Benjamin
Burpee / 25 September 2012
Current
Project:
1.
Process:
Develop an ethico-political practice based off of Deleuze’s Three Ecologies, asking three main questions
and folding them into a singular project. The secondary questions (below) are
more refined research topics that incorporate the ‘prompts’ into the singular
project.
a. How is the Studio (as a historical environment devoted to the
task of making) a social/collaborative environment? What possibilities does it
hold to exceed the private, reflective, individualistic notion of art practice?
i. Prompt: Swab the counters, grow cultures of bacteria on
agar, grow molds and fungi
1. But how can any found collaborators (microbal bacteria,
yeasts, fungi) contribute to making?
b. How might collaborating with the immediate environment for
sustenance change our conception of what an environment is?
i. Prompt: Forage for edible foods within the campus boundaries
1. How can food produce a worldview that exceeds the
considerations of ‘nourishment’ and ‘calories’?
c. What is the relation between the social and subjective? How can
one’s behavior be affected by a social ecology (and vice-versa) such that a ‘new’
culture is arrived at?
i. Prompt: Convert the studio into an experimental social
space—restaurant
1. Within a space, what will allow for new cultures and
subjectivities to emerge (how to develop a micro-culture with humans who are not
engaged with Guattari’s philosophy, or any other for that matter)?
2.
Potential
Product: A good way to answer all the above
questions is to develop a highly social food processing/experimentation center
in the studio. The studio will be converted into a microbiology
lab/restaurant/think-tank to radicalize each of the three ecological domains:
the environment, the social, and the subjective. This is an art practice
oriented toward action and the production of difference, and will also be based
on a deep research program utilizing scholarly literature, philosophy, and
experimentation.
Analysis:
1.
Sky—What’s
immediately revealed
a. The
most obvious aspect of this project will be its involvement with food and
drink. It might seem that I’m coming up with ‘weird’ ways of preparing food and
nothing more. I am making beverages, lunches, and dinners for people. Also, I
am growing bacteria and yeast cultures simply to demonstrate the fact that
microflora are ubiquitous; an odd juxtaposition and contrast to the edible
stuff.
2.
Mortals—The
meaning of the project
a. The
meaning of the project is political; it’s not only a reaction against
traditional western paradigms but a positive thinking and inventing of new ones
entirely. The meaning is also embedded in the process of questioning and curiosity
itself—the meaning is entirely self-contained and autoreferential in that it
isn’t assigned from the outside but is emergent in the process of teasing these
things out. This has really only begun and will hopefully be much more than ‘sustenance’
or ‘nourishment’.
3.
Gods—The
directionality of the project
a.
I think the directionality of this project is
partly open-ended in the sense that the project itself is based on an
open-ended question. What’s for certain is that there is a definite
directionality toward social—the
whole thing depends on groups and gatherings at every level. To be even more
specific, there is a directionality toward collaboration as a social practice.
Not only is there a need for a gathering, but this gathering serves to
articulate or solve some problem—In other words, there’s work involved,
questions at stake. As for my own private bias, I am curious about a directionality
toward inhabiting an ontology that takes the human as a generative and
relational entity, intimately coupled to the world that’s already full of
agencies and relational entities abound.
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