GalleryMuseums-in-Museums

Frames do not exist in isolation. They contain but also they are containers. A museum is not just a frame. It is frame that can hold other frames. This meta-ability is a choice but also it is a compulsion. The satisfaction of being can only be matched by becoming a facilitative being. A terminal can only be trumped by a server. But such a facilitative being is not easily realised. Who should be facilitated? Who is worth it? Who is magnified at the appropriate scale?

In the absence of sufficiently developed stories, should the storytellers just read the names of the stories again and again? If we do not have something, should we wait or should we make it up. Making things up is accompanied by a discomfort. How can we allow ourselves to be so self-serving? The matter at hand is about being able to consider working with the theatre of scale appropriately. We offer a frame that fits neatly inside the widest available frame. There is no empty space to manoeuvre. If you know what snug means, you can expect snug. We identify gaps and we germinate seeds that we transplant into the gaps so that the emergent frame can optimally fill up the gap. We are interested in museums as containers of other containers. We see museums as containers of mere items sometimes. This does not require us to work hard enough to position what we experience in our imagination. Surely what we get can't be what we are meant to get?

We like apartment blocks more than houses standing on their own distinct plot of land. Apartment blocks are frames that exist to merely lead us to the individual apartments. They do not have any function. Once we are at our destination, we knock or ring the bell if there is one and then proceed to go in. Once we are inside, we are in another world. From the container, we enter another container. Like a fridge inside the house, like a television on a television screen, like a story within a story, like an apartment block. Museums appeal to us because then we can carry on our business of catchment-building and containment. We flood the premises that we enter and we flood it with noise. After the initial moment of rupture, the deluge begins to subside. This event allows us to map and understand boundaries based on the slopes and depths of various flows. We of course behave ourselves because this process is only possible if we scan the landscape and figure out a strategy for navigation. Structures and pathways already exist. We are only guests. We can only play with optics, we can reflect, refract and colour frames with different lenses.

Enclosures

When we picture something inside something we picture it in a different light. Our mind imagines space and then fabricates it. If our minds didn't do that then our imagination would be trapped within the confines of where we are. And that is plain ridiculous. One of the only reasons we find it tolerable to keep living is the possibility of being absolute irresponsible in our imagination. This irresponsibility is without an anchor. But is also without any allegiance. It doesn't have ours or anybody else's interests at heart and we need to be hold it with a certain amount of suspicion. The easiest way for mischief to enter our waking consciousness is through our idle imagination. Imagination is not innocent.

So, when we consider enclosures, when we think of museums inside other museums, then the volume that we imagine is speculative in nature. We are not as precise as cartographers but we are as generous as gamblers. When we are considering a prospective space, we do not need precision at all. Those who need security before they place a bet on the unknown potential of a container will not be able to summon the courage of even placing the container in their midst.

Museums as containers within containers take courageous bets.

They schedule and place containers before they have even opened the containers to verify what they contain. This is the only way of dealing with the future. The future will not wait. After it has risen out of the rumble and noise of the present, the bets are closed. And once the bets are closed, the valuations are fixed. Once the valuations are fixed it is not possible to negotiate anymore.

The container might be engaged in the business of celebration, but strangely enough as the level of magnification changes, this is not possible anymore. From celebration, to prospecting, the difference is not huge. The latter serves the former. If you celebrate something once, how can you celebrate it again? This is the problem of celebration, either it is earnest with emotion or it is a ritual. It cannot be both. Museums know that they are on a moving platform, they cannot hold on to anything. By containing containers, museums are able to safeguard their interests. They are able to swim against the current, navigate paradoxes.

Very naturally, as you move closer to things, they appear to be bigger. This instability of the perception of scale makes it possible for distortions and illusions to be constructed. Scale is anything but a simple parameter. When containers enter containers, our view gets obstructed and the absolute scope of scale gets reset. This allows new effigies to be built with as light a touch and casual an undertaking as any. This is only an important part of furthering the cycle. The cycle is not an analysis. It is a process. We might know a process is a process but that does not render it obsolete. How we know the cycle and what we know of it is a small part of all the elements in the cycle. What we call a cycle could be a mere chain-link in a bigger cycle too. This need not overwhelm us, but knowing this we can rest easy amongst the fluid and fickle lot without needing to feign any fixity except the questions that we find ourselves asking repeatedly.

28-03-2015 Vacuum Suction tags: script

Vacuum is a stateless situation. There is no media for the promulgation of any idea of reform or dramatic intervention. The forces of capital have a clean run. They are free to operate in any way they choose. If vacuum is the absence of air, then what is this air? Human voices, the murmur of conversation, the humdrum in the ether that becomes the substance of manipulation. If there is no manipulation possible then does it mean that the only affordance is to behave according to the script? And who is the author of this script anyway? And why is this author so invisible and absolute? I know that the first cast of actors that works on a new script is very important because a rehearsal with this cast helps in developing the script further. But in our current scenario, that is not possible anymore. Because we are not the members of the first cast of actors. And also because the author in this context is deluded with a sense of his own grand-narrative. The first cast of actors in the present context has long gone. The scenario that we are talking about is the Internet. And the first cast of actors we are referring to are the initial band or artists, hackers and free software evangelists that fought hard to ensure that the common infrastructure became a commonly-owned, wild forest that became the germinal ground for many species to develop. Now we operate in walled gardens that have clearly defined pathways of discourse and exchange.

These walled gardens can collapse easily, if enough noise and air is pumped into the enclosures and the pathways cannot contain the motions of the crowd anymore. If the pathways of discourse and exchange that are permissible today become so densely populated that it breaks out into stampedes and movements that patterns cannot be read into easily then the pathways can be overwhelmed.

In a walled garden, continuities are not encouraged. In a police state, mass assembly is not encouraged.

But for texts to become scripts, continuities need to be imagined. A periodic scope needs to be furnished. Multiple episodes bleeding into each other need to be constructed.

The walled garden will not allow the emergence of a parallel script to challenge its own.

A script that can deny its own existence easily is possible. The continuity can be said to exist only in the minds who engage over time and let their mind be influenced and subjected to. It does not exist in any discernible form otherwise. The script exists in the audience's mind only. The audience can become a part of the production anytime.

Child entries

The Book of Curses

17-11-2012 Symptoms of a museum, part 1 tags: character-sketch museum badass

I choose to appropriate the word. The word 'museum' now just means what I read into it, it just 'means' what I pronounce. So it becomes a specification more than a description arrived at through careful observation and analysis. Pronouncements, specifications, commandments, hard-knocks.

And here goes.

A museum is a catalog of the lost and found registry,

When I say "the" lost and found registry, I mean a specific one Of course there are lots of those out there, if you are Japan, one at every station.

I mean the specific registry that journalists run. Journalists who have some interest in history. Journalists who have learnt a thing or two and fancy themselves with other identifiers. Like: historian, curator, critic, why even a director of a museum collection or something. A registry that a journalist runs is always operating desperate reconnoissance missions. Missions that hope to catch hold of things before they disappear. Catch hold of things before they become ghosts. The journalist (sorry a upper-case J will just be too much) pickles these border-line ghosts and proclaims a museum. But museums are not pickle shops. I mean they are lots of things but they are not pickle-shops. So pickling border-line ghosts is one, and then getting real'n'greasy with them is another. Imagine an all-night orgy with ghosts. Where will your mind be? So these don't just bind a history-text with architectural floss and money. They really play the coroner, the mourning chamber, the autopsy chief, the jazz performer. The cheap massage (and other tricks) offering-guy.

Of course there are museums pretending to be talking about the present. Offering the juiciest carrot of them all, for letting also-rans some show to be running-now. So you know escape-the-rat-race exit route. You land up in bed with a journalist who is going to musify (new word!) you. Seeding a monument to the unmarked, undeclared. Like fox searchlight, taking independent movies and putting them in theatres all over the galaxy. But sometimes I find these to be more like half-way houses. Sosometimes these kind of museums don't make the cut. When in doubt, ask yourself, does this museum rock my foundations? If yes, check. If no, no-go.

A museum plays with naked power,

By default and also not. Power is access to the server room. Access not because you are the server administrator but because you are a punk. Faith in piracy, eloquently supporting the case of anyone you feel like supporting. Irrespective of the case fitting the pattern or not. Power is not having the wheel in your hand but still being able to turn the direction of the vehicle. Not begging for the wheel but doing without it.

Foolhardy risk-taking may betray a nonchalance, a callous disregard for mortality. But it displays the urge. To know how hard the kick will hurt, you need to see the kicker, feel-up the thigh bones. Power does not mean having the switchboard in access, power means being the suicide bomber and the paratrooper in the same split-screen psyche.

Power means being in the play and citing all kinds of stupid reasons to not play-along. But staying-put and playing with myself at home. Playing with myself is an act of power. Power is in moments, not in positions, not in jobs, not in names, not in staying power or hit-rate.

Museums are refugee camps for mal-adjusted punks,

Adjustment is a clinically pathogenic tendency. To feel comfortable, work hard at digging-in a hole and then snuggling-in. Thorns on your ass, prickly urges that are craft moments of comfortable torture. Lubricants that don't work. Meditation spells noisily disturbed. Museums have their doors open for the mal-adjusted. The mis-fits. Not in the punk, non-compliant, oddball-genius way. Mal-adjusted are the things that don't turn up in the search result. Everything that didn't fit the pattern-search.

As a refugee-camp for mal-adjusted punks, museums are really running a shuffling container. It is a bid to get unstuck from the cycles. The mal-adjusted is the off-key, you don't risk seeing your members on the magazine cover. It becomes the antidote for dulling the crystal-clear, sharp-as-a-blade propaganda floating around. Stifling aspiration at the roots. What do you aspire to? Peer pressure is an impossibility if there are no peers. Root for the underdog, if you have to root at all.

Museums are stand-up comedy concerts, they fuck with everyone and wear irreverence on their sleeve,

Museums are at the end of the food-chain of whichever field they represent. There is no sales, there is no need for more money, there is more of it where it comes from. So the museum if a middle finger to all the middle-men, all the facilitators, enablers. They behave like kingmakers and whether there is magic or not in their magic-wand, they pull it out all the same. Fucking with everyone and feigning irreverence is one of the privileges reserved for the comedian-in-the-house.

The comedian-in-the-house is whoever has the guts to stand at this moment, whoever has the guts to put their head outside the window and holler, whoever can make you laugh. Slap them, leave the room. Do whatever. The comic is not going to stop. The comedy is going to be relentless, non-stop. And the figures in the front-row are going to get fingered. Freedom of speech was invented for the comedy stage only - fart in any direction, the stink gets home. Sometimes you laugh only because you came to a comedy performance. Hysteria builds up, layer upon layer.

Museums are games, rule-based systems,

You can play a game with a machine, because a machine will always faithfully follow rules. There is room for faltering, for exceptions. Museums, which we are talking about are like machines. There is no room for calling the people-you-met-at-the-party in. No room for being whimsical, writing your agenda for the year on a roll of toilet paper. Museums are machines for playing games. Games, according to popular diagnosis: rules, goals, rewards, voluntary participation. So in a game-world you can trigger things to happen, cause events by your actions. There is no mystery. There is complexity, yes. But all of it has been parameterized. So in my world, a museum almost have no head of their own. They are just pockets of probability, zones of repercussion.

And so, this museum is also a casino. A den for high-stake gambling. Sometimes life can be at stake, but other times more important things. Like the right to be seen as a person, a person with something to say. Within its own world only the rules decide what happens. And the rules here are not codes, not algorithms. But just a mass of unresolved, unparsed text.

Museums are crime-syndicates,

Universes within universes, closed systems, games are nothing but crime-syndicates. What are the defining characteristics of organised crime? You don't know where the money comes from. Fear. No one talks, and if someone talks they are dead or dying fast. Tribal-system, bonds and loyalties based on relationships and not a qualified search. Generosity.

Not all crime means possessing automatic assault rifles. Crime is a black-box, there are often very good reasons why crime is allowed to exist. Criminals often are criminals only because they provide functions which are much in demand, but difficult to approve-of. Selling on the street, prostitution, piracy come to mind first. The charade often exemplifies the phrase, "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours."

Sanctuaries for the irrational, opaque and the uncalled-for. Crime is doing the dirty work which can't be a business otherwise. And crime is thank-less. No one sends thank-you notes to this museum. People we meet on the street, don't slap our backs, buy us beers, invite us into holy matrimony with their daughters.

Museums are obsessive,

Obsession lives on the same street as sentimentality. Just way head. Way down the road. Obsession narrows down the potential options for the future. We don't want good things to happen, we want this to happen.This might be the repeated urge to digress,this might be anything. My museum obsesses over chasing desire and the point when it ceases to live, but continues zombie journeys.

Without an obsessive, neurotic urge I see programmes and agendas emerge from anywhere. Research, theory, aspiration, funders, google searches... anything. It is a strategy to avoid redundancy, a strategy to sideline possible glories and afflictions. Why want glory when you have a blazing obsession to nurture? The obsessive never worry. About the story winding up and dealing with a silence. The soundtrack is unending, the story will never wind-up. There will be enough obsession to go around, when it comes to that.

Obsession is the only way to to subvert and destabilize cultural tendencies to loop and crawl. Crawl behind trends and pools of common interest, avoidance-behaviors and innocence. Loop with each available opportunity, "if there is no future on the horizon, there is always the past."

And also unresponsive, unsolicited, self-propagating,

Unsolicited communication. Pushing air into a compressed-air tube can go on and on. There needs to be no stop. After it is full, it will stretch. After it has stretched all it can, it will burst. We don't care. We have plans at hand for a ten thousand year fully-pronged attack on your senses. We will be relentless. We will carry on and on and on. We will be unresponsive to demand, social conventions, our turn to speak.

We propagate ourselves, there is no press release. There is no hope that someone will pick it up and run it. No one is qualified to run a piece on this museum, we ain't answering no questions. A self-propagation urge arose from missionary examples, on working on principles of "in or out" no hangers-on. After a point if we are unresponsive, who gives a fuck? Who else is in the room. I occupy more space than the biggest dinosaur. I answer the contemporary with tirades of obsolete belief systems and philosophy. No one and nothing can withstand that attack.

Museums are schizoid,

I have never known the right manner of eating at the dinner table. Even if I know, it doesn't play out right. I will be fumbling with the fork or the spoon or the chopsticks. And I just smile, charmingly and sweetly. I got no time for explanations. I can't explain very well that early in this train ride, I dumped a part of my brain. It was the part that helped me understand and empathise with people around me. Only the schizoid will survive the storm that's brewing. Only the schizoid will lead humanity into the future. A passionate practice of obsession, being self-centered and not giving a flying fuck for anything else.

Of course there are still family and friends. They just become a part of me, there is a magnanimous sense of self. No separation, no chunking of people in bodies.

So, if this is a list of symptoms. This is a check-list, if there are any checks, you've got a museum in your hands.