Arbitrating Attention: reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds

The post-industrial world has given birth to what some describe as an “information economy,” which is but one part of a broader “attention economy.” But does this information glut produce an artificial scarcity of (social) attention or do our apparently foreshortened attention spans cast shadows where new forms of sensory and cognitive experiences can quietly deploy?

The rise of the attention economy – that is, the economy inherent to the “society of the spectacle,” of which the mainstream contemporary artworld is both the proving ground and the emblematic outcome, shows every sign of continuing into the future at the same inexorable pace it gathered in the twentieth century. At the outset, this might have applied to the 15 minutes of fame as art’s ulterior motivation. Increasingly, however, the attention economy has come to be defined by the relationship of capital to visual culture, more specifically to how artists and the artworld as a whole function in a sector increasingly nurtured by hedge-fund management tactics and poached upon by the prosumer strategies of the entertainment industry. Art is ostensibly still their perfect partner, for the ideology of these forces is not domination, but freedom. The challenge is to avoid passive consumption, while using the resources and freedom generated by the attention economy to fund the darker more poly-vocal initiatives at its edges.

At the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) Cunningham Road, Bangalore Recently, n.e.w.s. won the ‘Competition of Ideas’ for authoring a book proposal entitled “Arbitrating Attention”, which would explore new economic and social contexts for art. This 100-page text will be published at the beginning of next year. One of things n.e.w.s.

A response to Joselina: Joselina cites an essay of mine, (“Biennale Demand”, Jan 2008, http://www.aaa.org.hk/newsletter_list.aspx?newslettertype=archive), where I contrast the notion of “convention” with that of “tradition”. She summarises me as saying that “biennales have conventions, but not tradition”. And then she goes on to say: “This may be true to an extent, but following his definition of tradition, biennales, either through the foundations or offices that run them, or through the curators chosen, are hardly oblivious to past biennales that occur around the world. The derivative models from Venice’s formula are a reaction to the original biennale’s framework. The exhibition concepts, thematics, ideas are never realized while the curator is unaware of what’s been done elsewhere. Curators and directors are hardly, never reflexive. Most are. And the biennales they come up with are products of these. Are these then not the creation of a tradition?”

Introverts are people who do not generally demonstrate an enthusiastic social appetite. Most Internet interfaces and applications assume a voluntary and natural tendency for social bonding and seem to reward behaviour that fits these assumptions. What is our understanding of people who would broadly identify themselves as introverts? Can this inquiry inform our design efforts and guide us in reconceptualizing ways of working?

We are very delighted to announce that n.e.w.s. has won the 'Competition of Ideas', with our text Reinvesting attention surplus in plausible artworlds.

Asian Biennales: Nationalism in a post-colonial world Internationalism versus Nationalism

Currently, one third of the world’s biennales take place in Asia, with the first being the Tokyo Biennale in 1952. Yet, the international art biennale started with the Venice Biennale which was founded in 1895, a year before the Olympic games, at a time when world’s fairs and international exhibitions started growing in popularity with the idea that nations can showcase the best of their talents. However, this type of showcasing of national pride often leads to nationalism and sometimes to conflict.

Finally I got some time to respond, including my initial thoughts on from Renee's and Stephen's recent postings on 'time' and 'commodification'. At the same time I am watching the news unfold on the latest burst of the world economy (at one point I imagined I was imagining looking instead at Tatsuo Miyajima 'Counting' installations).

I cannot help thinking on whether the next bubble to burst - in similar fashion to the dot com and housing market bubble - will indeed be the art market (give and take a few monts or years from now)

As I try to seize the moment after reading Stephen's post: ‘The Fate of Public Time: toward a time without qualities’, I cannot separate myself from my recent trip to the U.S., the place where I was born and raised but do not reside.

The last two weeks of the global economic crisis might be termed as the end of the era of borrowed time. Beginning with deregulation during the 1980's Reaganomics and exascerbated by greed, borrowed money -‘leverage’ has lead to the crash on Wall Street. Central to the bailouts and interrelationship of a networked world are these ‘credit default swaps’ (coined 'weapons of mass destruction' by Warren Buffet). A kind of insurance sold by financial institutions, they insure against a possible default by an issuer of debt. Privately written, in unknown terms, the financial entities are now expecting to cash in. Culminating in the government bail out of the national mortgage company, insurance company, Wall Street firms (not all), the 700 billion dollar bill that doesn’t state the ‘value’ of these assets (though includes an option for a stock injection plan! with preferred stock) was finally passed by the congress. The US government has never been so directly involved in the financial market since the Great Depression. Has America gone social? I doubt it. But look at how time has changed the financial world: the investments of 'long-term' securities, savings and pension plans aren’t secure, contrasted by the banning of short-selling, making a quick buck, futures. Gambling was somehow deemed legal - outside of the casinos, certain Native American reservations and the state of Nevada. Deregulation on Wall Street had reinvented the art of speculation - borrowing shares and betting on the fact that their value will go down in order to pocket the difference, accounting for potentially the largest purchase of nothingness (devalued stock- assets without price) in history. What happened to the coined ‘treadmill of progress’ in the 'United States of Capital?'

Returning to Boym, briefly, one value of reflective nostalgia is its defense of idleness and of recapturing leisure time. ‘Time is money,’ she says, ‘but we want time that is not money.’

A Paris-based organization is hosting a "competition of ideas," the object of which is to rethink the social and economic conditions of art, explicitly breaking with twentieth-century conventions. The winner gets 10 000 euros -- not bad; both the winner and the runner-up get the expanded (100 page) version of their initial three-page proposal published. Bear in mind that this is how a hitherto unknown proto-blogger by the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau got started (winning a competition for his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences)... For funding reasons, it's open only to residents of the European Union. But as n.e.w.s. is registered in Europe, and collectively authored proposals are encouraged, I figured that we might take a multi-handed stab at rethinking the material conditions of art. Wouldn't it be a boost for our collective energies if we won? And even if somehow we didn't, we would at least have cured our twentieth-century hangover and gone some way to creating a twenty-first century We. Beyond that, I would encourage everyone using and reading n.e.w.s. to take part. Deadline: 15 November 2008.

For some time now, I’ve been meaning to respond to Lee Weng Choy’s thoughtful posting on the need for “slowing things down.” There is something intuitively urgent about that appeal for calm, which I felt needed to be fleshed out. Has something happened to time, I found myself wondering, or is it just our overwrought egos and zealous scheduling that need to be put on depressants? Then, during the Basekamp discussion, I heard myself improvising something about the becoming-we of n.e.w.s.; arguing somewhat self-evidently that our collective assemblage of enunciation is bound to “change over time.” That it is, but what does it mean to change “over time”? What is “over” time? When is that? The preposition bears reflection, but even if one were to say “in” time, the assertion would still beg the question: can anything change “out” of time? To change and to shift presuppose time; they are time-laden verbs – which, unless I’m mistaken, makes our collective voice an eminently time-fraught phenomenon. Which brought me back to Weng’s insight that if all of us are struggling with finding time, something may have happened to time itself, even as we continue to think of it as a smoothly flowing through phenomenal space and against which changes and shifts could be measured. What about cracks in time? What about a “third time,” a fuzzy, slothful or vacant time, recalcitrant to the tyranny of real time? It’s speculative, but such speculation appears less frivolous when one considers the frictional interfaces between competing experiences of time in our contemporary societies.

After the launch of n.e.w.s. at ISEA2008 in Singapore I did get attend Lev Manovich's lecture, author of the seminal work, The Language of New Media, (2001) MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, USA, where he pitched his 'cultural analytics' research project, as an ad for data-mining and fancy animations in academia, soon to takeover the world.

Manovich began his lecture by delving into the background of data, terming it a 'data revolution'. As we all realize during the last few years there has been an exponential explosion in the amounts of data, for example in 2011 the digital will be 10 times bigger than in 2006, a 60% growth increase. While people in dozens of areas of science and other fields such as business, banking, retail, etc. are using data-mining and interactive visualization; one area is lagging behind... culture. Manovich is into visualizing the cultural in digital form.

One has to be pretty mean-spirited to find much wrong with dreaming. But what I like best about dreams is that they put the lie to the increasingly prevalent idea that we all live in the same world - the very quintessence of contemporary ideology. Clad in the decidedly dad-reminiscent rhetorical garments of “common sense,” the one-world argument is regularly trotted out by our neoliberal realists to encourage us to fall into line, wake up to reality, singular, and give up our insistence on alternatives to the merely existent. In the name of the efficient governance of the existent order, they trivialise the fictionalising imagination – that is, the imagination that splinters and multiplies the real – as utopian dreaming, claiming that the real is one. But in making such a claim, they let the cat out of the bag – if only because everyone has that extraordinary and yet perfectly ordinary experience of dreaming.

It’s been a few weeks since the launch of n.e.w.s. in Singapore at the end of last July, and I’ve been meaning to write a short report to n.e.w.s. contributors and readers about some of the discussions those of us in Singapore had following the launch. But, as it often happens, after the one thing, there are the next several things, and you get very busy, and before you know it, weeks have passed by, and you’re still trying to follow-up ...

Here are a few images from the launch event last Monday. More soon ...

Web 2.0 is often referred as type of social networking providing “power to a user and democracy for everyone (...), as incubator of innovative forms of media and free cooperation” among its users. But, what if another point of view is added to this innocent image? We simply have to be able to comment, discuss and criticize something that is loudly (and successfully) represented as a new form of “information superhighway” bringing everyone “equal rights” to create and distribute content.

Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople Been a long time gone, Constantinople Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks - Lyrics from They Might Be Giants, "Istanbul Not Constantinople"

* No
* Yes

On the request of Lee Weng Choy to all of us to have shorter blog entries, I've cut an earlier entry in two.

My first intuitive response to the discussion about artistic positions in a global art world, issues like geography, territory and mobility, (i.e. the definition of 'territorial, extra-territorial and world artists') is to throw in some practice and maybe discuss some recent exhibition models (7th Gwangju Biennial by Okwui Enwezor, Shanghai Biennial 2008 by Zhang Qing, Julian Heyn and Henk Slager), that respond to this issues.

One of the questions I struggle with most regarding art is whether or not to continue using the word at all. On the one hand, it designates an amorphous set of symbolic configurations and activities by and large so at odds with what I refer to when I use the term, I wonder if I would not be well advised to look for a different word. Yet on the other hand, I am loath to yield the monopoly on the use of that term to those whose usage I find so uncongenial. Admittedly, the word’s usage has shifted considerably over the past 30,000 years, but at present the balance of power is so squarely in the hands of the molar worldart artworld (institutional market, museum-based production and other such normalising institutions of expert culture) that molecular (or minority) practices seeking to bring some heterogeneity to bear are condemned to marginality. Indeed they are relegated to parasitical status; uninvited guests at the table of the host whose values they abhor. So I am torn by a reasoned and almost visceral desire for exodus and a no less heartfelt and stubborn desire to hold my ground. Can anyone help?

Note: The following text is part of an on going research entitled "Pelurinho; on contemporary forms of Discipline and Punishment, after Michel Foucault".

A few months ago, I was asked to respond to a questionnaire on 'What is Contemporary Art' by C-Arts magazine (http://www.c-artsmag.com). A brief report of the questionnaire was published in C-Arts #2 (March/April 2008). The discussion is still ongoing, and I feel multiple platforms should address these issues. N.E.W.S. is one of these platforms, and hence I would like to challenge the contributors to consider the issue of 'Contemporary Art: 'Now' or 'Never'?

Below is a copy of my full (unedited) answers to the questions posed by C-Arts.

More n.e.w.s. on this to come from others, I hope...