Utopia, the 1964 New York World’s Fair and The Dialectics of Oblivion

 

To mark the launch of the recent release, Utopia or Oblivion (CN5) Constructive Music have created a website ‘which will serve as a focal point for a series of essays, articles, artists work and information resources that will be derived from the same broad remit offered to the musicians’ who have contributed to the project, inspired by the writings of R Buckminster Fuller.

 

Their website announcement continues:

 

‘Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment. Humanity is in a final exam as to whether or not it might qualify for continuance in the Universe.’ (Utopia Or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity R. Buckminster Fuller) Constructive are pleased to announce a compilation of work by 10 artists inspired by and in response to the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, specifically from the essays Utopia Or Oblivion first published in 1963.

 

In response to their request, I have written an essay on the theme on Utopia and the Dialectics of Oblivion, inspired by the 1964 New York World’s Fair. This global event, better known for the US corporations drawn to it rather the nation states it sought to represent, has always fascinated me. It opened the same year that Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and McLuhan’s Understanding Media were published. It was also the year that Jonny Quest and Bewitched first appeared on American TV. ‘The Trip that’s Worth the Trip’ is a tribute to this unique moment in the history of progress. It is another in my series of occasional essays that take their structure directly from Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’.  I follow the same numbering and divisions of his original text and retain all of the extracted quotes with which he begins and ends some of the sections. I also try and keep the relative length of each entry to approximately the same proportions as those used by Benjamin, even though the overall length of the text itself might vary. I first used this approach in the essay ‘On The Concept of History, Brexit, Covid and the Paradise of Sovereignty: A fable in eighteen parts with two addenda and seven supporting quotations’ - which you can find in its entirety here. 

 

You can find The Trip That’s Worth the Trip: Utopia – the Dialectics of Oblivion on the Constructive website by clicking here.  

 

The Constructive album release details are as follows: CN5 Various Artists Utopia or Oblivion 2023 LP / DL

 

Pictured above:

The Pop Up New York World’s Fair

The General Motors Futurama pavilion

Jonny Quest gets his jetpack

From the Bewitched opening animation sequence

The Voices Are Back – Some Reflections on ‘Speak Spirit Speak’

For a limited period only, ‘Speak, Spirit, Speak’, my radio doc on EVP, ghost voices and ghost technologies, is back on the BBC i-Player. You can find it here.

The show seems to have become a regular fixture on Radio 4 Extra – I usually know when it has been on because I receive an email from some listener taking issue, not so much with the programme’s arguments, but with some specific example or other. Usually it is ‘We can see Edith by radio,’ cited by Edith Cass, the widow of EVP researcher Raymond Cass, that causes the objections. I had the pleasure of interviewing Edith in the backroom of the hearing aid repair workshop they once ran in Hull. At a small altar heaped with artificial flowers and framed photographs stood the Juliette radio Raymond used to listen to the voices of the aether. Edith had no doubt about what the spirits meant by their message and was still moved to tears by memories of her time spent with Raymond and the radio. Other strong memories from the weeks spent working on this programme for Radio 4 included an afternoon at the British Library sifting through the archives of Konstantin Raudive – little more than a cardboard box loaded with spools of reel-to-reel tape and exercise books crammed with handwritten texts – and the long and fascinating conversation I recorded with Erik Davis in one of the old fifth floor studios at Broadcasting House. 

Those old studios were fabulous: all dark wood and green baize-covered tables – the producer sat in a separate room screened from you by a think glass window, and a light went on in the middle of the table when the machines were rolling next door. The room was practically built for séances. BBC Radio was already moving some of its departments up to Salford so many of the offices were empty and deserted – just a few lights on phones or heating units still winking in the darkness. Erik gave a fantastic interview; and although we only used a few clips in the final show, I still have a recording of the full hour we recorded together. Jon Calver, my producer, thought that, with a little cleaning up, it would have made a great programme in itself. One day I’ll retrieve the recording from the archives and figure out what we might do with it.

So the voices are back, and I’m always happy to hear them. Has my position changed on what they are telling us over the intervening years? Not really. Long conversations with Mike Harding of Touch and sound artists Micheal Esposito and CM von Hauswolff have only increased my enthusiasm. The most recent thing I wrote on the subject was a review last year for The Wire of the LP ‘Medium: Paranormal Field Recordings and Compositions 1901 - 2017-09-20’, put out by Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw State University. I am quoting the review here in full for your interest:

There have been so many installations, performances and record releases involving Electronic Voice Phenomena, an elusive form of spirit communication using a wide range of media from early phonographs and tape recorders to computers and MP3 players, that ‘EVP’ can now be regarded as a legitimate musical genre in its own right. Ghost voices have existed ever since recorded sound was first captured on a mechanical device – every playback becomes an exercise in mortality and absence, particularly when a recording outlives the individual who made it. Not surprising therefore to discover such a diverse range of material caught in the grooves of this vinyl release intended as the sonic counterpart to a group exhibition of work by artists exploring the paranormal as their primary subject matter. The disc’s compilers have gone to great lengths to offer a comprehensive overview of the complex and shifting terrain covered by EVP. This includes musical compositions written and performed by those with direct links to the ‘spirit plane’ such as the sonorous ‘Re-Incorporation’ by percussionist Frank Perry and the sublime ‘Message from the Mystery’ by British clairaudient Jeannie Evans. Juxtaposed with them are pieces by experimental composers and performers exploring evanescence and disappearance as expressions of cultural colonialism, such as Guillermo Galindo’s turbulent ‘Limpia’, equating national borders with the shamanic crossing of thresholds, and Sally Ann McIntyre’s mournful attempt to invoke the lost song of the huia, a bird native to New Zealand that has been extinct since 1907. The record is resonant with references to early EVP pioneers such as Friedrich Jürgenson, Konstantin Raudive and Raymond Cass; and there are some suitably grainy field recordings made by psychic researchers teasing out accounts of hauntings, ghost voices and astral projections. And this still leaves room for some of the more established experimenters in the genre to slip through the cracks and fill them in afterwards. Leif Elggren, CM von Hauswolff and Michael Esposito have each been associated with Touch Music’s continued commitment to EVP since the release of their Ghost Orchid collection back in 1999. Elggren places before us a radio without an antennae struggling to pick up anything through the white noise and bock; Hauswolff has his various machines speaking in slow heavy tongues, while Esposito tracks spirits across a nineteenth-century battlefield on ‘The Yellow Jackets Last of 1811’ and remixes a recording from 1901 of spirit voices projected by a shaman into the horn of an early phonograph – their hearty but incomprehensible chortling will surely haunt the dreams of anyone who listens too closely.

‘Speak Spirit Speak’ is available on the BBC Radio i-Player for another 24 days.

Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics

I have an essay in a new collection of essays published by Edinburgh University Press. Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics is edited by Winchester School of Arts's Professor Ryan Bishop and Professor John Beck of the University of Westminster. The book connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to 21st century arts, society and culture. From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, the contributors to this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.

I am particularly pleased with this collection, not just because it includes contributions from the likes of Ryan Bishop, Jussi Parrika and Neal White, but because it contains the very last essay to appear in print that was composed while I was still undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer back in the summer of 2014.  The drugs they were giving me at the time had a strange way of enhancing my powers of concentration, meaning that whatever I wrote under their influence remains special to me. There is still some material from a larger project to be published at some point, but that can wait for the moment. In the meantime, here is the abstract for the essay, plus some key words to get you started:

‘The Very Form Of Perverse Artificial Societies…’

The Unstable Emergence of the Network Family From its Cold War Nuclear Bunker

Abstract

Just as the ‘nuclear family’ was seen as a strategic element in the Cold War, dispersed into suburban enclaves of self-contained domestic units, so the ‘network family’ of today, distributed across social media now finds itself defined as a strategic element in a warring online community. This paper seeks to examine the shift in domestic security from its deep roots in the nuclear family under threat of nuclear destruction to the network family of today whose elusive and fragmented presence is experienced as both a threat and a defence position. Delueze and Guattari’s ‘desiring-machines’ are examined in terms of the impact Norbert Wiener’s theory of Cybernetics upon both popular culture and the theoretical models proposed by Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse. Even as the mass media communicate today’s moral panics over online security, antisocial ‘trolling’ and whistle blowers – which already seem a quaint piece of media archaeology – actions are depicted and explained in terms of a domestic instability, first perceived during the Cold War 1950s and 1960s, from ‘slacker’ Ed Snowden to Anonymous adolescent hackers and Julian Assange’s displaced national status.

Key Words

Cybernetics, networks, ‘desiring-machines’, science fiction, media archaeology, Cold War politics, defence strategies, suburbia, Hollywood, popular culture, war machines, hacker collectives, portable devices, interactivity, marginalization, Watergate, Anonymous, Wikileaks, Oedipus, ‘Molecular Revolution’

And here are some more details about Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics from the Edinburgh University Press:

Key Features

Makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and culture

Draws on theorists such as Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Bernard Stiegler, Peter Sloterdijk and Carl Schmitt

The contributors include leading humanities and critical military studies scholars, and practising artists, writers, curators and broadcasters

234mm x 156mm

320 pages

20 colour illustration(s)

Technicities

ISBN

Hardback: 9781474409483

eBook (PDF): 9781474409490

eBook (ePub): 9781474409506

Ken Hollings Radio 3 Essay Series Back Online

My series of talks for BBC Radio 3’s Essay series, ‘Requiem for the Networks’, is now back online again after its original one-week run on i-Player last year. A great opportunity for those who missed them the first time around to hear them at their leisure, the series also offers early drafts on some of the material contained in my forthcoming book, The Bright Labyrinth: Sex Death and Design in the Digital Regime’, the final text for which is pretty much 98% complete.

 The Essays series comprises five talks:
‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’
‘Victorian Search Engines’
‘The Network Goes to War’
‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’
‘Heads in the Clouds’

From the introductory preamble to ‘Requiem for the Network:

As weaponry systems, commercial enterprises, banking and home entertainment draw increasingly upon the same operating platforms, the neutrality of the network is open to question. Perhaps the most appropriate model for understanding the enduring nature of the network is the Labyrinth: a structure of mystifying complexity where technology, deception and violence all meet. The US military, having been instrumental in developing the Internet, has now withdrawn into its own secret labyrinth, which it considers a safe environment for the transmission of classified data.

You can find the entire series as separate episodes on the Radio 3 website by clicking here.

Please note: as with the original i-Player version, the last five minutes of the final episode is missing: it is useful to note in this respect that networks not only accept errors but can also perpetuate them. I have brought this missing section to the attention of the series’ producer, the wonderful Mark Burman, in the hope that he can get those responsible to correct it. In the meantime, I can make the script for episode five available as a PDF to those who wish to read its thrilling conclusion.

See also:

Requiem for the Network on BBC Radio 3

Requiem for the Network – Essay One, ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’

Requiem for the Network – Essay Two, ‘Victorian Search Engines’

Requiem for the Network – Essay Three, ‘The Network Goes to War’

Requiem for the Network – Essay Four, ‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’

Requiem for the Network – Essay Five, ‘Heads in the Clouds’

Pictured above: KH has left the building...a clean desk in the studio at Henry Wood House

A Tribute to Paul Baran on BBC Radio 4

In what turned out to be an appropriate conclusion to Requiem for the Network, my series of talks for Radio 3 last week, I had an opportunity to pay tribute to the design genius of Paul Baran. Talking with Paul about his experiences at the RAND Corporation during the 1960s for my R3 feature All Your Tomorrows Today provided not only one of the highpoints of that particular show but also one of my fondest memories of working in radio to date. I am pleased to say that you can hear extracts from that original conversation intercut with my own commentary on Paul’s remarkable career in a sequence from the April 1 edition of Radio 4’s regular broadcast obituary The Last Word.

The piece sticks pretty closely to the story of Baran’s development of the distributed network, the basic conceptual architecture of the internet, but also gives some sense of the man and his relationship to the Cold War world of strategic thinking. My favourite moment in the original interview was when he revealed that his papers on distributed communication were translated into Russian so that the Soviets could have easy access to them: ‘We wanted them to have that information,’ he explained. ‘Their communication systems were even worse than ours.’ His tremendous work at the Institute for the Future, the think tank which he cofounded in 1968 with Jacques Vallée and Olaf Helmer is yet to be fully assessed – but then it’s still a going concern, as my friend David Pescovitz told me in a recent conversation which we recorded together for broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM sometime later this year. Paul Baran will be greatly missed. The future may well go on without him – but it won’t be same.

The edition of The Last Word featuring Paul Baran is currently available on i-Player and can be accessed by clicking here. It also comes as a podcast and can be found here. This feature should stay up online for about a month - but you can never tell theses days.

See also:
In Memoriam: Paul Baran, 1926-2011
‘Requiem for the Network’ on BBC Radio 3

Pictured above: the Institute for the Future logo – where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

Requiem for the Network - Essay Five, ‘Heads in the Clouds’, Tonight

‘Heads in the Clouds’, the fifth and final essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 25, at 23.00hrs.

A map of central Europe drawn up in the 12th century could still show post roads established five hundred years previously upon what remained of the old Roman road system. Since then technical engineering has increasingly shaped moments of social and cultural transition. From the earliest centralized networks, when all roads led to and from Rome, to the decentralized networks of the European Enlightenment all the way through the distributed networks of the nuclear age, our paths have never stayed the same for very long. The networks might soon be replaced by ‘cloud computing’, a method of data storage which will allow you to access data from any terminal, anywhere, at any time. The meteorological metaphor seems appropriate: as data becomes another constantly-shifting element in our global environment. But doesn’t being anywhere also mean being nowhere?

The Wire asked me to make a statement about ‘Requiem for the Network’, so here it is:

The aim of this series of short essays has been to develop new critical perspectives on the profound changes brought about by networks in human development – it was a theme I had been working on in a number of lectures I have been giving to postgraduate communication design students at Central St Martins and elsewhere. Networks are both a form of architecture and a communications medium at the same time, which can lead to some quite vague thinking with regard to their power and effects. It does not, therefore, surprise me that the Network – usually understood as the Internet – is being treated with the same cheery and enthusiastic innocence that greeted electronic media like TV, radio and computers in the 1960s. That’s why my series of talks takes the form of a requiem - to lay some of this more optimistic thinking to rest. I am not making this argument in order to disparage networks or to present them in negative terms - it’s too late for that in any case. I am presenting these talks in the hope that people will take the Network more seriously and think about its history and development a little more critically. The Network continues to change our lives, but we’re not really taking the time to understand how or why this is happening.

Essays one, two, three and four from the series are currently available from BBC i-Player - each one, however, will only be available for seven days after the date of original broadcast. Thanks for listening.

Pictured above: KH in the studio at Henry Wood House – Is that it? Can I go now?

Requiem for the Network - Essay Four, ‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’, Tonight

‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’, the fourth essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 24, at 23.00hrs.

From spotting craters on Mars to identifying images in museum archives, it seems that there is no longer a problem that can’t be solved simply by throwing enough people at it. Social networks, online communities, multiplayer games, open-source projects and long-tail marketing are all examples of how the masses of the 20th century have been replaced by ‘the crowd’ of today. The networked ‘wisdom of crowds’ continues to evolve – from Second Life to MySpace and from Facebook to Twitter. These, however, are nothing compared to the personal relationships the netizen of the future will enter into with inanimate objects: RFID chips and complex barcodes embedded in products will allow you to interact with the contents of the supermarket shelf, establishing a social network of things. Don’t look now but that carton of orange juice just called you by name.

Essays one, two and three from the series are currently available from BBC i-Player  - each one, however, will only be available for seven days after the date of original broadcast.

Pictured above: Producer Mark Burman at the controls during playback of talk number 4 in the ‘local radio’ studio at Henry Wood House, in the West End of London – so how ‘local’ is that exactly? Even Mark didn’t have an answer to that.

Requiem for the Network - Essay Three, ‘The Network Goes to War’, Tonight

‘The Network Goes to War’, the third essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 23, at 23.00hrs.

In the 1945 Vannevar Bush, the head of US scientific research during World War II, wrote an essay called ‘As We May Think’ – it argued that, thanks to intricate mass-produced components, a whole new generation of communication devices would soon come into existence. By 1991 CNN was able to transmit a live commentary on the opening salvoes of Operation Desert Storm from the Baghdad Hilton. And even as the cable news network was in its ascendancy and Iraqi Command and Control became paralyzed, the public was also learning about a new communication system called the ‘Internet’ being used by Kuwaiti citizens to contact the outside world. From Sputnik to the development of the World Wide Web, the Cold War has provided an ideal climate for the network to flourish – with a little help from Neil McElroy, the man responsible for inventing the soap opera.

Essays one and two from the series are currently available from BBC i-Player - each one, however, will only be available for seven days after the date of original broadcast.

Pictured above: in the studio at Henry Wood House, London

Requiem for the Network - Essay Two, ‘Victorian Search Engines’, Tonight

‘Victorian Search Engines’, the second essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 22, at 23.00hrs.

Sherlock Holmes had his gazetteers, almanacs and timetables; the City had its Stock Exchange, the Parisians had their pneumatiques and Morse had his code; the early telegraph wires followed the existing network of railways throughout the country, receiving, storing and sending on information. All these examples indicate not just ways of distributing data but also ways of thinking. This essay will not only look at the historical development of such networks and reasons behind it but also the extent to which our own thinking about networks has been influenced by the past. The early telephone system, for example, was used for the delivery of music into the Victorian home, thanks to devices like the Telharmonium, a mighty switchboard-operated instrument so heavy the floor beneath it had to be specially reinforced. And whoever thought the idea of music being relayed over a phone would ever catch on?

Pictured above:  producer Mark Burman at the desk in the control room, KH in the studio, reflected in the glass partition between the two, recording the talks at Henry Wood House last week

Requiem for the Network - Essay One, ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’, Tonight

‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’, the first essay in my series for Radio 3, Requiem for the Network, goes out tonight, March 21, at 23.00hrs. Information on its availability either on BBC iPlayer or as a podcast will be posted in due course.

Today the business and academic communities embrace the ‘networks’ with the same fervour they once showed the electronic media of the 1960s. Thanks to the internet they have the basic model for ‘crowd sourcing’, ‘data farming’ and other forms of research. Online communities of ‘netizens’ continue to multiply and flourish, offering new perspectives on consumption, relationships, political participation and mass communication. ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom,’ was once the watchword for an early phase in the Chinese Cultural Revolution – and look how that turned out. The networks today seem ubiquitous and omnipotent: but do they represent a cultural revolution or a total regime change? And what do we understand of their history or their power? Who and what, finally, do the networks connect us to? Welcome to the Labyrinth.

We set great store by the welcome we receive – we have usually travelled a great distance to get there. Today the welcome offers access to an increasingly ‘soft’ architecture of responsive environments, transparent barriers, audible directives, unseen electronic gateways, transportation systems and temporary spaces. The reverse face of this welcome, however, is the heightened security of body scanners and metal detectors, firewalls, ‘pay-walls’ and denial of service. The network becomes a labyrinth which we navigate like laboratory rats in a maze. Looking at basic configurations and definitions of the ‘network’, this essay looks at its development in terms of behaviourism, game theory and systems management. Perhaps the hardest labyrinth to get out of is the one you don’t even realize you are in.

Pictured above: in the studio at Henry Wood House, London

'Requiem for the Network' on BBC Radio 3

Starting at 11.00 pm on Monday March 21 and continuing throughout the entire week, I shall be presenting ‘Requiem for the Network’, a sequence of five late-night talks on BBC Radio 3. The series explores how the network has extended the range of our senses but also compromised them.

As weaponry systems, commercial enterprises, banking and home entertainment draw increasingly upon the same operating platforms, the neutrality of the network is open to question. Perhaps the most appropriate model for understanding the enduring nature of the network is the Labyrinth: a structure of mystifying complexity where technology, deception and violence all meet. The US military, having been instrumental in developing the Internet, has now withdrawn into its own secret labyrinth, which it considers a safe environment for the transmission of classified data.

‘Welcome to the Labyrinth’ Monday March 21
‘Victorian Search Engines’ Tuesday March 22
‘The Network Goes to War’ Wednesday March 23
‘I’ll Be Your Orange Juice’ Thursday March 24
‘Heads in the Clouds’ Friday March 25

Each talk starts at 23.00 and lasts for fifteen minutes. Turn on, tune in – freak totally out.

Pictured above: in the studio at Henry Wood House, London

Requiem for the Network: Warhead

To complete the documentation of Requiem for the Network, an installation created in collaboration with Rathna Ramanathan for the Embedded Art show at the Akademie der Künste, here is a series of detailed views of the three main panels. The floating network of connections they reveal can be followed more closely by reading my essay ‘Requiem for the Network: Six Degrees of Devastation’ in the Embedded Art catalogue, published by Argo Books.

Requiem for the Network: Fifth Stage

The pictures above offer a wide-angle view on the location of the four panels of Requiem for the Network in the basement at the Akademie der Künste. This brief documentation gives some indication of how the curators have located the work precisely between the War Room on the ground floor, where the public can view the work by CCTV, and the corridor on the third level below ground. This attention to the positioning of the work expands the work’s presence, drawing attention to the way its design echoes organizational flowcharts, the complex weaves found in neural nets and the blast circles devised by RAND to plot the outcome of thermonuclear wars.

From top to the bottom: KH in the corridor standing next to the panels of Requiem for the Network (photograph taken by Lillevan), two oblique views of the panels’ arrangement on the wall, and the work itself as viewed on one of the War Room screens, relayed from the basement via CCTV - you can see the camera used for this live feed positioned just behind me at the end of corridor in the top picture.

Photo Op at the Brandenburg Tor

I have no excuse whatsoever for posting this picture, except that it shows me, caught in the act of delivering my lecture ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth: Some Further Thoughts on Requiem for the Network’ at the Akademie der Künste last Saturday night, and the Brandenburg Tor – and all in the one shot too.

It also brings back many happy memories of the evening – including the one of Heinrich Dubel of the Erratik Institute lighting fire crackers and throwing them off the Akademie balcony onto the square below to see whether the police would react (they didn’t). My thanks to everyone who showed up and took part in the event so enthusiastically – and many thanks indeed to Lillevan for taking such an evocative photograph. Every tourist should look like this.

Embedded Art (Below Ground)

Below ground, the Embedded Art show emphasizes even more forcefully the concept of security as theatre. I was accompanied by animator and filmmaker Lillevan on one of the last guided tours of the exhibition – this is the only way to see some of the more restricted items in the show, including Requiem for the Network, the four-panel installation I created in collaboration with designer Rathna Ramanathan. Uniformed security guards (or at least their very obliging representatives) keep parties of visitors moving through doors that only open with the swipe of key card, forbid the taking of photographs and generally make their presence felt. As participating artists, Lillevan and I were allowed to break away from the main group and do some of our own documentation. ‘You’ve probably just blinded somebody upstairs,’ Lillevan observed in his usual charmingly discreet manner as I took a flash photograph of one of the CCTV cameras. I’d forgotten that these images feed straight back up to the War Room Lillevan and Zaji Chalem had designed for the ground floor.

The exhibition space itself also formed a key element of the show: the basement rooms – useful only for storing non-valuable items of academy bric-a-brac – had been left pretty much untouched: the floor was raw concrete, the while walls stippled with paint flakes and staples, and the view up through the central gallery revealed heating ducts, wiring and insulation. The overall feel is of a connecting suite of test beds or interrogation cells. ‘Requiem for the Network’ had an entire corridor to itself, the installation and the space working very dramatically together in the name of security as a bureaucratic precaution: something bland and maintained far from public view. More documentation on the work's installation in a following post.

Pictures two and three show the CCTV cameras and an Embedded Art security guard in situ. On either side of them in the sequence: KH and the rest of the tour stop at ‘Requiem for the Network’ (photo taken by Lillevan), and the view in the main underground chamber of the show looking straight up.

Embedded Art (Above Ground)

The above images taken on the ground floor of the Akademie der Künste should give you some impression of how the Embedded Art show structured the experience of art and security to the casual visitor.

The first picture shows the front of the Akademie during daylight hours – inside the main entrance was a sign instructing members of the public to ‘proceed in an orderly manner to check-in counter for more information’. Long lengths of incident tape, similar to the fragment captured in the second picture, marked out a clear path to ‘check in’, severely restricting access to the Akademie reception area, while long lines of tourist attempt to negotiate what appears to be an open space.

Pictures three and four are of actual exhibits accessible above ground. One shows a detail of the extraordinary operations table in the ‘War Room’ created by Lillevan and Zaji Chalem. The other shows ‘Security Song: A Complete Analysis’ by Paul B Davis – the unattended item of luggage, left inside the main elevator, plays back a reassuringly jolly remix of Gershon Kingsley’s ‘Security Song’ over and over again, rendering any casual visitor to the Akademie considerably less casual than they were before.

The next post will document some of things that were happening at the Embedded Art below ground.

Embedded Art: The Eyes Close For The Last Time

Yesterday evening Embedded Art: Art in the Name of Security ended its three-month occupation of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. I was very pleased and proud to have been present for the last weekend of the exhibition’s run and to have given the closing talk in what was an ambitious programme of supporting events. Over the next few days I will be uploading pictures, notes and comments from what was an exhilarating and sleep-deprived two days. For the moment, however, I would like to commemorate the closing of an amazing exhibition and to thank Olaf Ardnt and Janneke Schönenbach of BBM, Moritz von Rappard and Cecilia Wee for all their hard work and commitment.

The giant eyes that have been conducting night-time surveillance on Pariser Platz since January may have now closed for the last time, but the dialogue initiated by the Embedded Art show will continue for some time. Berlin remains, as always, a city to be watched.

Ken Hollings ‘Embedded Art’ Lecture at the Berlin Akademie der Künste

I will be giving at a lecture at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on the evening of Saturday March 21, and the event will be open to the public so all are welcome to attend. The title of my talk is ‘Welcome to the Labyrinth: Some Further Thoughts on Requiem for the Network’ and will be an overview of my recent researches into the role that security plays in the daily running and expansion of the digital regime.

The lecture is part of a programme of events supporting the exhibition Embedded Art: Art in the name of Security, curated by Olaf Ardnt and Janneke Schönenbach of BBM (Beobachter der Bediener von Maschinen) in association with Moritz von Rappard and Cecilia Wee. The subject of considerable press scrutiny and a CNN news report, Embedded Art includes the installation ‘Requiem for the Network: Six Degrees of Devastation’ – the product of my recent collaboration with graphic designer Rathna Ramanathan. The show is due to close this weekend – in fact, my lecture is one of the last in the programme – so you are advised to hurry if you wish to see this remarkable show. The lecture is scheduled to start at 20.00 hrs.

Akademie der Künste,
Pariser Platz 4,
10117 Berlin
24 January - 22 March 2009Tues – Sun, 11:00 – 20:00
€ 6, concs € 4, free for under 18s
http://www.embeddedart.org/ Press enquiries to Brigitte Heilmann: +49 (30) 200 57-1513, heilmann@adk.de

The Embedded Art catalogue, featuring my essay ‘Requiem for the Network’ is currently available from Argo Books.

Embedded Art Catalogue Looks Fabulous – In A Disturbing Sort of Way

Security, like eroticism, is a state of affairs: something we inhabit rather than actively participate in. To offer representations of either is to diminish their significance – which is why I am pleased to note that the main body of the Embedded Art Catalogue , published by Argo books, has no images in it whatsoever – just black letter text, leavened by the occasional short slug of text or reference in red. All the essays – including my own ‘Requiem for the Network: Six Degrees of Devastation’ – have been set in a bold typeface, creating an impression of heaviness and suppression that practically seeps out from the pages. This isn’t a book for reading – it’s for running as scrolling banner headlines on CNN. To comprehend the full measure of its content you would have to encrypt it first.

The Argo website copy for the book runs follows:

EMBEDDED ART – Art in the Name of Security, Berlin 2009
Accompanying the exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin, curated by Olaf Arndt, Janneke Schönenbach, Moritz von Rappart and Cecilia Wee.

As the waves of international terrorism reach vital organs all over the world at the beginning of the 21st Century, new threats curtail the dream of a peaceful, undivided and secure world. In response to these circumstances, state and private organisations across the globe are producing new tactics, strategies and technologies to fight the dangers threatening our democracies and jeopardising our understanding of the term “civilisation”. Indeed, everything that can be performed “in the name of security” appears desirable: security has now become an ideology. The publication “embedded art. Art in the Name of Security” interrogates these pressing issues, appropriating the words of composer Gershon Kingsley to ask its audience, “what would you give for security?” As a reference book to the subject, the publication compiles cutting-edge contributions by sociologists, historians, media artists, political and cultural scientists such as Peter Bexte, Alfred McCoy, Steve Goodman, Ken Hollings, Wolfgang Pircher, Florian Rötzer und Steve Wright.

Design: Gunter Rambow
English
184 Pages,2 colors
21 x 26,5 cm
Softcover with flaps
EUR 30,00
ISBN 978-3-941560-09-3
Includes a DVD with contributions by the participating artists.

Top Image: front cover of Embedded Art catalogue

Embedded Art Press Quotes

Olaf Arndt of BBM has supplied an overview of the press response to the Embedded Art show at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. One of the exhibits is ‘Requiem for the Network: Six Degrees of Devastation’, which I’ve been worked on with Rathna Ramanathan. ‘The tenor for EMBEDDED ART,’ Olaf writes ‘is from “groundbreaking exhibition” to “new aesthical power for political arts”.’

Die Zeit, 5 February 2009
‘Horrifying Humming’ Tobias Timm
The artists participating in EMBEDDED ART do not wish to produce decorative commodities, rather, they understand themselves as radical preachers of Enlightenment… The exhibition attempts to show how the fear of terror has been stoked and instrumentalised. As a result the show itself induces fear, that future technologies will be deployed in reality in the near future… The visit to the underground cellars of the Akademie resembles a ghost train ride leading you from the world of make-believe into a menacing reality, increasing the visitor’s sensitivity to the current threats.’

Tagesspiegel, 24 January 2009
‘Mental Warriors’ Kolja Reichert
‘It’s amazing how quickly the disposition capsizes. For so long, political art has been suspected of being oriented towards a practical goal, which in itself is hostile to the concept of art….The apologists for neo-liberalism, acknowledging their shipwrecked status, remain silent, now enabling critical art to be acceptable in a mainstream art context. With that, the ground has been prepared for a ground-breaking exhibition at the Akademie der Künste whose opening unexpectedly coincided with the Gaza war.’

spiegel.de, 23 January 2009
‘In Close Contact With the TASER’, Jenny Hoch
‘We tolerate quite a lot In the Name of Security: surveillance, raids, data disclosure. The exhibition ‘EMBEDDED ART’ in Berlin’s Akademie der Künste comments on this alarming development and challenges the boundaries of acceptability with its visitors. But above all, EMBEDDED ART deals with a powerful subject, particularly strong because of its societal relevance. Whereas in former times, the ideals have been liberté, egalité, fraternité, today the predominant ideal is security… The exhibition elucidates a re-evaluation of the gulf between the older ideals and that of security, also demonstrating the problematic results of that re-evaluation.’

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 27 January 2009
‘Self-experiments in Weapon Technology’, Alexandra Mangel
‘The idea of the exhibition makes sense. That it can work as an exhibition is proved as soon as the doors of the goods lift in the second underground floor open and we are confronted by a Kandy-Kolored (Kool-Aid) Acid trip style oil on canvas painted by Moritz Reichelt… The show is shocking, an honourable, enlightening research effort and a feast for fans of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.’

Neues Deutschland, 3 February 2009
‘The Production of Maximum Pain’, Manuela Lintl
‘Of course it’s hasty to say at the beginning of the year that the Akademie der Künste has been installing the most important exhibition of the year with EMBEDDED ART – Art in the Name of Security. But this ambitious project will – most likely - be an exception amongst the palatable others of Berlin’s contemporary art jungle.’

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 January 2009
‘Art of War Halls’, Peter Richter
‘During EMBEDDED ART, the Akademie’s cellars, built by the architect Behnisch, get a taste of Abu Graibh… When you find out that the Pentagon considered providing an ADS microwave pain beamer machine knowing that the exhibition will critically investigate the subject of Non-Lethal Weapons, and you discover that this critique of European security policy is sponsored by EU funding, then you’ll gain some idea of what the term ‘embedded’ means today.’


Die Welt, 24 January 2009
‘In the Name of Security’, Gabriela Walde
‘The exhibition abstains from ham-fisted provocations, depicting and documenting more than she judges. However, those who expect the Akademie to come up with a top-down presentation, lush with discourse, will thankfully be most pleasantly surprised.’


Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 January 2009
‘In the Cellar’, Harry Nutt
‘The curators’ approach is political in an eminent way and most of the commissioned artists have been following them on this path, according to which any one of us is under the control of an alien apparatus… Most of the time we are too dull and inactive to imagine what the exhibition is clearly demonstrating: namely, the huge amount of scientific energy that has been put into the apparatus of building security… There will be no-one left untouched by this.’


Berliner Zeitung, 24 January 2009
‘The Great Discomfort’, Ingeborg Ruthe
‘Those expecting to engage with highly complex, brittle political fragments and wade through problematic debates will be surprised how visceral the exhibition is. Irritating and unsettling, yet elucidating, it’s also entertaining when, for instance, you see a Pop-Art style Bin Laden appear on the giant display of the Akademie’s façade, turning the ‘master of evil’ into a comic figure. Thankfully, the exhibition refrains from dividing the world into good and bad, avoiding the judgment of gods and wise men. Only the Hauptstadtkulturfonds dared to finance such an aspirational, weighty and explosive exhibition.’


Zitty, March 2009
‘In Evil’s Den’, Petra Reichensperger
‘Once again it’s the artists in their role as curators who consequently experiment with the format of the event exhibition. They thrust themselves into undermining the system by subversively executing the fundamental rules of security. There is no way that art can be more cutting in commenting on contemporary security policies.’

Deutschlandradio, Barbara Wiegand
‘The mis-en-scene is very apt, inspiring and filled with fresh art…without doubt, an honourable show.’

3Sat Kulturzeit
‘Very intense’

Radio1, Marie Kaiser
‘EMBEDDED ART takes place at the very right location. My advice is to go and see it. It’s worth it, but it’s tough… One of the most important exhibitions in Berlin.’

Updated Online Source:

http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2009/02/17/pleitgen.germany.embedded.art.cnn.html
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/0,1518,602914,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/video/video-48174.html
http://www.tvbvideo.de/video/iLyROoafJ6Cn.html
http://www.dradio.de/dkultur/sendungen/fazit/908405/
http://www.rbb-online.de/_/stilbruch/beitrag_jsp/key=8495108.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFYY7isrjOM
http://www.wdr5.de/nachhoeren/scala.html
(podcast vom 26. Januar)
http://www.radioeins.de/programm/programmbeitraege/200901/embedded_art___kunst.html
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/29/29587/1.html

Embedded Art: Art in the Name of Security continues until March 22. I will speaking there on March 21. More details on this as they come up.
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, 10117 Berlin Tues – Sun, 11:00 – 20:00 € 6, concs € 4, free for under 18s http://www.embeddedart.org/ Press enquiries to Brigitte Heilmann: +49 (30) 200 57-1513, heilmann@adk.de