discussion with Shu Lea
and Audrey moderated by Jukiko Shikata from Tokyo - I will forward you
the details as soon as I have them.
While reading \"Getting a Move On: A Logistics of Thought towards Print
and Publics\", I was also reminded of a discussion on piracy with Raqs
Media Collective ca. 15 years ago that taught me about my (and generally
Western) biases in perspectives on piracy. Back then, piracy was largely
discussed in the context of download culture (with The Pirate Bay,
Library.nu/LibGen, aaaaarg & WaReZ servers as the standard examples),
but Raqs brought in the perspective of pirated software and DVDs sold on
street markets. \[I wonder whether that culture and economy still
exists. When I moved to my neighborhood in Rotterdam, it was still
normal that when you went to a hairdresser, mobile vendors of pirated
DVDs would come by and sell you the newest Hollywood films.\] Back then,
I largely shared the view of the Free Software/Open Source movement that
intellectual property should be ended, but that piracy of commercial
software ultimately had the effect of keeping the software industry in
business, and prevented a mainstream success of Free Software. Raqs,
however, argued in favor of considering pirate\'s work as a form of
community care, and addressing real community needs, which then made me
rethink my position. (All the more now as Free Software is fully
entangled with the big software industry, and has questionable
libertarian heritage on top of that.) Nevertheless, I\'m still torn on
this issue. If one just sticks to the example of digital piracy, then
one could argue that The Pirate Bay paved the way for Netflix, LibGen
paved the way for Amazon Kindle, and WaReZ servers paved the way for App
Stores; not only conceptually or in their user interface design, but
also in the \'content\' they provided. (I.e. The Pirate Bay offers
pretty much the same kind of mainstream films that are offered by
Netflix, etc.)
I find it excellent how Display Distribute shifts this whole
perspective, and often deadlocked and tired debate, on \"'Who will read
it?'\". Today, I wrote a paper with an attempt to define \"Urgent
Publishing\", as a wrap-up of a research project of my school in which
Clara was also involved, and made an attempt to first define urgency
through propagandistic-memetic success \[taking the example of Jordan
Peterson and Natalie Wynn/ContraPoints\], and then partly toss this
definition, redefine it through communality \[i.e. roughly: what is the
communal urgency of a publication, as a pact and shared interest between
readers and publishers? - with the following proposed five criteria:
reponsiveness, reaching one\'s community, emerging from this community
and its needs; creating identification; spreading - perhaps virally -
within the community\]. I could learn a lot from Display Distribute in
this respect, and am not even sure whether I should be the person who
writes this paper. In any case, I will share it with you after my
editorial cleanup/bugfix (for which I need a night sleep and fresh
eyes).
Unfortunately, I am not familiar with Hendrik Speck!
image of underground networks has always been a reference. The
privatisation of the German postal service in recent years has always
been a very amusing anomaly to what I see otherwise as a country more
resistant to those forms of co-optation. But maybe DHL\'s terrible track
record is a great example of how privatisation doesn\'t always work.
Actually, there had been quite a lot of privatizations or partial
privatizations of public infrastructures in Germany since the 1990s,
including telecommunications, the train system, energy and water
suppliers - pretty much the same (neoliberal) story as in the rest of
the world.
In a similar way, Stevphen Shukaitis---whom I mention in the Book
Society text---is a Marxist anarchist who has been embedded within an
Organisation Studies department of the Essex Business School for some
years, and he has recently decided to embark upon a second PhD in sports
studies to further think through forms of collaboration and organisation
that are, in terms of the sports industrial complex, inherently
imbricated within corporate sponsorship, spectacle, and media.
I am familiar with his work with Penny Rimbaud (from, among others,
Crass)!
Granted, I think there are very few people who can manage to work
\'undercover\' in this way and not find themselves co-opted by the
systems which they were supposed to infiltrate. That\'s the idealism of
politics, isn\'t it?
Yes, and I must say that I am rather disillusioned in this
respect, often even appalled by fellow academics. I would prefer
(tenured) academics to reflect on their co-optation and complicity, and
not to pretend to have an autonomous position. It\'s rather easy to have
a moral high ground if your position is secure.
Best,
Florian
2020-11-18
What I forgot to mention - since you brought up \"total football\"
(originally a Dutch concept from the 1970s, \"totaalvoetbal\", coined by
Johan Cruyff - I should also translate his most
memorable quotes, because they might be inspiring for
Display Distribute:
\"Every disadvantage has its advantage.\"
\"You\'re not going to see it until you\'ve figured it out.\"\
\"The good cause is not your own cause.\"\
\"Football is a game of mistakes. The team that makes the least is the
best.\"\
\"Football is simple. What is difficult is simple football.\"\
\"If you aren\'t anywhere, you\'re either too early or too late.\"\
\"Coincidence is logical.\"\
\"The truth is never exactly the way you think it will be.\"\
\"I\'m against everything, until I make a decision. Then I\'m for it.\")
\...so what I actually forgot to mention is three-sided-football, which
was supposedly thought up by Asger Jorn, but actually practiced by a
number of situationist-inspired people in 1990s Britain and later:
\[In 1996, I made a radio interview with Roberto Bui (one of the
masterminds of the Italian Luther Blissett Project at that time, and now
member 1 of the Wu Ming Collective; we just collaborated again on an
article on
QAnon: ) as a
supposed \"coach and talent scout of the Luther Blissett Three-Sided
Football League\" (and I just found the English of the German
manuscript on [lutherblissett.net](http://lutherblissett.net/):
). I would never have
guessed that Three-Sided Football would still be a thing 24 years
later.\]