Hi Johannes, Ioana, Gabriel, and all, Thank you for your comments and great questions. Not easy to answer, I have to admit, but I will give it a go.
Johannes thank you for your response. Unfortunately I would agree, there is very little joy about/in academia at the moment and as we know there are many individual and collective struggles all around us and I am sure some on the list might be involved in them in different ways. But before I move on I want to make a little correction as in your writing mine and Ioana's posts were merged into one coming from the same person which perhaps suggests a proximity of our concerns, but as they were articulated by two different people I wanted to make that distinction. Ioana's questions are so well articulated and focused: 'How can I embody and live what I theorize, without letting it close down my possibilities of experiencing? How can I make of my performance-making practice a learning experience (that materializes in some kind of knowledge acquisition or understanding) rather than an application of the theoretical outcomes of my research? (How) am I to justify my art practice in relation to my theoretical research and demonstrate its relevance to the latter? (this question matters because mine is a theory-focused PhD; its outcome will be a dissertation)'. And I would be curious to hear more on this. Johannes, your post touched on so many important issues. What I enjoyed a lot was your description of what you called 'tough luck', actually it made me lough aloud, because I imagine this is exactly the kind of luck that most of those doing practice based PhD's have and again each of us deals with it in a different way. It seems to be an accompanying issue to work with on top of all the original questions that I started my PhD with. I am sure it is a widely shared experience. >> Magda, i would think your performance practices and the curating experiments are interface enactments and they are lived of course, and yet you might agree, they can be recorded, they can be edited, narrated, mythologized, and written up or down meshed with images....... >> (Johannes) >> Another seemingly paradoxical relation I'd like to hear more about is that between commoning and curating. In your work, do you actively make an "emancipatory" effort to move away from "directed commoning" and towards "collective curating"? Or you try to pay close attention to how both vectors interact in the course of instituting? How much self-awareness is involved in this process?>> (Menotti) >> I would be curious to see how do you relate these hardships of categorisation to the skype logs of the common practice project, which seem to be an interesting way of writing/ preserving that fully embraces the metamorphosis that result from translation (or a transport in time).>> (Menotti) I situate common practice and my research around curating within what I consider to be a new context for curatorial strategies with reference to social technologies that claim to redistribute power relations. Common practice critically operates in a network environment and pragmatically points to the specific problems characteristic to network society which are labour organisation and its condition (free and immaterial labour) in the environment in which creative co-production of knowledge takes place non-stop and contributes to creating what often has been defined as digital and immaterial commons as well as new forms of enclosures which also accompany this process. Thus in my research around curating and commoning (understood after De Angelis as 'the social process that creates and reproduces the commons') I take into account the new context which is defined by the changing character of production which becomes biopolitical production invested in production of subjectivity. In that context the question of recording is hugely important indeed because it is about what I record and if I record at all (in which case it is a tough luck when it comes to my PhD, though hopefully I will come up with some solution) . On the other hand there are already recordings of the session which are available on the wiki where the common practice is stored, in theedited versions of skype text chat conversations, as well as original chat discussions, wiki history which follows changes, etc. It seems to me that the only way to interact with those, outside of the actual session as it is happening, is through mythologizing, narrating, interpreting, etc. I am not sure what is meant by the concept 'directed commoning'. More explanation would be. Common practice is not about curating collectively either. The research is about investigating the conditions (social, technological, institutional, political) in which curating takes place versus a desire (yes, utopian most likely) to on one hand not to be subjugated to those conditions and at the same time not to subjugate others to them. Linking curating with the concept of the commons is probably not a tactic in this case, but a strategy, or methodology if we want to stick to the research language, to investigate biopolitics of 'curatorial'. With all best, Magda _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
