CLUSTERS AND CRYSTALS: OBSERVING AT POINT ZERO

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As the organizer of Sinopale, the European Cultural Association — which grounds the biennial in long-term, sustainable micro-political and emancipatory efforts — is responsible, in collaboration with an international team of curators, for the selection of artists and the formation of the program, adopting a pedagogical and functional collective approach to produce a format of intercultural exchange with the local context through the exhibition, the events, and their logically resolved orientations.

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Sinopale is an event-based, process- and site-oriented biennial. For us, it is important to emphasize Sinopale's experimental character — one inspired by locality and site, and one that encourages art practices generating circulation models between new production, experience, the field of art, and everyday life. Sinopale encompasses many events in different formats. Alongside alternative venues, the biennial's main exhibition will take place in the former prison. At the same time, with no hierarchy between it and the exhibition, the entire city of Sinop will overflow with short, performance-based events. In addition, an open-air film screening program, the Sinopale Summer Academy educational programs, and Sinopale Children and Youth workshops will be open to a broad audience and to the community.

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We wanted to underscore the exhibition value of art that demonstrates the worth of directly evaluating, through today's system of values and perspective, the complexity of the city of Sinop and the past that articulates its potential urban spaces, while emphasizing the continuation of what is at work in constituting the horizontal structure of aesthetic events.

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This summer, Sinopale brings together art practices learned and lived through the experience gained from knowledge of a specific site — practices that can be seen as sharing, common ground, difference, and knowledge, as well as non-knowledge, alongside aesthetic, social, and political practices, as other facets of the same process. Representational values of this kind — constructed in ways that are spatial and non-linear — are common to both art and history.

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With the aim of opening up a field of productive practices in which art practices can efficiently build new bridges to unite site-space-city, and can be seen as cross-cutting tools for social change that can dissolve within the existing context while externalizing and transforming it, we began the project Observation at Point Zero, built on the genealogy of a method in which "there is no such thing as universal cartography."[1] "Clusters and Crystals" refers both to spiritual and environmental public spaces, and to "the immeasurability of the public, which constitutes the absolute order of shattering or creating being."[2]

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With ethnographic and archaeological enthusiasm, we explored clusters of knowledge formations and the material traces of clouds, and questioned how values crystallize and how they can become the raw material of energy and matter. Marx referred to commodities as "crystals of this social substance, common to them all" (i.e., human labor) — values, commodity-values. Crystal is the ideal model for a stock of potential energy: it implies the general law of the conservation and transformation of energy.

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Energy is never lost or gained, only transformed from one form to another. The essential problem of contemporary physics — since energy tends to dissipate and change its own form — is the question of how to store energy. This is a phenomenon of transformation that produces a reality specific to physical energy, social energy, and the flow of labor. The energy of a site sustains the tangible nature of the site's existing reality, and in turn, the site produces energy, in a cycle. Observation at Point Zero examines the relationship between energy and knowledge within time and space.

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Mapping — sketching out the future of happiness through functionalist diagramming

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By applying the method of functionalist diagramming, we sketch out a "happy future" that makes use of two types of character — one that assumes a person is simultaneously both "analyst" and "inventor" — in a leap toward qualitative spatial practices. To this end, we examine the development of social and aesthetic practices that are one and the same as watching a performance, assuming an operative position, placing them on the map, or mapping the local competence — containing both material and spiritual elements — that can arise from collective expressions.

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As Félix Guattari noted, "maps themselves are like laboratories that set experimentation with sketches into interaction." They immediately constitute socio-analytic, aesthetic, and political practices. Mappings are event-based processes that cannot be simply reduced to any summary, determination, or chronology, but that develop the potentials emerging from schematic effects — effects capable of engendering their own signs, participating in non-human flows across social, biological, poetic, cosmic, and other registers, in signs and sounds.

The map provides numerous methods for inventing a great many modified "becomings," in an expression of the diversity of deaths that is the map's very nature. It is both an aesthetic and scientific, both an artistic and theoretical, tool for organizing migrations and deaths. It can always be turned upside down, spun around, or reassessed, developing a system of schematic propositions against the new and non-localizable ties of transformative trajectories that are new in determining schematic coordinates and in the passion for creating personalized spaces.

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Observation at Point Zero — an analytical-polemical and aesthetic-productive practice

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We take the risk of focusing on our emancipatory efforts regarding the gaze. Classical perspective, in which the vantage point is a hole — a peephole — presupposes observation moving from outside toward the interior of a surface that functions as a mirror (reflecting). It is constructed within a geometric symmetry, around the theoretical identity between the viewpoint and the vanishing point. Through its beginning and end, it contains a hidden assumption — with the capacity to propose a virtual space of transience, an automatized field of attraction that mesmerizes the viewer's eyes — that the purpose of seeing is the vanishing point, and it fixes the gaze.

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It is no coincidence that Michel Foucault, in the opening section of The Order of Things, asks us to pay attention to the production of the field of knowledge, to the field of objective reflections born from the relationship between geometrically fixed points, and to the importance of looking at their symbolic expression.

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"Point Zero" was not designated to discover a new supernova. It signifies the analytical-polemical and aesthetic-productive practices of a new way of seeing based on "360-degree attention" — an expanded set of "Unfashionable Observations," which, unlike classical perspective, disrupts symmetry and grants critical and historical importance to the process of observation. As for spiritual/mental matters, the "doctrine of classification" is of no use — they are part of existence. "Observation at Point Zero" means working, in a moment of crisis, to exceed the limit out of necessity, and to take on the functioning and schematic practices of molecular pragmatism and the microcosmic. Spatially, it can be characterized as a constantly changing mechanical eye — a blender of all possible perspectives, bringing a new relationship between perception and sensory experience, between the unconscious and consciousness, the public, society, and difference, through the environmental and proven practices of thousands of eyes.

Observation at Point Zero is not merely a method proposing newly derived ways of looking at the world. It means being in the world — not being in front of the world, but a conception of the world in which there is no center. This new asymmetric configuration is more than the difference between activity and passivity. It means, simultaneously, the design or schematization of a contradictory spatial figure — as if one were both visible and behind the scenes at once, a two-way structure, paired but as if two identical things had become doubled (identical properties, identical mass but different electric poles [– and +]), or like resembling twins, or like Kafka's two bureaucrats — who are, in fact, agents activating a system of mental processes — or like the electron passing quickly through the double-slit experiment, its behavior dependent on the diffraction pattern that a tunneling effect or wave-state condition would display while passing through both slits simultaneously — except that if someone observes which slit it passes through, this observation completely changes the particle's behavior and shows it only in its particle-state form.

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Such a schematic method of looking holds in daily life: a child spontaneously discovering the details of its surroundings, an anxious farmer watching clouds rise in a blue sky from the field, a fisherman on the open sea seeing a storm approaching, the curiosity of a scientist observing the stars of the night sky and simply discovering that the Sun and Earth are located in the outer suburbs of the Milky Way, the innocence of a poet looking at the green burst of leaf buds…

Thus, we are concerned with all the imperceptible methods of the experience of one's gaze upon mental phenomena with closed eyes — with the woman who knows her gaze turns back upon itself, no different from the oceanic feeling of the mystic's religious experience, or the automatized steps of the sleepwalker's path — de-automatizing the way one looks at reality and its phenomena. De-automatization differentiates the mechanical aspects of perception from mental processes and the capacity for comprehension — that is, it points to "perception grasping an object, the capacity for comprehension grasping the relationship between an object and consciousness," and to the flow of a mechanized unconscious.

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Why and How to Develop Molecular Perceptions

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Observation at Point Zero, in its own in-betweenness, does not merely observe knowledge; it is also a practice of a schematic proposition aiming to develop a molecular perception — an activity of the capacity for comprehension operating on all the creative sides of a productive practice. It opens toward an understanding of activity — that is, an aesthetic, political, and historical-ontological understanding. The space between the two — inside and outside the universe — is a passage whose nature is to unite and to bind, rendering the process of such an observation invisible to an outside observer. When it comes to discovering the invisible phenomenon, this is the most salient observation one can undertake.

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The space in between is a fantastical wonder and a plastic field, entirely a matter of behavior, and an impersonal individuation deriving from the relations of collective needs. "In between, everything is possible" — as a structural collective practice producing the world as an open-ended dynamic activity and diversity within its own historical and political horizon, "from the most extraordinary possibility to the most unalterable materialization." The field of individuation consists of an emancipation and of options born from new realities arising through their own metabolizations. This metabolization is valuable — as the "pure" energization of the social field through the living force of the living subject and living knowledge, since things are fluid and undefinable — a metabolization in which things themselves are historical and undefinable, as the effective reality of one's own thought (this productive field turns with productive flows), of a possible of the possible.

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We strive to actualize new formations, presenting their capacities for their own ends as the potentials of real life. This means placing oneself in the very midst of dynamic forces to vectorize and orient the political effects of the circulation of (particular) particles that are neither subject nor object, and of the multiplication and enabling of strata — for example, the pure quantity of potential deterritorialization, the building blocks of the universe, of which we too are made — for the sake of vectorizing and orienting political effects.

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They retain the power to effect ruptures while critically traversing the real world from one end to the other, and encompassing a creative and material historical-ontological view — the material view of "the entirety of the collective matter that plays a role in history." This is an act of imagination that, with all the living energy of resistance as poetic and theoretical thought, follows real social relations and whose reference points come from them.

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A method of setting energy free — designing over the void

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Observation at Point Zero, like Writing Degree Zero, is an original method for freeing an unreachable point-zero energy. Zero-point energy is also the "residual energy" of the void. As scientists posit, the energy of the universe is balanced between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravity. The density of zero energy is microcosmic and significant — it is the primary matter. To observe from point zero is a practice of sketching over the void, of schematizing the void as the opposite of nothingness. The alternative to the void is a fullness. It is a practice that leads, absolutely, to fullness, to the flow of matter, to the constant construction of space for life as a being formed in abundance. Such a conceptualization of matter and of its metabolic existence in the body offers us the possibility of orienting ourselves like a biopolitical figure. "This is what the biopolitical production of the multitude entails: filling the void until it extends itself from fullness to void" — expanding and deepening the ontological practice of the emergence of a line of deterritorialization of migration.

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Astrophysicists say that when an event occurs within the boundary of a black hole's event horizon, this event can never reach an outside observer, making it impossible even to determine whether such an event occurred at all. In Observing from Point Zero, we allude to the effects of the black hole's event horizon — meaning that an observer takes up different focal points outside their own gaze. In such an observation, without critical distance, the observer is situated within the field of observation and becomes part of it — for example, blurring the boundaries between the knowing subject and the known object — rather than from a viewpoint composed of representational and symbolic claims made with respect toward an object.

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Such a position — calling for an aesthetic event through the polemic of presentism — lies between being and taking place. This presentism creates a new space or field: "subjectification as a process, and a relation (relation to oneself) […] constitutes 'selfhood' as a relation of a force to itself." "Subjectification has nothing to do with an 'individual': it is a specific and collective subjectification related to an event (a time of day, a river, a wind, a life…). It is a form of intensity, not a personal subject."

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Black holes: the event horizon as cosmic grave where there is no return — eternal return as illusion

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Scientists explain black holes, with their potential for destruction, as a gravitational collapse — like a mathematically defined field known as the event horizon, from which not even light can escape, and which underlines the breakdown of the homogeneity of the space-time relation following Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. Black holes are perfect cosmic graves, perfect reservoirs for meaningless matter — a strongly condensed space demonstrating contemporary science's mathematical allocation of space.

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Félix Guattari created the objective black holes of social and micro-political space. To understand how their functions are organized within themselves, one may look at the holes in the face, focusing on the mouth. This image evokes an abyss — the mouth of darkness can swallow, but it can also open to utter a word or to speak, or leave a clue, trace a mystery in space, or produce work on common ground, as sounds pass through space and bodies, seizing them, while forms of expression that are graphics-upon-sound can enter into communication. What can change the void, and what can cross the threshold and return? In this chain of thought, we will ask how the eternal return evokes the void, how centrifugal force can stir up creative matter, and how it can inspire our collective creativity in action.

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This eternal return is not the alteration of an event, but rather its eternal return as an illusion — which is the very condition, in all its spiritual and imaginary aspects, for the imaginary that permits a form of bending in which Foucault's "non-human alterity," to create mechanical movement, "a consciousness firmly anchored in the existing world, thus creates an imaginary appearance against the ground of genuine reality." This illusion is not actually a return, but rather it causes an irreversible change in the pure formation of the continuous development of the subject that emerges within space, sets itself in motion, and grows with space. The essential experiment of reality is growth — for instance, the expansion of the universe and its swelling through continuous development. How has this become entangled with the immanent growth of our responsibility and of the practices of political subjectivity, and how can this counter the swelling of the black holes of gentrification, securitization, the annexation of a country, financialization, and economic crisis in our existing conditions? How can it respond to the disruptions of our realities? This effort explores open-ended dependencies, embracing all the dual meanings and ambiguities of both history and meaning — spreading toward our (significant) non-human alterity, always embracing the other and the "self," like the positive and affirming positions of all mixed perspectives, to understand the idea of a fourth dimension.

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Inverting the negativity of crisis — subjective resonance as the echo of the social black hole

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We are faced with the crises of a world economy that turns the abstractions threatening us all with environmental crises and suffocation into a fluid flood. The various dimensions of the global crisis continually strike locality, accelerating dispersive processes under its gravity's negative effects, and seizing and freezing the positive energy produced by all of us, individually and collectively. This leads to the exhaustion of productive forces and the closure of subjectivity for one-directional economic benefit, and this has a destructive effect, amid ever-rising social and economic cost, on the conditions for the reproduction of the social bond.

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The question is how we can turn the negativity of crisis into a positive within the ontological horizon of the creative act arising from a double bind. Our creative activity can ignite within a short-lived monument, with the capacity to turn oppression into creation and invention, with an explosive core ready to trigger an irreversible process. We must learn how, in an extraordinary state, to organize the forces through which we can collectively turn crises into productive and collaborative work. Observing from Point Zero means learning to use the contradictions of the ambiguity of crises to create a boomerang effect from the perspective of the "real" context — that is, to intervene on the plane of the micropolitical, to participate in the creative flow of rhythms, inductions, and fluidities.

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In Félix Guattari's concept, situated somewhere in between all the active and positive energy-giving quantitative and creative flows of matter, opening the threshold of creative chaos for the dynamic flows of change that link past and future to produce a solid "now," subjective resonance is the echo of a black hole. This environment, in which all singularities are scattered, constitutes their differences through common resources capable of causing a wide redistribution of power and knowledge. The forces of the ocean of creative chaos spread the network of power through weak forces and quantum fluctuations. It is the prime matter (materia prima) that allows us to cut a piece to form a space, giving it shape, to create as an aesthetic instance of organization — meaning, to cross a particular threshold of reality, to put a schematic practice into operation. It is a space/place that holds our concrete scaffolding — it does not offer support, since, like inconsistent formations, it is cloudy and blurred, but it has the capacity to constitute reality.

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Secondary forms of learning — concrete resistance

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Here we want to recall Silvia Federici's Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, from whom we have much to learn, and with whom begins a process of self-valorization and self-determination. It gives us tools not only to reconstruct the public interest but also to discover new forms of solidarity as a feature of relationships capable of creating new common spaces. This requires a major transformation of our attitudes toward the preservation of selfhood as one's own responsibility — for example, responsibility toward the social relations that constitute both the aesthetic and the political, flowing outward "in countless waves cascading toward other spaces" in relation to all productive fields and forces. Another important question that arises is how we can recognize history as the origin of a collective project of solidarity and sharing. Such practices, besides encompassing education and learning, are collaborative work that includes being responsible not only to one another but also — like knowledge and subjectivity — to the world, the forest, the sea, the air, and the spiritual environment.

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We do not begin from "grand politics" in order to produce new statements, but rather, with the claim that "the minor implies integration," we begin from a process that is at first marginal, from minor forms. Hence, there is no bird's-eye view of the human condition. Yet, paradoxically, minor forms cannot be outside actual history, because they are concrete resistance, and in fact they produce history. Minor processes of learning provide the actual movement of thought, its living energy. Learning concerns all vital matters and the systems of communication of human and non-human networks — following Bateson's lesson, we can learn from everything around us: from a dog, a stone, a child.

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We are all within a lifelong learning process, which is the essential nature of all living beings, necessary for survival and adaptation to one's environment. Learning is a regulating and self-correcting practice of life, responsible for creating qualities and extensions. It is a metabolic practice of the contradictory poetic ties of self-sustaining machines' aesthetic existence and of successive aesthetic effects of creative resistance to the current realities permeating all of life, as an explosion. Aesthetic power embodies the coexistence of what is not mutually shared, creating context and learning from it. It is the passion for individuating spaces in order to position oneself there. In other words, the minor movements of our desires to learn are a leading step toward a significant vitalist thinking.

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We want to arrive at freedom not as consumerism or as a commodity, but as a concept of a new invention that stands alongside creation and creative satisfaction. Freedom and responsibility are mutually shared. The more freedom we gain, the more, in turn, our responsibility grows, in rhythmic steps — one for freedom, the next for responsibility. Inseparable from the instantaneous passions that liberate our thinking from colonization to create and imagine new existential territories, we must cultivate our own gardens and fields, and wait patiently for them to bear fruit. In this process, how can we be guided by our pedagogical needs, and how can we make direct reference to our daily lives by inventing new forms of living? Michel Foucault's statement, "life as a work of art," implies for us a form of the aesthetics of existence — a life in which one exists not as a subject, but as a work of art.

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Ruptures and passions for renewal — reconstructing the quality of everyday life

This century is one of ruptures and passions for renewal, from South to North, from East to West, down to a flow of extraordinary condensations and vibrations from the past. The deterritorializing flow of energization passes through these ruptures in order to cross the abyss and constitute the present, and it revives and permits new sensitivities, new understandings, the blessings of a new generosity.

We want to engineer the machinery of an engine of uprooting, desired in the hope of reshaping life in a way that can give life to various levels of reality, to take part in the captivity of "inexhaustible unconscious wealth." We must pay attention to these ruptures, occurring with ever-increasing force, developing rapidly and splitting into two branches — new revolutions, new independence, new alternatives with their ecological strategies — and we must strive to suggest new administrative techniques and new relations among communities. There is a pragmatic (pedagogical) need for schematic lessons to form new alliances between productive and political forces. We may call it society's right to produce, and life itself.

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The schematic proposition of revolutionary passions has the potential to permeate every aspect of life with all this creative potential, and to develop new evolutionary trajectories in order to return to the rigidity of everyday life with its monotonous rhythm. Let us use our desires and passions to regulate the harmony and quality of our everyday life. This is not only in the sense of clothing our flesh onto the bare skeleton of the real to build new concrete for the future, but also to preserve the dual character of the event and its potential for rupture, to build an already-existing harbor that will give space to a peaceful life — which must be a truly delightful discovery of collaboration offering wonderful conditions for our leisure time too, to swim in the ripples of water beneath a gentle sun, to lie upon warm stones. We urgently need a refrain both for our working days and for all the free time in which we can enjoy ourselves after work.

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At the outset of all these processes, we need a certain amount of money in order to be able to build a reality — an adaptable and resilient reality. We also need all the quantitative creative material and singular numbers that encompass the full quality and quantity of life coming from biomatrix and biopower, as a positive affirmation of life in all its forms. Gregory Bateson identifies that value within biology is not a linear function, but a matter of fitness that is highly local. What is good in one situation may be poisonous in another. He compares this to the world of political economy: "This property of biological value does not wait for money." This connects to Deleuze's analysis of biomatrix, in which biopower is defined as "the reality of embryology." The larva's need for transformation comes from within, as a potential and a power, and it cannot be stopped. The larval subject of creative revolution is the production of subjectivity as a "biopolitical being," within an active "transformational reassessment" of the entire stratum, through a microcosmic vitalism that gives life a new meaning.

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Learning as a process of change — knowledge of a space

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This year at Sinopale, we are interested in bringing together art forms that trigger a common consciousness closely connected to learning. Learning, as a process of change, encompasses both learning and forgetting — some would say it means acquiring knowledge from that environment and feeding it back into that environment, developing extensions "already covered with qualities" — for example, all common knowledge, both individually and collectively produced, capable of binding, that we need in order to create shared ideas for knowledge, living knowledge, to implement a politics of the public. That is, we strive to define a field of knowledge of space that determines the publicness of a project — not a project of those who resemble one another — a space in which we can come together. We are interested in knowledge that can resist, because resistance, with its full ecological set of definitions, can be understood as a productive practice in public, a poetic contradiction of both matter and theoretical thought, an ontological practice, and as biopower.

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The creativity we bring to our work can bring craft — which is under the long-standing pressure of corporatized post-industrial mass production and has come close to disappearing — together within the heterogeneous uniqueness of the impressive reality and poignant presence of contemporary art. We ask how we can account for the most salient power of the extraordinary school of life, in which the exchange between them, for the imaginative faculty, stepping outside their own contexts, can reveal the creative potential of learning as a self-operating formation, strengthening secondary educational strategies produced within their own environments for that environment, strategies that can become increasingly successful.

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This edition of Sinopale is entirely devoted to engaging with minor forms of learning, supporting alternative community education, and ensuring equal access to art-produced and home knowledge in the field. With this, we hope to raise awareness of the present, using and reassessing marginalized, excluded, and forgotten knowledge, for the sake of a socially respectful and environmentally inspired development, and to give new life to used materials by transforming them.

 

Text: T. Melih Görgün, Dimitrina Sevova,

with  the contribution of Aslı Çetinkaya, Işın Önol, Emre Zeytinoğlu, Elke Falat

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[1] Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles/CA: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2011).

[2] Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London / New York: Bloomsbury, 2013/2003).

[3]Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles/CA: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2011, p. 172).

[4]“Subjectivation has little to do with any subject. It’s to do, rather, with an electric or magnetic field, an individuation taking place through intensities (weak as well as strong ones), it’s to do with individuated fields, not persons or identities.” Gilles Deleuze, “Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open,” in id., Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York/NY: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 93).

[5] Cf. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p. 113).

[6]Michel Foucault, The Order of Things,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973).

[7]Unfashionable Observations is one of the English translations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, better known under the title Thoughts Out of Season. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Redwood City/CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thoughts Out of Season, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Adrian Collins (Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1915).

[8] Antonio Negri, Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, trans. William McCuaig (New York/NY: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 59).

[9] Wolfgang Iser, “The Aesthetic and the Imaginary,” in David Carroll (ed.), The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (Stanford/CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 205).

[10] Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles/CA: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2011, p. 189).

[11] Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza‘s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 196).

[12] Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, preface by Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). A theme common to structuralist writing, as Deleuze outlines: “No structuralism is possible without this degree zero. Phillipe Sollers and Jean-Pierre Faye like to invoke the blind spot, so designating this always mobile point which entails a certain blindness, but in relation to which writing becomes possible, because series organize themselves therein as genuine “literemes”. In his effort to elaborate a concept of structural or metonymic causality, J.-A. Miller borrows from Frege the position of a zero, defined as lacking its own identity, and which conditions the serial constitution of numbers.” Gilles Deleuze, “How to recognize structuralism?,” in id., Desert Islands and other Texts 1953-1974 (Los Angeles/CA: Semiotext(e), 2004/2002, p. 186).

[13] Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2013/2003, p. 230).

[14] Gilles Deleuze, “Breaking Things Open, Breaking Words Open,” in id., Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York/NY: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 92).

[15] Gilles Deleuze, “Life as a Work of Art,” in Negotiations, op. cit. (pp. 98-99).

[16]Wolfgang Iser, “The Aesthetic and the Imaginary,” in David Carroll (ed.), The States of “Theory”: History, Art, and Critical Discourse (Stanford/CA: Stanford University Press, 1990, p. 205).

[17] Gregory Bateson, “Double bind, 1969,”in id., Steps to an Ecology of the Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of Himself(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, pp. 271-278). See especially Bateson’s rendering of the training of dolphins, in which some resist the routine by developing creative and inventive ways of affirming that routine, breaking the rules with striking and unexpected feats in front of the audience while being obedient during training sessions.

[18]Félix Guattari, The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis, trans. Taylor Adkins (Los Angeles/CA: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents, 2011).

[19]“This definition of learning raises questions regarding cases of ‘learning’ or ‘hysteresis,’ which can be found among purely physical phenomena. One of the best known of these is the case of the Chladni figures.” Gregory Bateson & Mary Catherine Bateson,Angels Fear: towards an epistemology of the sacred (New York/NY: Macmillan, 1987, p. 46).

[20] The American Heritage Dictionary defines hysteresis as “the failure of a property that has been changed by an external agent to return to its original value when the cause of change is removed.” It is the dependence of a system not only on its current environment but also on its past environment, on its history, on the path it took to get to its current state.

[21]Bateson, Angels Fear, op. cit. (p. 47).

[22]Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005).

[23]Bateson, Angels Fear, op. cit. (p. 47).

[24] Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland/CA: PM Press, and Brooklyn/NY: Common Notions and Autonomedia, 2012).

[25] Massimo de Angelis about Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero.

[26]Humberto Maturana Romesín, Fundamental Relativity: Reflections on Cognition and Reality (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013).

[27] “What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” Michel Foucault. (1991) [1984]. “On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader. (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1991/1984, p. 350).

[28] Silvia Federici, “Feminism And the Politics of the Commons,” The Commoner, The Commoner, January 4, 2011<http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=113> (accessed 2014-04-15). Republished in updated form in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (eds.), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market & State (Amherst/MA: Levellers Press, 2012) <http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/feminism-and-politics-commons>.

[29] Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York/NY: E. P. Dutton, 1979, p. 54).

[30] Gilles Deleuze, “The Method of Dramatization,” in id., Desert Islands and other Texts 1953-1974 (Los Angeles/CA: Semiotext(e), 2004/2002, p. 97).

References:

Revolution of Forms (http://www.revolutionofforms.com)

Village Institutes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Institutes)

Common Spaces, Artist Initiatives, Public Projects, Development Projects, Common Ideological Spaces or Survival Strategies

Collecting the Future (http://collectingthefuture.europist.net/)