DériveLab

we are ernest

2011-09-12T07:38:00.000-07:00

Dérivelab continues as an ongoing research project, however our main activities as a collective are now being conducted under the name Ernest. Our first event under this name, ironically, will be a talk and walk in many ways engaging with similar themes surrounding the theory and practice of dérive. The event is entitled Performing Gravity and takes place on 24th Sept. 2011 at Eb&Flow gallery, Leonard Street, London.

For more see our new site: www.we-are-ernest.org

Residency & Performance, Manchester

2011-07-16T01:23:00.000-07:00

Dérivelab residency at The Burlington Fine Arts Club, Manchester International Festival fringe. Narrative environment and durational, 'post-audience' performance.

This work consisted of a constructed narrative environment founded in the idea of an ‘analogue blog’: a three dimensional magazine, a network of knowledge and material exchange made visible in space. It is a space which we inhabited alongside the detritus of our intellectual interchanges. Within this situation we undertook a durational performance in which a series of chosen books were anonymised with newly produced covers, the process of our selections and exchanges, the selected texts, images and annotations, recorded and compiled into new books. This process explored exchange, value, individual psychology and the possibilities of collective working.

Later we performed and read extracts from a anonymous journal found at Victoria station, piecing together a semi-fictional detective story of drift, romance and intrigue from its pages. The found journal for us represented the ultimate post-audience artwork. We wanted to consider what would it mean to collectivise this form, for it to be translated to the spatio-temporal situation which we inhabit, for it to become a 'metazine'?

Literatopia

“In Romania under Ceausescu, and in other regimes where communications are restricted, knowledge has been circulated in the form of banned books. In the Romanian case a book was passed to you at work and if you wanted to read it, you had to take it and read it in secret, you had to take it home and stay up all night to read it and bring it back with you the next day for someone else and this is how free knowledge was passed. There is, we think something powerful about this image, not just the political dimension, which clearly we see today as people share links on social media, but also there is something magical about it, almost ritual, like a spell: perhaps it is the non-digital circulation, the embodied physicality of it, not the disembodied exchange of the ‘information society’, but information exchanged as a gift. One has to take this knowledge and read it whilst the sun passes beneath the earth and whilst the moon passes over your house and at sunrise the spell will be broken and you must return to the world. It’s like the rules of the world get suspended during the hours of darkness, it is the time for reading and drifting and loving and partying, those tiny micro-inventions, networks of relation and moments of autonomy that Michel de Certeau calls the ‘night-side of societies’.

City Skin London

2011-06-16T01:08:00.000-07:00

Dérivelab member Mihaela Brebenel recently carried out the mirror iteration of her performative drift City Skin, originally performed in Bucharest, now carried out in London.

Dérivelab participants at Skin Ego, Bucharest

2011-05-19T00:33:00.000-07:00

Mihaela Brebenel, Open Visit, Bucharest, April 2011
(Photo: Florin Panaitescu; Tattoo Artist: Raluca Rugina)

From 8th April - 1st May Dérivelab member Mihaela Brebenel curated the exhibition Skin Ego at St. Ink, Bucharest, Romania, with participants including fellow Dérivelab member Christopher Collier.

Skin Ego's aim was to create a site-responsive platform for dialogue between academic and artistic practices within a space that is a hybrid between functionality and display. Skin Ego took place at Saint Ink tattoo parlour, Bucharest, rejecting the common imagery associated with this type of space and seeking to explore the notion of tattooing through artistic practice in a non-literal fashion.

The concept of the exhibition stemmed from psychologist Didier Anzieu's study of the concept of 'skin ego':

at once a sac containing together the pieces of self, an excitation-screen, a surface on which signs are inscribed, and guardian of the intensity of instincts that it localizes in a bodily source, in this or that sensitive zone of the skin.

Emerging from this concept, existing and new works from four artists were shown alongside a performance intervention and an interactive installation.

In the concept of Skin Ego tattooed skin emerges as a gateway to the re-negotiation of self, through the openness to affect and being affected in the tattooing experience. The skin that experiences the tattooing process is opening up to a re-negotiation of the borders of self in relation to the world, just as an infant in the early stages of life. As with the infant, the tattooed skin is not constructing this subjectivity in isolation, rather it is intertwined with the skin of the tattooist and that of an audience, communicating, transmitting affects and re-negotiating boundaries.

As a physical opening of the skin, tattooing becomes an experience of internalisation of the outside both in physical and metaphorical terms, by the insertion of ink into the skin and by the flow of those affects which are in circulation during this experience.

Works included:

Open Visit Mihaela Brebenel (RO) Performance, 2011

Brebenel with the work on her arm completed (Photo: Dragos Ometita)

Brebenel created a performative opening upon Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi's historical tattoo performance actions. Following an email dialogue with the Perjovschi, Brebenel set out to reinterpret Perjovschi's tattooed address to his Romanian homeland, creating her own call to her country, in a performance entitled Open Visit. During this public performance Brebenel had the word “Romania” tattooed on the same arm, in the same place, as Perjovschi had done but with parts of the letters which form the word missing.

The missing spaces in the letters R, O, M, A, N, I, A represent an open action, a form of intellectual and affective incitement, chosen by Brebenel to address the need for responsible action in a multi-layered socio-political context, an open call for responsibility directed to a generation suspended between an identitary belonging to its country's values, a strong anxiety vis-a-vis the manner in which a capitalist system has developed and the wish of aligning and belonging to international value systems.

In his two actions, Perjovschi opened, and then closed the identitary dialogue; his initial reaction was that of an artist-activist threatened by physical violence (in 1993, during the miner's revolts, taking the stand in the streets was met by the miner's wooden and metal clubs; in 2003, the context was more complex and the artist felt that his answer needs to become fluid, raising new forms of interrogation).

In 2011 Brebenel answered, through the Open Visit performance, to a new type of anxiety, that of the multiple blank spaces awaiting completion. The open spaces in the letters that form the word “Romania”, nowhere to be found on the tattooed skin, form as many acts of responsibility, open calls wanting to be taken over. The action itself is an artistic incitement to cultural activism, the spaces offering themselves to be completed by actions, through a common and sustained effort.

"I live in London at the moment, where I came to experiment an education system, a culture and a fruitful, active artistic space. However, this is not a selfish journey. I want to keep returning to Romania with a luggage without labels, opening a dialogue with each trip, re-visiting issues and questions leading to the formation of our cultural and artistic identity. An utopian project? I want to believe it's not the case! More likely, a critical analysis, based on action.” - Mihaela Brebenel

During the performance, Brebenel read a short manifesto and completed on paper the letters forming the word ROMANIA in her tattoo. The text, the tracing paper used for the tattoo, a film documenting the performance, as well as some of the emails exchanged with artist Dan Perjovschi were then shown in the exhibition.

The Whatever Singularity
Christopher Collier (UK)
Inkjet on paper 2011

Christopher Collier, The Whatever Singularity (detail)

For the state, identity, face, skin, passport photograph, DNA, all become an index by which to order and control our bodies through a securitised and bureaucratic framework of power. The appearance of identity is deployed for the production of identity maps that force us appear through esoteric and abstracted frameworks, frameworks perhaps not so remote from phrenology or palmistry.

This work produces an star-chart for the skin ego: the markings and form of the body, the moles upon the skin, become no longer an index of individuality but faint constellations for the astrology of a 'whatever singularity'. They are ultrasound scans and lunar satellite photographs of the simultaneously singular and co-constituted entity that is not equal to the sum of its characteristics, that can never be equal to itself and that has no condition of belonging. They are orbs of dust, ghostly blazes of drizzle in the camera flash, they are inversions, they are under the skin. They are the copy with no original: to ask for the ‘authentic’ subject makes no sense, even the authentic philosopher. The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to a subject, the total function of singularity is reversed. Instead of being based on identity and appearance, it begins to be based on another practice – politics.

'Be only your face' said Giorgio Agamben, the 'face', is not properly a face but an interface, it is our surface upon the world, and yet also the world's surface upon us. Appearance is never just appearance, for in appearing it conceals its very act of becoming apparent.

Appearance therefore is the necessarily violent and exclusionary practice of disciplining social relations, forcing their concealment by this very act of appearing. The exhibition-value of the work of art involves an oscillating power play over the terrain of appearing and perceiving; making see and being made to appear. The counter-position to the violence of appearance would see the revelation of language itself, as itself, in the absence of any originary basis, in which we have only our face, only our skin.

In recognising such, we open language and appearance as a site of improvisation, breaking the dichotomy between contemplation and bare life, unified selfhood and relational affect, we are released from the obligation to be ontologically 'complete', we become 'whatever singularities', we might go beyond our properties and acknowledge the relational nature of our ego, identity arising in the chain of signification. This is perhaps a way through which to understand the concept of the skin ego.

Relieved from this oscillating internal/external pressure to be equal to ourselves - to be ourselves - we might find that, as Agamben puts it:

“what the state cannot tolerate in any way is that singularities form a community without claiming an identity, that human beings co-belong without a representable condition of belonging”. (Agamben)

Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2000

other participating artists in the exhibition were Roisin Byrne (Ir)and Ioan Colbeanu (Ro).

City's Skin, Bucharest

2011-05-18T01:02:00.000-07:00

In conjunction with the Skin Ego exhibition at St. Ink Bucharest, Dérivelab member Mihaela Brebenel undertook a performative intervention on the streets of Bucharest.

City's Skin Mihaela Brebenel (Romania) Costume-document, 2011

The intervention City's Skin represented an action of mapping and documenting the tattoos and particular signs on the skin of random passers-by on the white surface of a garment worn by Brebenel. Representations of tattoos and marks on the skin were drawn on the costume by people who the artist approached on the streets, in a drift through the historical centre of Bucharest. The intervention will be mirrored in the same form in London; at the end of the process, two costumes which have 'collected' the skins of the two cities will be shown, or even tried on.

Moles, birth marks, scars and graphic representations of tattoos found on the skins of people in Bucharest were transferred with a marker on the white surface, creating a constellation of signs, symbols and starting to shape a form of collective skin.

The approach was a form of mapping the city, a psycogeography, using drift as means of experiencing its relations.

Various people that the artist encountered in this unplanned circuit were asked to contribute to the creation of this collective skin, and the costume was re-composed, the shapes of people's bodies started emerging on it, building a common urban body. Small black circles stand next to names of persons transferred from tattoos; portraits and musical notes decorating the arms, texts embedded in someone's personal history hold a place next to scars transferred from bodies, at one point their production marking crucial moments in someone's life.

The bodies of the people drawing on the costume achieved a referential, indexical function for an accurate transfer on the white canvas, yet the act of graphical representation itself was, for the most part, short-lived, approximate and somewhat shy. The representations were anonymous, yet each of them was a crucial constitutive part in the construction of this map. Identities were free-floating, but an affective commonness was translated during the process.

“Mapping various skin surfaces which create an identity, an exteriorization of a process that was, at first, an internalization of the exterior- a complex space for the circulation of affects – this intervention is an attempt to map a skin of the city, constructed gradually by the people roaming its streets at a specific point in time, a snapshot of their identities coming together in these representations, sketches of a psychogeography in continuous making.” - Mihaela Brebenel

On the way back to the exhibition, the costume was carrying the graphic forms of a common skin, a random map generated organically. The costume was taken off, remaining open to more representations from the people visiting the exhibition and waiting for the meeting with another costume-map, another city and its inhabitants- in London.

A Methodology of Dérive

2011-02-09T23:49:00.000-08:00

The stairwell at Really Free School

DériveLab member Christopher Collier presented his ongoing research into the dérive at Really Free School on 8th February.

Really Free School, at their squatted premises of 5 Bloomsbury Square, describes itself as an occupied space, surrounded by institutions and universities, where education can be re-imagined. Amidst the rising fees and mounting pressure for ‘success’, it claims to value knowledge in a different currency; one that everyone can afford to trade. In this school, skills are swapped and information shared, culture cannot be bought or sold. It is an autonomous space to cross-pollinate ideas and actions.

If learning amounts to little more than preparation for the world of work, then this school is the antithesis of education. This space aims to cultivate equality through collaboration and horizontal participation: a synthesis of workshops, talks, games, discussions, lessons, skill shares, debates, film screenings.

Christopher's talk did not attempt to come to any concrete conclusions or to make a particular argument but instead sought to open up a theoretical landscape for engaging with dérive in wider and more varied intellectual frameworks in the attempt to uncover its continuing potential as a methodology. This, to an extent focussed on how we might usefully think dérive via certain poststructuralist theories of language and performativity.

DériveLab Artists at 104 - Centquatre Paris

2010-11-02T12:59:00.000-07:00

DériveLab artist Christopher Collier in collaboration with fellow collective member Attilia Fattori will present an intervention at 104 - Centquatre, Paris on November 6th. The work will appear as part of a programme curated by the Winterstory project as part of Jeune Création 2010.

The work entitled Divertissement, mimics the theatrical grammar of the 'intermission', reproducing such an intermission in the performance programme as a device in order to critique notions of affect and the constitution of empathy. It does this not only within performance as a genre but also within the media at large, particularly exploring the manipulation of affect by the international news media in service of political and military ends. In an extension of a Brechtian device from the theatrical field into the pseudo-theatrical, ambiguous constructed reality of the media field the work seeks to draw to the fore the deployment of aesthetic affect as a form of political operation within media spheres.

Christopher Collier & Attilia Fattori, Divertissement, Centquare, Paris

More Information:

This piece attempts to articulate a conceptual loosening the of the individualist liberal subject by expanding notions of performativity in alternatively presenting the image and image-making as ‘operation’ or ‘labour’ as opposed to representation. It attempts this through the investigation of the notion of ‘disaffect’ as a strategy for the reintroduction of the interval, interruption, disjuncture or intermission in contemporary culture. Attempting to follow the work of curators such as Bridget Crone and theorists and writers such as Brian Massumi, Steven Shaviro and Steve Goodman, affect is introduced as a proliferation that (although possibly unavoidable) can potentially be opposed through a strategies of disaffect, rupture and intermission. It seeks to explore the relevance of Brecht's 'A Effect' within the contemporary totalising, ontological media landscape. If terrorism is both the production of and product of affect, what is the production of disaffect?

Intermission, or entr'acte, meaning a break between sections of a performance, theatrical play or musical concert constitutes not only a break for actors and performers but a public space for audiences to socialise and therefore a political space for audiences to discuss and for dissensus to occur, critically underpinning the theatre as a democratic form. It has however also become representative of the way in which public or social space has become increasingly commercialised and put to work in the service of capital via a colonisation by advertising and consumption. Therefore the 'commercial break' is an interesting temporally constituted space for interrogation as a site of both consumption but also a critical disruption in the homogeneity of affect and a space for dissensus.

Commonly lasting between 15 and 30 minutes, the entr'acte often contains a piece of music, frequently specifically written to be performed between the acts of a theatrical production. Indeed entr'acte developed into a specific genre in its own right, intended to break the action or mood of a production with something different. This potential alterity was grasped by Brecht who deployed what he termed the 'A effect' to critique the totalising language of aesthetic, theatrical affect. When such an insert was intended to disrupt the mood before returning to the main action, writers often deployed the device of a 'play within a play' which is akin to the French term 'divertissement' (a term which in English carries connotations of advertisement and yet also diversion, (and hence affect as a diversion in itself – from life - or conversely the use of diversion, or disruption as a critique of affect).

The music of the entr'acte came to be termed 'furniture music' connoting its intention to remain peripheral to the action, in the background and functional. The first publicly performed furniture music composed by Erik Satie premièred as entr'acte music. Described by the French term 'musique d’ameublement', furniture music is background music originally played by live performers and named by Erik Satie in 1917. When many theatres and concert halls were closed because of the war a group of avant garde artists and musicians held a happening at 6 Rue Huyghens where paintings from the likes of Picasso and Matisse were displayed accompanied by the music of Satie and other avant garde musicians. This performance led Satie to form the group known as Les Nouveaux Jeunes. The music produced was intended as a form of ambient music, performing something akin to the function of so called Muzak or 'elevator music'.

Several decades after Satie's death furniture music was revived, largely due to experimental musician John Cage. Furniture music appeared as the precursor for minimalist, experimental and avant-garde music as it represented the primary instance of music being decentred or played out of context: as a backdrop. This also would go on to influence composers of popular ambient music such as Brian Eno.

Neoliberalism depends upon the integration of a connective, affective field, not too remote to what Debord proposed in the Society of the Spectacle. The corporate deployment of affective modulation and tonality (see Steve Goodman – Sonic Warfare) means that the ontological separation of a subject from the immersive physicality of media imagery is no longer possible. This work attempts to examine the use of intermission to explore both affect and its pre-individuated control, not directly through drawing attention to disparities of representation or classical strategies of juxtaposition and Chockwirkung (shock effect) but through an exploration of the formative processes of affect itself in the image's own agency. The 'poor image' (see 'In Defence of the Poor Image', Hito Steyerl) is likewise a disruption of the totality of the empathetic and affective field. In interrogating notions of the perception, framing, iteration, the intentionality, pre-individual affect, empathy, consumption and agency of the image and sensory affect more widely, the work seeks to draw out what is performative in the imagery of the media age. Within the intermission, the intermission.

Footage in the film consists of mobile phone footage of a missile strike on Gaza alongside a 1950s US cinema intermission reel with other news and media imagery. The soundtrack consists of mixes of Erik Satie's Furniture Music, Part 1: Curtain of a Voting Booth, Furniture Music, Part 2: Tapestry of Wrought Iron,, Furniture Music, Part 3: Phonic Tiles, electronic tones and a field recording of furniture being thrown from a third floor window.

Dérivelab work at Mediations Biennale, Berlin

2010-09-30T08:58:00.000-07:00

Dérivelab participants/members Alyssa Ueno, Nicola Rae, Paul Malone, Fabiola Faidiga and Giorgio Tentolini will be showing work, much of it emerging from the Dérivelab 2 event in London in July, at the ERASED WALLS: MEDIATIONS BIENNALE, Freies Museum + ConcentArt, BERLIN from 7 October 2010. The work will form part of the Ottica TV project, developed by Paul Malone.

"Erased Walls" is a part of European exhibition project, in the frame of which two other exhibitions will be presented in Poland from 5/9/10 and Bratislava (3/10/10). It deals in its themes with many of the ideas with which the Dérivelab project seeks to engage and explore, notably transgressive drift, liminality and iteration/'quotation'.

"The curators will focus on the creative work after 2000, with an emphasis on the latest art, unconstrained by geopolitics. Erasing of the frontiers does not apply exclusively to our region anymore. All over the world, the walls that were physically torn down, have been replaced by invisible ones – whose existence is all the more efficacious and poignant because of their imperceptibility. Political divisions are now being exchanged for new ones, those associated with the dominance of the capital, social supremacy, poverty, media manipulation, the feeling of solitariness and exclusion. The artists, by constructing an image, arrive at reflections otherwise unattainable, which cannot be devised by means of language or document. An image is frequently a close-up quotation from reality, which, having been extracted from the mundanity and then presented in a different light shed by art, becomes surprisingly distinct".

Alyssa Ueno, Iron and Glass (Still)
...

"The second Mediations Biennale - the largest contemporary art exhibition in Middle Europe will take place originally in Poznan/Poland from 5/9/10 to 30/10/2010. The presentation of the latest achievements in art concentrating on a dialogue between different cultures of the world and artistic explorations of creators from Middle Europe, by relating to our historical and cultural experience will create a different platform, different sensitivity and a different perspective in the perception of global processes.

This year the official opening of the Biennale is one of the items of the programme accompanying the 4th ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) conference – a meeting of 43 Ministers of Culture and delegations from Asia and Europe, held in Poznan on 7th- 19th September 2010".

Dérive On Air

2010-09-08T02:52:00.000-07:00

Dérivelab has been invited, as part of a day of live radio broadcasts by Inheritance Projects on Saturday 11th of September, to produce a radio gameshow that playfully and performatively reflects our interests in the area of dérive.

For Charlie Woolley's solo show, 'Mysterious Cults', Inheritance will be programming a day of performances, lectures, screenings and radio plays. Inheritance Projects Ltd. is a non-profit curatorial organisation dealing with issues of historicity and heritage through contemporary art, music and performance.

The concept that we have devised and will be trialling in our slot is entitled (g)hostis and is a discursive game of conversational drift, relying on a set of simple rules and irreverently exploring some of the more abstruse districts of theoretical territory.

The idea for conducting this experimental game as a potentially productive artistic or philosophical methodology derives initially from the idea of dérive, ie. drift, a concept arising in Situationist texts meaning the aimless, although reflexive and analytical movement through space. Others, such as Jacques Derrida have evoked the notion of dérive as a deconstructive tool for decontextualising language through a process of iteration and by extension, derivation, thus producing new and unexpected meanings. In seeking to explore new and unexpected meanings this game recalls various anti-logical, anti-linear Surrealist methodologies such as the exquisite corpse.

Let us begin with a quote. In her book Wanderlust Rebecca Solnit describes walking as an antidote to a fractured, postmodern conception of space:

On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between … interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors: one lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.

What if that logic, the logic of dérive were to be applied to language and discourse? What if we were to regard exclusive and alienating theoretical and philosophical soundbites similarly as such 'interiors', as private rooms, discourses or as Wittengenstein may have it 'language games'? As concepts which operate as locked, fragmented interiors and which shut out and exclude other speakers? What if by use of the dérive we might deconstruct the structures of these 'language games', we might wander, drift, between and around them, arriving in unexpected territories and iterations?

With this experiment in dérive we wished to derive its form from its format, namely that of the radio discussion or game. Perhaps if we regard discourse as a series of rules, the distinction between 'game' and 'discussion' becomes already less pronounced. In the syntax of radio the discursive event relies upon the structural elements of a 'host' and a 'guest'; a guest whom the structure dictates is in a way 'hostage' to this structure for the duration of the event.
In his paper 'Hospitality' Derrida deconstructs the notion of hospitality, claiming that

“hospitality” is a Latin word … of a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, “hostility”.

He draws out the common etymological source of both 'host' and 'guest' from the latin 'hostis' (or g-hostis) thus deconstructing their apparent oppositional position within the conventions, or structure, of hospitality. In fact both 'host' and 'guest' potentially derive from this latin term 'hostis' – meaning stranger or enemy. The host and the guest are enemies, opponents within a structure of both language and rules or conventions of hospitality, within a discursive game. A host also contains the associative possibility in English of being the vessel possessed by a ghost, by an uninvited guest – held hostage to it: both host and guest are haunted by the linguistic possibility of being hostage, hostage to the other and to conventional structures. Hospitality is haunted by the possibility of hostility. As Derrida states

[in] the final reversal of the roles of host and guest … of the inviting and the invited … the one inviting becomes almost the hostage of the one invited, of the guest.

Levinas links hospitality with ethics in claiming that as host I am hostage to the Other, to the ethical demands of hospitality. Thus ethics are always taking me hostage. But enough derivations, let us return to the dérive, the right of hospitality is primarily a nomadic right for, in the words of Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock in their translators notes to the Derrida piece,

unconditional hospitality must remain open without horizon of expectation, without anticipation, to any surprise visitation.

As the logic of the nomad is that of drift; the non-instrumental; aimlessness of the dérive, this gives us a new angle on the possibility of dérive, namely the dérive is that whose phenomenological 'horizon of expectation' is open and 'without anticipation'.

Therefore, taking the notion of host and guest as opponents, enemies that are hostage to the structure of a discursive game, it is our intention to extend this logic to the very notion of discourse itself. Returning to the Rebecca Solnit quote, how might we then undertake a nomadic dérive through such language games, through such hostile theoretical territory?

In considering this we have devised our own language game, a game in which the rules are as follows:

・ Each player has a hand of cards, from which they must attempt construct a narrative, argument or discussion.
・ The winner is the player who uses all the cards in her hand, and who is able to bring the discussion to a conclusion.
・ Each player has a hand of randomly dealt cards (10 each for two players, 8 for three, and so on, with the precise amount being entirely variable to suit our preferences).
・ These cards have the name of a theoretical concept (eg 'deterritorialization'), a more general term (eg 'football'), or a person (eg 'Derrida', or 'Duchamp' for example').
・ The player must devote at least one sentence of their narrative to each card they play.
・ If the player speaking finds themselves stuck, or pauses too long, they must draw a fresh card and let the next player pick up the discussion.
・ Or, if they mention an element that is on another player's card, that player can play the card to interrupt, and they now become the speaker.
・ The more competitive players may therefore do their best to avoid mentioning the kind of typical philosophical elements on the cards, but it can also be very enjoyable to keep throwing out opportunities for other players to chip in.
・ Each Player also has 3 interrupt cards that they may play at any time, each card may only be played once. When played the player gets to take over the conversation at the exact point from which they played the card.

The idea of the game from our perspective as an artistic and philosophical experiment is as a way to think outside of linear and discursive structures of instrumentality in a deconstructive and dérive-based fashion. The game could be seen as a methodological experiment in making novel connections, discovering new meanings and new contexts and in undermining the linguistic 'interiors' that some theoretical topics potentially represent. Through a game of discursive drift we hope to open up our 'horizon of expectation'.

(g)hostis will take place on Saturday 11th September at SPACE studios, London at around 3pm and be broadcast on SPACE studios radio and Art Review radio over the internet.

Work by DériveLab artists exhibited in Greece

2010-09-05T01:34:00.000-07:00

Work from three of the artists from DériveLab 2 has recently opened at the KODRA 10 arts festival in Thessaloniki, Greece. Christopher Collier, Nicola Rae and Lawrence Abu Hamdan who produced works for the recent DériveLab event at Centre for Creative Collaboration were invited to show pieces at the arts festival which runs from the 3rd - 12th September in the derelict military installation at Kodra.

DériveLab : Project 2 Sound and Interaction

2010-07-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

A selection of images from DériveLab : Project 2 Sound and Interaction at Centre for Creative Collaboration, London.

Showreal

micro-residency

Hidden Landscapes, Chris Thompson

Audience

Driftshift performance (Franziska Lantz)

A New D(é)rive, Christopher Collier

Performance by Doron Polak

Noise Pollution?

Nicola Rae, Sonic Frequencies

Opening

A New D(é)rive, Christopher Collier

Attila Fattori and Lauren Lapidge

Paul Malone, These Inconstant Heavens

Alyssa Ueno and Lei Hattori

Giorgio Tentolini

Paul Malone, These Inconstant Heavens

still the night before, still going...

2010-07-21T16:52:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow Evening : DériveLab - Project 2 | Sound and Interaction

2010-07-21T14:42:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow night is the opening of DériveLab - Project 2 | Sound and Interaction. We open at 6pm. Feel free to bring your own drinks!

There will be several performances taking place throughout the night:

Theremin and multi instrumental performance of Angelo Madonna interacting with the visuals of Nicola Rae.

Lab 3: Interactive performance spreading between both online and offline  by Hedva Eltanani.

DriftShift : Performance by Franziska Lantz of found sound and found text collected to form drifts that shift.

Live translation in sound of moving image score - London / Napoli / Marseille edges by Melanie Clifford.

See you all at Kings Cross!

The night before DériveLab 2 - A late night begins...

2010-07-21T14:27:00.000-07:00

One More Teaser

2010-07-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

One more teaser...
Find more details in the link:
LAB3

Some Teasers...

2010-07-19T16:04:00.001-07:00

Chris Thompson

Albrect Wild

Christopher Collier

Paul Malone

Nicola Rae

2010-07-17T11:46:00.000-07:00


"Fantastico! ... New media is the new black!"

- Nick Lometti

2010-07-16T13:06:00.000-07:00

"We believe Dérive is a conduit to circumvent and short-circuit those repellent elements shortselling us down the river of ur-banality. We believe Dérive as an activity is reflexive: it both responds to situations but situations likewise respond to it. DériveLab concocts reflexive phenomenologies, DériveLab psychoanalyses the unconscious of urban space"

DériveLab 2 - Provisional Schedule of Events

2010-07-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

DériveLab 2 - Provisional Schedule of Events (more details soon):

A programme of performance, sounds, talks and discussions.

Thurs 22nd, from 6pm: Opening, drinks (limited! please feel free to bring your own!)

Performance from Hedva Eltanani(ongoing)

Sound performance from Franziska Lantz (Driftshift - of Resonance FM)(9pm)

Sound performance from Melanie Clifford (8pm)

Friday 23rd, open 2pm - 8pm:

Early evening: Paul Malone, The Inconstant Heavens lecture on Alternative Cosmology of Plasma Theory (6-7pm)

Saturday 24th, open 2pm - 8pm:

Doron Polak performance 7pm

followed by

Discussion of Doron Polak with writer, free-lance curator Henie Westbrook

Sunday 25th, open 2pm - 6pm:

Afternoon (from around 3pm - to around 5pm): Conversational Drift, Talk/discussion/crit on the possibilities of Dérive and the work that has emerged.

Pre-Kick Off Meeting

2010-07-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

nomadic DériveLab office at C4CC

Around midday I arrived to Centre for Creative Collaboration near Kings Cross Station with my big suitcase. Inside was my whole 'office': Desktop, books and other bits and pieces important for creating the art piece.

From today until the exhibition opening night of the 22nd of July, the site will become a space for interaction, and creation of the artists taking partin DériveLab project 2.

Not many artists have arrived before the Kick Off Meeting in the evening so the site was nice and quiet. Like a sancturary from the busy and dusty area of Kings Cross, Centre for Creative Collaboration has a unique stillness occasionaly interrupted only by the deep rumbling sound caused by the overground trains passing by.

This makes me think that it is a perfect space to obtain inspiration and create a piece which is concerning with the rhythm of the city and trains.

Today was all about the settling in, getting used to the space and tempo and some precedent studies. I was also editing my website which needs a bit more of work before I could show to public.

Tomorrow will be a reading day... some re-readings of inspiring book on the philosophy of sound art : Listening to Noise and Silence by Salome Voegelin and other books I used to write my dissertation on the idea of Dérive in the contemporary context of Tokyo.

2010-07-11T02:18:00.000-07:00

click image to enlarge
click to download invite
click to download press release

DériveLab Press Release

2010-07-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

DériveLab

Centre for Creative Collaboration, Acton Street, London.

22nd-25th July 2010

Opening 22nd July 6pm

DériveLab is a laboratory cast adrift upon the cultural waters of a 'broken' society for the experiments of a cast of artists, performers, musicians, theorists and designers. From the 22nd - 25th July 2010 DériveLab's latest feature-length psychotic episode features at the recently opened Centre for Creative Collaboration, near Kings Cross, London. An opening preview, post-view and peepshow takes place on and in the evening of the 22nd. Prior to this participants will explore or ignore, work and play within the venue for 10 days before their potentially prized or somewhat despised responses are reprised and prised open to a public.

DériveLab challenges participants to work off the rails and on the wrong side of the tracks, across disciplinary boundaries, with a schizophrenic mix of collaboration and resistance, whilst occupying an anti-hierarchical territory that mixes established, international practitioners with students, primarily from Goldsmiths, drawn from across undergrad, postgrad and research realms. DériveLab is a widely encompassing, wildly spinning compass at the corner of a constantly changing map of international contributors from cities including London, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Parma, Trieste, Paris and Tokyo.

We believe Dérive is a conduit to circumvent and short-circuit those repellent elements shortselling us down the river of ur-banality. We believe Dérive as an activity is reflexive: it both responds to situations but situations likewise respond to it. DériveLab concocts reflexive phenomenologies, DériveLab psychoanalyses the unconscious of urban space.

Further Information for Editors:

DériveLab participants respond to the concept of Dérive, a word which we take to have no definitive meaning, rather seeing it is a seminal, fluid starting point for creative intercourse. We do not limit our far from immaculate conception of Dérive to that guy Debord's well-known use of the term as a method for exploring the psychology of urban space, we also engage with other derivations of Dérive from Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze amongst others. But DériveLab is demonstrably not simply concerned with theoretical ejaculations or name-dropping dead French men beginning with D. We want to drop the dead wood and well the re-hearsed interplay of words for play, grafting a copse of living concepts onto the contemporary urban jungle. Therefore DériveLab is not simply a semi-necronautical attempt to generate a degenerate 'art' but rather to artfully, if not artificially, attempt to transcend and ascend discipliniarity and farcical, hierarchical glass ceilings, attempting an in vitro cross-disciplinary, cross-generational cross-fertilisation between emergent and established practitioners, students and professionals. It is not simply a passively re-posed response to a historical concept but an active provocation and interrogation of the contemporary situation. It sets up a creative collision course that could be a big bang, beginning something beautiful, but conversely it could be a car crash.

For Who, What, Where & When:

http://www.a2arts.co.uk/derivelab/index.html

For Why:

http://derive-lab.blogspot.com

DériveLab, A Simple (Sub)Version

2010-07-02T03:50:00.000-07:00

Alyssa requested that I simplify and indentify the core aspects of the essay on the theory of DériveLab to allow her to translate it more effectively for some potential participants in Japan with whom she is in contact. Therefore, here is perhaps a slightly more basic and stripped down description of the project:

'Dérive' is an idea that has no definitive, fixed meaning, rather it is a starting point for explorations. One should however bring out three important historical understandings of the term.

Firstly Guy Debord used Dérive to mean a method of drifting aimlessly through urban space so as to experience the city in new ways and to map the psychological effects that this process brought about within the person doing the drifting.

Secondly Jacques Derrida used Dérive to mean the process by which a word or sign can drift through differing contexts, ie. a word or image may take on different meanings when placed, or 'cited', in different contexts. Derrida found this interesting in that it contains the potential to reappropriate, or resignify signs (and their power) simply by placing them in different contexts.

Thirdly Gilles Deleuze used ideas of Dérive to explore what he called 'deterritorialization'. This is the idea of evading and breaking down boundaries and categories of understanding, for instance between diciplines but also any static definition, such as nationality, social status etc.

DériveLab draws on all three of these understandings of Dérive but is not just concerned with dead French men beginning with D. We want to take these ideas and go further.

Therefore:

DériveLab is not just 'art' but tries to go beyond disciplinary boundaries. Likewise it tries to allow crossover between more and less established practitioners, students and professionals.

It is an experimental exploration of the emotional and intellectual effects brought about by various urban situations within everyday contexts.

We are interested in exploring visual, intellectual, social and sonic processes as well as the ways in which space and time are marked out and conceptualised by various processes.

DériveLab is not a purely theoretical investigation, we want to explore these things by practical means, collecting together many different methods of exploration and bringing together contributions from, and explorations of, multiple spaces and times.

DériveLab encompass a constantly changing network of international contributors from cities including London, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Parma, Paris and (hopefully) Tokyo.

DériveLab is actually a Dérive in itself, but also a contemporary engagement with historical notions of Dérive.

DériveLab takes the position that 'art' itself is a static definition that must be 'deterritorialized' in Deleuze's terms, or be broken apart through a process of drift, citation in other contexts - both practical and intellectual drift and movement. Therefore, we do not seek to produce static, definitive 'exhibitions' but rather, as Debord might say, to create 'situations'.

Therefore DériveLab is 'situational' in that it aims to explore specific situations but also to create them, to generate new situations via creative means. This is why the Dérive as an activity is reflexive, ie. it both responds to situations but situations likewise respond to it.

project drift or mission creep

2010-06-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

Following on from a meeting in an enigmatic café in Soho we met again at the Centre for Creative Collaboration near Kings Cross from where the meeting dérive-d into a café close by, through the tube network to Elephant and Castle and London college of Communication. Here Salomé Voegelin discussing her new book, and a philosophy of sound art after which the meeting continued into the dusk. What we derived from this process was mainly departures and not arrivals but so far we have talked about having a Lab at C4CC for two weeks from 12th July until 25th July in which the space functions as the site of a micro-residency cumulating in 3 days of situation-specific exhibition and events. This remains nebulous.

DériveLab is becoming DériveLab

2010-06-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

DériveLab is developing, DériveLab is becoming.

DériveLab was conceived as an umbrella to bring together an international selection of artists, performers and media practitioners responding to non-static urban situations.

Following on from the success of DériveLab 1 in Dalston, London, June 2010 a group of artists, curators, students and theorists from various international and inter-disciplinary backgrounds convened to formulate the idea of the DériveLab as an ongoing project for research, investigation and as a method through which to respond to a series of given situations.

The next DériveLab is anticipated to take place at the Centre for Creative Collaboration in London in mid July, with a focus on sound work. We are seeking dialogue with interested parties: artists, architects, musicians, theorists, writers, scientists, researchers and 'extra-disciplinary' persons that may wish to engage with the theme of the Dérive as an investigation into the unconscious of urban space or as a method for the immanent critique of conventional socio-spatio-temporal structures. More will follow here soon.

For information, keep checking this blog or contact: derivelabcollective [at] gmail [dot] com.

On the Possibility of DériveLab...

2010-06-15T11:51:00.000-07:00

On the Possibility of DériveLab

some interpretive musings by way of an absent manifesto

DériveLab negotiates and insinuates a space for artistic, social and topographical experimentation.

DériveLab performs an extra-disciplinary, reflexive situational analysis of various everyday contexts and configurations of collectivity.

DériveLab employs alternative interactive and interpassive methodologies in a fluid network of multiple international contributors from cities including London, Frankfurt, Parma, Bucharest, Paris and Tokyo.

DériveLab is a non-fixed conceptual framework that literally takes a Dérive through artistic, academic, social and spatial practice. It both is a Dérive, and it derives from a contemporary and historical engagement with Dérive. DériveLab is theory and praxis.

A sudden change of ambiance

Dérive as it is commonly understood appears as a symptom of a certain urban and socio-economic situation of 19th and early to mid 20th cent. modernity. Dérive and psychogeography, as popularly understood in the SI model are essentially practices emergent from a 19th cent. Parisian bourgeois milieu modulated by the crisis of liberalism that precipitated the Second World War and subsequently by the collapse of confidence in state planning and centralisation on the part of the far left in post WW2 Europe. The situationist/letterist conception of Dérive was broadly consistent with a move by the so-called New Left that sought to criticise liberal understandings of subjectivity. This conception then, was therefore characterised as emergent from, and by resistance to, a set of socio-economic conditions and modes of governmentality that were already beginning to enter a new and distinct paradigm during the supposed height of these practices during the 1950s and 60s. Consequently, in isolating, exceptionalising, even mythologising of the specifics of the situationist's practice of Dérive, what work on the Dérive has lacked is an examination of its socio-political and cultural specificity. What is required at this moment is that the situationist notion of Dérive is not universalised and applied as a critique, method or genre of artistic practice across varying contexts, as appears to be the case currently, but to be made historically specific, precisely in order that the Dérive as a concept be more effectively theoretically generalised. Essentially the project attempts to build a theory of dérive adequate to the present moment through research into the reality of its current manifestations.

To understand from where DériveLab derives we must drift through the linguistic ambiance that it implies, uncovering its derivation. We have opted to use the term 'Dérive' (capitalised to denote the specific concept), this is clearly of central importance as the definition of this term is essentially what is at stake within the whole project, but upon the definition of this term the whole project also either stands or falls. We opt for the French 'Dérive' in the sense that it has specific theoretical connotations, as set out by, but also no longer limited to Debord's definition (by this definition we understand both directly through the primary source of the SI/Lettrist's own writings, and secondarily through accounts of their practice and commentary upon it, although again there are distinctions to be made). Although we are seeking to move the practice of dérive, as a theoretical concept, away from strict correlation with the SI's definition, we retain the term dérive as it is felt that it connotes a specificity as a concept in a way that to use the English translation of 'drift' would not. Likewise, 'dérive' allows us to drift more usefully through differing meanings and nuances; it flows freely and is not fixed, it derives from the Latin 'De', meaning 'down from', 'from', 'of', 'concerning' + 'rivus', meaning 'brook', 'stream'. Drifting down from the river of history dérive evokes a sense of 'deriving': how can our understanding of dérive derive from its historical use? Drift we believe connotes total aimlessness, or powerlessness, like an unhindered but oarless boat upon open water, it derives from an archaic form of 'being driven', dérive however connotes 'rive', river, something that flows but has a continuity, is modulated and moulded by the twists and turns of the terrain, the gradient and the density of the rock. It evokes not being driven but being carried along by currents, pulled and not pushed, perhaps then even evoking the desire for utopia and not merely the aversion to capitalism. Dérive is libidinal, ludic; drift is nihilistic. Such are small but not unimportant distinctions and we feel this term is more appropriate to the way that we understand the dérive as moving through the urban environment.

To Dérive, as we know, was a methodology popularised as a theory/practice for urban exploration and a critical means for the analysis of the generic and specific situational environments of urban space by the Letterist and Situationist Internationals, centred around Paris in the 1950s and early '60s. As a collectively developed practice, the Dérive was given theoretical articulation by Guy Debord as a methodology without apparent preconception, akin to the Surrealist methodologies of free association or psychoanalysis but located within the extra-psychic realm of space and architecture.

The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account.(Debord, 1981).

Hence Dérive's methodology is extra-disciplinary, it unifies theory and practice, art and life within the reflexive analysis of a given phenomenological situation.

As a pseudo-scientific analysis of urban form, the Dérive was developed as not only a direct contestation of state/capitalist normative power on the streets, occupying the night, defying the curfew, nor simply as a process of collective singularisation within certain cells and affinity groups within the radical or bohemian Parisian underground, but also as a anti-disciplinary sociological analysis of the geographies of class and the what we would now understands as the biopolitical modulation of environments of relational space for the manipulation of behaviour of subjects conceived as populations. This was taking place under an emergent neoliberal form of governance, a concept of governmentality that sought to manipulate popular behaviour through the allure of spectacular consumer capitalism, characterised by shopping malls and most importantly, by a new explosion in advertising in response to the consumer boom of the mid-1950s with the neo-imperialism of the Marshall Plan (European markets were rebuilt in the American model, financed by American loans for the purchase of American goods) coupled with De Gaulle's policy of 'dirigisme' - state-directed capitalism and its use of five-year plans, nationalised infrastructure expansion and increased production in major sectors giving rise to the so-called '30 glorious years'.

All of these developments in popular conditioning saw reflection in the artistic turn towards pop culture in the Nouveau Réalisme movement, its counterpart Independent Group in the UK and the emergence of a philosophical focus on everyday life in the work of thinkers such as Lefebvre. The turn towards population management elsewhere manifested in a late flourishing of functionalist architecture and approaches to urban planning. This, combined with the Gaulist post-war enthusiasm for large scale state-directed infrastructural development, provided the context for the massive redesign of urban environments along biopolitical, functionalist lines. Such was the context in which Dérive emerged as a critical practice, in conjuction with the situationists demonstrable understandings of the technologies of biopolitical manipulation, through their analyses on the construction of situations and the activation of audiences, not as spectators, but as 'livers'. If situations were the means by which they would seek to détourn the spectacular technologies which power utilised to construct pliant subjectivities, Dérive was the methodology by which they sought to analyse and understand such processes.

Foucault's notion of biopower is intertwined with his concept of a so-called dispositif (apparatus) of 'security' as a means of ordering populations, something he contrasts with alternative techniques deployed for the ordering of individual bodies, which he terms 'discipline'. In its 'security' form, biopower specifically manifests through attempts to modulate and control groups of subjects conceived as a unity, through the regulation of a 'milieu', and as Foucault describes it, 'tries to affect, precisely, a population'. By this he understands the manipulation of 'a multiplicity of individuals who are … biologically bound to the materiality within which they live' (Foucault, 2004, p.21), and which comes to prominence as a form of governmentality with the emergence of statistical classification in the 19th century, the era in which cities are opened up for trade and free-flowing movement, the era of the flâneur. Foucault elaborates when he charts the emergence of a distinctly neoliberal conception of subjectivity, or rather subjectivation, through the notion of human capital. It is this process of subjectivation that Dérive, if not yet quite fully aware of the theoretical implications, was developed to analyse.

Understanding the operation of power manifested in human capital is what defines Foucault's conception of neoliberalism as biopolitical, as opposed to other interpretations of neoliberalism, such as that of David Harvey for example. As John Protevi has noted, Harvey understands labour as a commodity in neoliberalism, whereas Foucault picks up on Gary S. Becker's theories to emphasise the subjectivation process of human capital as a mode of biopolitical governmentality.

The Dérive is inherently a critical methodology in that it performs a similar function upon this subjectivation process to that which psychoanalysis performs through a linguistically based analysis (within an individualised and by definition regressive, strongly bourgeois milieu), but rather than such a context, Dérive functions instead within the extra-individual, collective realm of the architecture and the spatio-temporal situation, in this sense it is non-anthropocentric. However, the Dérive's analysis yet remains rooted in the individual in that it is intrinsically phenomenological and in that it contains the trace of a certain humanism that characterises the writings on space of Lefebvre, in this respect it operates as an antidote to purely functionalist or structuralist, utilitarian critiques of urban space. The Dérive psychoanalyses the unconscious of urban capitalism.

Why Now, the SI?

To follow the derivation of the Dérive allows us to drift through differing meanings and nuances; it flows freely and is not fixed. Drifting down from the river of history Dérive evokes a sense of 'deriving', and in so much, DériveLab can be said to derive from situationist theory. Not in the sense that it is entirely derivative, we do not claim to be neo-situationists, but in the sense that a theory of Dérive is derivable. Such a theory is inherently transmissible, it contains its own possibility of derivation, it is citable, and excitable. There will be no more New Babylon but the concealed geographies of class and the biopolitical ideologies of urbanism remain a fruitful territory for investigation. The metropolis may have diffused itself into the networks of regional planning, power dispersed itself laterally so that seizing the streets no longer means seizing the city, however the intellectual and practical territory of the Dérive remains a useful tool in the reflexive analysis of such structures and in meeting with their challenges.

To paraphrase Debord, we are engaged in an arms race to uncover the geographies of desire before they fall further into the armoury of those dispersed webs of control and communication that attempt to circumscribe the entirety of contemporary urban being and experience. In its very performative act of continual singularization, a durational promenade performance with no audience, it is the continual remaking of the present moment anew. Dérive offers a space of evasion from an urbanism in which leisure time and urban space only appear through the mirror of capital and consumption. Our Dérive is not the Situationist understanding of Dérive, we accept that no context can contain the term, by its very nature it performatively enacts this fact. Rather our Dérive is a fluid conceptual framework that operates as a site for experimentation and exploration. It takes the idea of the Dérive and applies it to spaces, to contexts, to disciplines and to career and work/leisure hierarchies. DériveLab literally takes a Dérive through artistic, academic, social and spatial practice. It both is a Dérive, and it derives from a contemporary and historical engagement with Dérive. DériveLab is both theory and practice. Our engagement with the Dérive acknowledges it as an articulation of Jetztzeit - now time – and as such, if not now, when?

If, to continue a biopolitical line of reasoning, a semiotic economy now contains the entirety of our being, only methodologies such as the Dérive can offer a means of experiencing an alternative phenomenology that might reflexively alter both our presence in the world and the world's presence in us. By transgressing the boundaries of liberal understandings of subjectivity we are drifting, not to somewhere better, but precisely in the act of drifting we are making our subjectivity in the here and now different from itself and others. In singularization, in the continual becoming that is movement, we can enact a real revolution of everyday life.

Revolutions that as yet have no model

For Jacques Derrida “dérive” is a process via which the possibility of semiotic autonomy exists, precisely in the fact that signs are not fixed but contain the inherent possibility of drift through infinite contexts.

Every sign, linguistic or non-linguistic, spoken or written... can be cited, put between quotation marks; in doing so it can break with every given context, engender new contexts to infinity
(Derrida, Signature Event Context, p.12).

Derrida locates dérive as

an essential drift bearing on writing as an iterative structure, cut off from all absolute responsibility, from consciousness as ultimate authority (Derrida, Signature Event Context, p.8)

We are therefore returned to the Dérive as a potential stream of (un)consciousness for the urban project within the semio-capitalist realm. Hence Dérive is a site of alterity in its citablity, and even if citational alterity contains the possibility of recuperation into the machinery of semio-capitalist cybernetic networks, the Dérive is not merely citable but in fact ex-citable. It is, as touched upon above, extra-disciplinary, extra-individual, extra-semiotic. The Dérive, in its unity of theory and practice, is both simultaneously sign and act and therefore - in its inherent performativity – it is 'always out of control rendering it susceptible to processes of unauthorized appropriation and, hence, resignification' (McNay, p.178). Thus, as speech is for Judith Butler, in its inherent performativity, the Dérive is 'excitable'. On performative speech acts Butler states:

precisely the capacity of such terms to acquire non-ordinary meanings constitutes their continuing political promise...the insurrectionary potential of such invocations consists precisely in the break that they produce between the ordinary and an extraordinary sense (Butler, 1997, p.145).

Such is a productive analogy, there have been many, De Certeau amongst others, who have drawn the connection between walking in the city and reading/speaking. The performativity of language, may turn out to be analogous to the performative rearticulation of space through the construction of situations, something Lefebvre has touched upon. Butler's position, echoing Derrida's analysis of J.L. Austin's examinations upon performativity, proposes that it is through 'misappropriation', 'decontextualisation', 'denaturalization' of the 'traditionally signified' that the 'limits of speakibility' might be reworked (Butler, 1997, p.144). This process, which Derrida has termed reinscription, has been deployed within the sphere of art and indeed beyond for many years, for example Dada's innovative use of visual and verbal collage techniques to subversive effect or Guy Debord's own theories on Détournement (Debord, 2003, p.8-13). As Derrida postulates

Once this parasitism or fictionality can always add another parasitic or ficitional structure – what elsewhere I call “supplement of the code” - everything is possible against the language police: for example “literatures” or “revolutions” that as yet have no model (Derrida, Limited Inc. p. 243).

If urban space 'overcodes' the process of our subjectivation, to supplement the code is to open the possibility of this subjectivation towards contingency. Derrida's linking of 'literatures' and 'revolutions' is interesting here (as Gayatri Spivak notes in her essay of the same name) in that makes explicit the very potential that a deconstruction of the oppositional nature of aesthetic and socio-political can activate. Indeed as Spivak makes clear

Derrida's invocation of "fictions" does not mean indenturing the discipline of philosophy to the discipline of literature. One might think of it perhaps as deconstructing the Hegelian opposition and ranking between the ethical and the aesthetic (Spivak, p.43).

The Dérive performs precisely this function in its unification of aesthetic and ethical, individual and collective, phenomenological and situational, theoretical and practical, art and life. This was precisely the situationist insight as it provides a means of drifting through the seeming impasse of collective vs individual liberation within a critique of the dominant socio-economic, spatio-temporal ideology.

The citational, 'parasitic' (in Austin's terms) nature of the aesthetic, what Derrida above termed the 'fictional', offers precisely the space of resignification that Butler has identified in the 'break' it enacts 'between ordinary and extraordinary' (Butler, 1997, p. 45). Within this 'parasitic', aesthetic realm might we then find a space not only of the breaking with socio-political contexts but as Derrida perhaps suggests in Limited Inc for a reinscribing of a certain array institutionalised presuppositions of Western philosophical discourse. It is the theories of Butler that offer us a way to analyse the transformational potential of just such a reinscribing. As she states in Bodies that Matter:

resignification marks the workings of an agency that is (a) not the same as voluntarism, and that (b) though implicated in the very relations of power it seeks to rival, is not, as a consequence, reducible to those dominant forms (Butler, 1993, p.241).

She goes on

The incaluable effects of action are as much a part of their subversive promise as those that we plan in advance (Ibid.)

This is part of the Dérive's inherent potentiality. However, tactics of resignification are not without critique, as McNay notes 'Butler's idea of political agency remains ... an abstract potentiality rather then the result of specific social practice'(McNay p. 181). She understands resignification as symptomatic of Butler's conception of power that is 'primarily symbolic' and less 'sociocentric', the weakness of which 'is that it underestimates the extent to which there can be a systematic recuperation of seemingly radical practices'(McNay p.181-182). A process that uses a logic of resignification, as Debord would term détournement, within the practical realm of everyday life rather than theory or the 'primarily symbolic' is precisely the function of the Dérive, the Dérive as praxis. It is a situational détournement in that it operates as a reappropriation of practice, of spatio-temporal domains as opposed to intellectual or symbolic ones. It quite literally reoccupies the streets. Citation can be both inherently recuperative and anti-recuperative, constantly iterating and evading definitive delineation, derivations become indistinguishable from the derivable. It is the performative process of Dérive however that opens up the space of contingency in our phenomenological experience of the city.

A Dialectical Fairytale

In light of the above we can see that art contains the clear potential to reveal the afore mentioned unconscious of a given situation, but it also contains a potential for the recuperation and concealment of the reality of said situation. As Heidegger notes, art is a form of aletheia – revealing – but aletheia contains also lethe – forgetting. Every unconcealment is also an concealment he notes, going on to quote Hölderlin: 'But where danger is, grows/the saving power also' (Heidegger, p.333, quoting Patmos by Friedrich Hölderlin). The potential that art may provide a counterfactual domain from which to enact the processes of resignification that we have mentioned, even liberating it from the purely symbolic, whilst simultaneously incorporating the danger of recuperation is one that Walter Benjamin is acutely aware of when he speaks with a somewhat guarded ambivalence on the reproducibility of art, liberated from its 'aura', in an age of mechanical reproduction. It is possible to draw certain parallels between Benjamin's thought and Derrida/Butler's notions of iteration and therefore to link the revolutionary power that Benjamin presciently recognised in the reproducible artwork-sign to the potential for change offered by a process of resignification. As Benjamin famously notes,

To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics. (Benjamin, 1968, p.223)

The parallels with a theory of iteration are marked; origin no long holds a totalising influence upon the utterance, instead an emancipatory potential arises from its possible recontextualisation, its drift – or Dérive. In illustration, compare Spivak's sketching of the Derridian position,

Derrida insists that no speech act is, even originarily, tied to its appropriate context; and that thus iterability disrupts the so-called unity of voice and intention even as it remains the condition of possibility of form (Spivak, p.47).

In its absence of teleological orientation, the Dérive is constituted as a mirror of this Derridian absence of origin, and hence shares the potential of its contingency to produce difference, alterity. Benjamin himself recognised the power of the counterfactual investigation and it could be argued that his interest in art, or the aesthetic and poetic domain more broadly, might stem from his recognition of this as a space of alterity from which to think challenges to the socio-political norms. He recognised the potential that Surrealism contained with its processes of decontextualising and recontextualising and its decentring of the conscious self. The Surreal power that arises through the juxtaposition of incongruous elements could indeed be thought out via a theory of performative iternation; it is the introduction of a sign into a formerly alien context by process of which the context is transformed. Such a process he articulated, not as performativity, but as a theory of experience in which erlebnis is disrupted by a shock (that art may provide, or perhaps we might venture, the performative utterance) resulting in the changed context of erfahrung in which critical reflection becomes possible. It is not as major an intellectual leap as one might imagine to arrive at a theory of the performative from such a concept, for Benjamin may well have had in mind some notion of citationality in developing his ideas and in its inherent performativity the Dérive provides a means towards Benjamin's theorised disruption of spatio-temporal norms and the ideology which they encode. Benjamin was keenly interested in the work of Bertolt Brecht who's project contains the political deployment of the contextual break along with a significant use and awareness of the power of citation. Brecht recognised the potential for socio-political change inherent in citation, as a tool in what he termed 'the A [alienation] Effect' (Brecht, p.136-147), this was also a technique that Debord was not unaware of in his speculations concerning the contruction of situations and a methodology that, along with its foil in the work of Artaud, went on to feed the biopolitical aesthetic that flourished in the happenings movement of the late '1950s and '60s of which the SI were contemporaries. Whilst notions of alienation are not necessarily compatible with a biopolitical or Derridian framework, the political deployment of citationality, of resignification bears intriguing comparison. As Benjamin writes, and as Spivak notes, drawing a similar parallel,

interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structures. It reaches far beyond the domain of art. It is, to mention just one of its aspects, the origin of the quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context... 'Making gestures quotable' is one of the essential elements of epic theatre (Benjamin, 1973, p.150)

The Dérive stands as a method of citation and quotation beyond semio-linguistic spheres, it is a détournement of everyday lived situations, an attempt to turn biopolitical functionalism against itself, a fact of which, although employing a differing terminology, Benjamin was distinctly aware. It was indeed from Benjamin's 'dialectical fairytale' of the Arcades Project, his deployment of counterfactuals, alternative spatio-temporal situations and through a methodology of intellectual drift and citation that he conducted his master work's analysis into the unconscious of his contemporary, urban, social situation. Benjamin's Arcades Project is an astounding and almost hypertextual, citational and critical exploration of the city life of Paris in the 19th century that is textually quite unique in its exploratory and experimental structure of textual Dérive. In this text he deploys the archetype of the flâneur: the figure of the ‘stroller’ or ‘loafer’ deriving from the French verb flâner, meaning ‘to stroll’, who is primarily engaging in Dérive. Baudelaire defined the flâneur as a person who walks the city in order to experience it and Benjamin’s work seeks to address and lament the marginalisation of this figure of the flâneur in the increasingly mechanised, instrumentalised and consumerised streets of 19th cent. Paris. As such it was this conception of the Romantic figure of the flâneur as a site of the counterfactual exploration of the unconscious of contemporary society, along with the Brechtian and Surrealist methodologies of shock and free association from which the Dérive as conceived by the LI/SI is perhaps derived.

Benjamin developed a concept of experience which broke from the limiting notions of Kantian experience into new understandings of the spatio-temporal and symbolic. Flânerie, as an alternative methodology of urban experience and as psychogeographical exploration, bypasses the conventional Kantian categories of experience that hold logical continuity, space and time apriori and therefore both physical and theoretical Flânerie, or Dérive, proved useful methodologies for Benjamin. Flânerie provided a means to access erfahrung, in its constant assimilation of the past and future ambiance of urban space, the disconnected temporality of the aimless journey, the Flânerie collapses spatio-temporal intuition into a totality of lived experience which we might term Jetztzeit, a Brechtian concept, meaning 'now-time'. This excess, or overflowing of experience in the present phenomenological moment is chockwirkung – shock effect. The discontinuity embodied by chockwirkung, its collapsing of time and space and its bringing of the present moment into stark relief was inherently anti-hegemonic, in that it disrupted the assumed linear continuity of historical time and the linear grid of conventional topography. However, in the post-hegemonic milieu of the post-Fordist, neoliberal global capitalism of today, space and time are already fractured and disjointed, shock and the perpetual present of now-time are the currency of spectacle. How then might we use the Dérive as a methodology for the immanent critique of a given spatio-temporal-symbolic situation within 21st century contexts? Benjamin went further than many in recognising its potential as a methodology for exploring the unconscious of the urban and social situation but our strategies must lie elsewhere.

'I'll Drift...' - The Logic of Interpassivity

As the situation reflects the Dérive, so the Dérive reflects the situation, it is an inherently reflexive methodology, that via the logic of what Derrida labels citation, is both affected by and affects its contextual situation. Dérive is therefore not merely a theoretical tool of phenomenological exploration but a practical methodology for change in collective situations. It is both a site of examination and the evasion of hostile subjectivation technologies.

As Scott Lash states:

Domination in the global communications order is, many argue, through not discipline but control. The communication order’s non-linear systems are such apparatuses of control... Guy Debord already understood in the 1960s this new power of control through cybernetic-like mechanisms. They are military mechanisms. They are a question of force and strategy. They have nothing to do with ideology or culture or hegemony or meaning. At stake is not meaning from the order of representation (and hegemony) but instead ‘operationally’. Debord already gave us the way out. Not to resist but to derive (drift). ‘Lines of flight’ are the dérive. But the dérive is site-specific. It is site-specific and generic at the same time. To dérive is not exactly to resist. It is to evade. It is an ‘exit’, not a ‘voice’ strategy. The dérive moves slower than lines of flight. It moves from engagement to engagement. Dérive says I don’t like your logic: I won’t contest in a class-versus-class struggle or through rituals of resistance... Instead dérive says: I’ll drift. Is dérive at the heart of 21st-century critique? The response to domination through interactivity is the ‘interpassivity’ of drifting. In the hegemonic order, we challenge power through contesting domination through discursive argument. Or through symbolic struggles. To dérive is to do none of the above. It is to slip out. It is strategy through movement. (Lash, p.67-68)

Much like some of Lash's lectures (as someone who has attended them might tell you), the Dérive is a stream of consciousness, yet it is articulated topographically and temporally, a stream of consciousness derived from space and time – hence the reflexivity of urban space: consciousness, the embedded experience of the world, even being itself derive from the spatio-temporal situation, to Dérive is to engage with and partake within the experience of situational phenomenological systems, to continue Lash's line of reasoning, the Dérive is not epistemological, rather it is ontological.

If the Dérive is ontological, it follows that it provides a methodology of being, of becoming, of singularisation. So perhaps it is not as a re-signification of spatio-temporal situations that its continuing value arises, but rather in its possibilities for collective singularisation, as a means of detourning, of sabotaging the technologies of modulation which are continually singularising us as subjects into certain models of production and consumption, work and leisure, movement and stasis. Dérive is inherently contingent, as Lash says, site-specific, even for Benjamin or the Letterists there could be no permanent Dérive, for then its value for the generation of Jetztzeit is diminished or it would doubtless be recuperated into the banality of conventional experience. As Ivan Chtcheglov admitted:

continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defences, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.
(Chtcheglov)

How then might Dérive be usefully deployed? As a methodology for art? After all, what is art but the selection of a heightend moment of life, an extension of the Dada readymade, the nomination of a defined spatio-temporal situation, we are returning to a situationist praxis. The situation of the Dérive functions as the methodology of highend moments that keep open the possibility of an alternative to the totalitarian technocratic subjectivation of neoliberal capitalism. Using Deleuzian terminology, Nicolas Bourriaud has spoken of the future of art lying in its ability to deterritorialize, in nomadism:

The artist turns cultural nomad: what remains of the Baudelairean notion of modernism is no doubt this flanerie, transformed into a technique for generating creativeness and deriving knowledge. (Bourriaud, 2009, p.3)

Bourriaud indentifies a heterochronic/heterotemporal condition of the contemporary situation through which artists, freed from the chains of discipliniarity, are equipt to Dérive. However, Bourriaud's understanding is simplistic, he doesn't take into account the ontological critique that Dérive enacts; his obliviousness to the class and colonial implications of his understanding of globalised drift is crass, a liberal utopia of free trade and free, universal mobility. In his favour however, he identifies the Dérive as a method of deriving, unless we wish to close down the productive openness of the Dérive we can not deny him his liberal interpretation, for us however the derivations lie elsewhere.

Let us return to some derivations. To derive, is to obtain or receive from a source; to arrive at by reasoning (a site of theory); deduce or infer: derive a conclusion from facts (a analysis); to trace the origin or development of a word (an archaeology); in linguistics, to generate one structure from another or from a set of others (a détournement) and in chemistry, to produce or obtain a compound from another substance by chemical reaction (a transformation or tranmutation).

A lab is a room or building equipped for experimentation or research (a space); an academic period devoted to work or study in such a place (a time); a place where chemicals are manufactured (a means of production); a place for practice, observation, or testing (a locality of praxis).

The Situationist International is Dead, Don't Consume it's Corpse!

The DériveLab, it can be seen derives its strength from its semiotic drift, its Derridian Dérive, as well as its Debordian one, but also from its basis in praxis, as an archaeology of the biopolitical, an evasion of technologies of security, its breaking of the curfew. Its evasion of static definitive form is a tactic that Debord himself attempted to deploy with the Situationist International. For Debord the Dérive was not art, it was life; the Dérive is a situational praxis that appears as the aufheben of the two.

As Sarah Kofman has pointed out, the traditional discourse upon art, dating back at least to Plato and the expulsion of Poets from the Republic, has marked the status of art as fallen. As writing is to speech, as text is to image and ultimately as art is to life, the history of art is the monument of the unnatural, its space is not the domestic but unheimlich. The story of art is 'A Story of Ghosts and Corpses'. Kofman presents art as a Derridian supplement, an abstracted spectacle that negates the real: 'when the spectacle of death is presented as its double in painting, it becomes bearable, or insignificant' (Kofman, p.208). The key word here is 'insignificant' for in presenting the doppelgänger of life, this art gives us the situation that is neither present or absent, that is literally 'insignificant', it robs life of significance within the equivalence of a semio-capitalist economy of signs, replacing it with the simulacrum. The addiction of the simulacrum lies in the fact that 'the uncanniness of art is the same fascination that is provoked by the corpse'(Ibid.).

It could therefore be argued that the reason these things are, as Rossetti put it, 'cold and dead' (Rossetti) is that only art in the lived moment of the collective situation of singularisation can truly make a positive, rather than subtractive contribution to experience. It is the live moment, and through it there exists the testament within which the possibility of singularization inheres. The testament is the experience of someone who 'has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it' (Agamben, p.6). It is the lived moment rather than the monument: the representation that is its corpse. The art of figuration is a dead art, as evinced in the close corollary within the development of documentary recording technology in the 19th cent. - photography, sound recording etc. - and the purveyance of the spiritualism and the cultural turn towards the uncanny. Photography and sound recording were often originally conceived as a technology to grant living presence to the dead. Such technologies only come alive therefore, not in themselves, but as tools in the creation of living situations. Scrawled across the face of a gallery in Paris during the failed 1968 revolution was found the graffiti 'L'art est mort, ne consommez pas son cadavre' - art is dead, don't consume its corpse. That the historicisation of the SI has been upon specialised aesthetic terms can only work towards their and our advantage. The misunderstanding of the SI as an art movement has acted as a shield upon recuperation for the legacy of the SI is not formal, not a set of aesthetic objects, but rather a toolkit or recipe book of modes of praxis, of singularisation. As such, in their very recuperation, in the appropriation of their libertarian architectural vision of desire by the forces of unfettered neoliberal urban development, they reveal new modes of thinking, unhistoricised in their very fluidity, adaptability, citationality and drift, in their Dérive.

Thus, to return to Heidegger: 'But where danger is, grows/ the saving power also'. Dérive, like art, as we have seen contains both the potential to elucidate the lived experience of the city but also in the hands of some artists to stifle and recuperate its vitality into a commodifiable format, testament can easily become monument, it is not as simple as the division between object and experience. The art of the Dérive must therefore remain, that which the Situationists termed 'phenomeno-praxis'.

Art has a history as recuperation par excellence. It can be argued that a 'spiritual' formulation of art has always been biopolitical, but also collective, following a trajectory from the shamanic to the medieval-cinematic; from totemic fetish to the great cathedral; it was largely phenomenological and situational. It is the 'post-situational' art of the Reformation and Enlightenment and early/mid capitalist periods, the art of modernity, that is essentially documentary in nature, a response to the relegation of the affective realm to the private sphere and the reification of the collective realm within the formalised 'universal' principles and laws of the state. Indeed, Western art from the Renaissance on, dare I say a post-Raphaelite art, through the processes of empiricism, professionalism (with its myth of the artist) and commodity production utilised a technē of science in order to produce a representative document of lived spacetime: the encapsulation of the situational within the realm of commodity, a supplement to the rational order of the state, dangerous passions contained within the specialised realm of artistic creation, licenced in the hands of certain pseudo-shamanic geniuses. Berger's classic analysis of the capitalist tradition of oil painting provides as good an illustration as any of this application of art as an apparatus of capture, art as document, art as object.

And yet, within the post-Fordist, neoliberal landscape, such analyses are overly simplistic. There is as much danger to be found in the emergent plethora uncritical of public realm 'walking' and other such practices, made by artists in receipt of statuary proportions of developers' budgets to produce 'socially-aware' smokescreens for their gentrification projects. Artists, still thinking in terms of the physicality of commodity, overlook their place within the post-Fordist labour relations as the primary producers of semiotic commodity for developers and urban regeneration 'branding' exercises. 'Pop-up' happenings bring kudos to empty properties, keeping prices warm whilst markets are depressed, drawing a positive 'brand-positioning' to certain postcodes, ultimately adding surplus value to the property-commodities in which the developer's capital has been invested, the artist is as much a part of the labour relations in this situation as the builder or plasterer, whether they make an aesthetically pleasing, physical sculpture, or augment the cultural capital of the development by way of producing semiotic value through ephemeral practice. The major source of public-realm art in the UK currently is gentrification, hence when we see practices akin to the Dérive deployed directly as a public realm project by artists we must remain critical and aware of its context as semiotic commodity. That is not to dismiss such projects as without value, clearly artists inhabit a capitalist system of labour relations, just as we can not blame the bricklayer for gentrification, neither should we necessarily attack the artists involved. However, we must remain critically aware of the artist's place in this system, and not attribute radicality to projects that merely paper over the social ruptures that such developments result in, artists too should be aware of their position in relation to such operations. Perhaps the best hope for Dérive lies outside of traditional art economies, this does not mean that it is not art, rather that its function remains antagonistic rather than complementary to capitalism. Art is therefore a danger to the Dérive but the Dérive is potentially a 'saving power' to art.

Art has traditionally been captured as a specifically delineated spacetime (it is this delineation that marks it from everyday life), this is a reification, but via the logic of situations this process can be detourned. A similar logic of reification is at play when the public realm artist converts social capital into plain old capital via their interventions on behalf of developers. This is simply the logic of work – work as a delineation of life via an economic imperative, the operation of alienating labour that reifies social relations into commodity relations, conceals the relations of people in the relation of things. The notion of the profession exists to fulfil this purpose. The curriculum vitae represents the abstraction and reification of the singular individual into an economic document of human capital. The Romantic myth of artistic uniqueness and genius is one strongly encouraged by a capitalism and an art market that seeks to deny a universality of creativity and to promote artistic activity as a specialised and restricted phenomenon and hence to retain what Benjamin labelled the 'aura' of the work of art. The aura of the work, created by the myth of its specialised production as a result of a professional individual exists in order to maintain its position as an exchange commodity and an entrenchment of social position, it is of course analogous to the fetish character of commodities in Marx. However, the professional aura of the artistic genius, or even just the neoliberal 'creative' individual who has invested their human capital in managing their 'innovative' talents, is an inherently and classically capitalist identification that derives from the division of labour, as Marx pointed out when he stated 'In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities' (Marx & Engels, p.432). It is the dominant discourse that demands and perpetuates the myth of specialisation and commodity, therefore applying the logic of the Dérive, the means by which to avoid such a reifying recuperation exists precisely within this very logic, or illogic, of the Dérive – to defy discipliniarity. To make art as a critique of life and life as a critique of art, to make art without audiences and without artists. Debord always refused specialism, perhaps this is why the Dérive remains relevant for us today. Therefore the activity of DériveLab, even if labelled 'artistic' must remain not only cross-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary, but extra-disciplinary. It must only arrive at art not via the means articulated by Bourriaud, when discussing Robert Fillou:

Art offers an immediate “right of asylum” to all deviant practices that can not find their natural bed. So many forceful works...only arrived in the realm of art for the simple reason that they had reached the limit in other realms
(Bourriaud, 2002, p.102).

ie. as the last refuge for extracting surplus value from those arenas external to and therefore incomprehensible to the logic of capitalism and its system of divisions, specialisms and disciplines. Rather DériveLab must transcend the categorisations of discipliniarity and profession, of artistic and academic investigation in the same way that the Dérive does for the categories of experience and spacetime. It must be heterochronic and heterotopographical. Dérive gives us purpose without instrumentality: if contemporary urban being is seemingly entirely circumscribed by the instrumentality of its actions, Dérive is the action that evades instrumentality and therefore opens up a different means of being, an alternate ontology. The DériveLab performatively enacts its promise, the Dérive is a Lab, the Lab is a Dérive.

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References:

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Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, New York, 1968

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