We're really pleased tonight to be hosting this discussion this evening between artist collective Lucanto, art historian David Joselit and philosopher Reza Negra Astani to mark the launch of a new publication titled Turning Inward, published by Sternberg and edited by Lucanto and designer and editor Clemens Jann. This collection of essays and artist contributions provides a range of critical reflections on contemporary art and its modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Departing from metaphors of center and periphery that organized arts discourse in the 20th century, the publication addresses the spatial logic of globalization and its attendant breakdowns of distinctions
among modes of discourse from the visual arts to urbanism, politics, education, and philosophy. so tonight's event has been organized with Lou Cantor and the New York based artist Abraham Adams and includes a visual counterpart to the discussion in the form of a number of artworks presented in this space and upstairs I'm going to hand over shortly to Abraham to introduce the evening in this in this presentation of works more fully but I first wanted to thank Abraham particularly for his for the organizing of tonight's event and also the artists who contributed works to be exhibited, and also to the participants in the discussion, Josefina and Collier from Lucanto, David and Reza, for their engagement in this event, and also lastly to Art Geneve and Fondation pour Artes Visurale for their
support of the book and this evening's discussion. So without further ado, I'll pass over to Abraham. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much Richard and to Artist Space for hosting us and to Nico of the space also for support and organizing. I'd like to just introduce everybody briefly and ask a couple questions that arose in my mind when I was reading their essays that they contributed to the volume. I thought I'd speak briefly about the works on display first. I brought this group of works together in hopes to propose a kind of response to the themes I saw between these essays and the volume. I'm going to kind of leave that in the negative space for you all to consider as you feel like it. The works will be up
for the evening and we invite you to look around at them afterward or right now. And so upstairs there are a smaller group of works, a selection that will be up for a couple days, a piece from the collective, Time Farm from Lou Cantor and John Miller. At the end there's There's Harm Vandendorpel, there's John Miller, Andrew Ross, John Stansfeld, Mary Walling Blackburn and Raphael Kelman and a lot of the artists are here and thank you for contributing work and for coming. So I'm just going to kind of leave it at that for those pieces. So I thought I'd briefly introduce everybody and then just ask my one question and then whatever conversation comes up and there will be some time for questions. Lucanter, first off, is a Berlin-based arts collective founded in 2011, whose main scope
of interest is grounded in intersubjectivity and interpersonal communication. Lucanter's practice explores the polysemic minefield of contemporary communication where media, message, and meaning constantly fold back into each other. Previous group exhibitions include the outdoor sculpture Triennial in Berlin, the Berlin Biennale, New National Art, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, and the Villa Tokyo. So this is the book right here, or this is actually the naked book. It's got a nice dust jacket that I've taken off in order to be able to interact with these various sticky notes I have. And the introductory essay by Kolya and Josephine of Luke Cantor, who are here this evening to speak,
is about relationships toward complex informational systems and our tendency to read into excessive information a kind of projective identification, a phenomenon called pareidolia, which is manifest as such things as recognizing faces in cars. Or actually, I saw a Tumblr recently of faces in things. So that is a collection of pareidolic examples, I guess. And midway through the essay, there's a note about how... I'm going to read a little piece of it actually. Our imagination now resembles the interfaces of the devices we use, and even the questions we ask ourselves seem to be Google search friendly.
Extensive amounts of knowledge processing and memory are exported to electronic devices, and rapidly progressing miniaturization presents the prospect that these smart devices will no longer be external to our bodies, yet some things can't be processed with computers, absurdity, misreadings, mistakes. In such a context, human error might very well be our most valuable asset." And there's a piece, there's a cantor piece reproduced in the book that relates to the crashing of these, of cars, the cars that we see faces in that actually, in fact, in contemporary car design, Contemporary car design anticipates pareidolia and your essay speaks a little bit to a turn in the past ten years from intentional design of nice looking cars to mean looking cars.
I don't know what to make of that at all but I was wondering if you could speak a little bit briefly about this comment about the value of error. You say that computers aren't so well suited to producing or understanding absurdity and misunderstanding. And I wonder if you could expand on that comment in the essay. Yeah, let's start with your question, why is the human error our most valuable asset? In our contribution, we don't mean that in general, but more in the context of the creative field, like literature, art, or science. I mean, all these fields that need to escape the rigor of an algorithm. Just think about penicillin or Viagra.
I think that in general, if you navigate within a certain system and you obey the rules of that system, and you seek not to fall into any error, you are not very likely to discover anything that is outside of that system. I was very inspired by what you, Reza, wrote in your essay about the pitfalls of knowledge and how our knowledge is built in layers and how we should always question the layers that been before in order not to build our knowledge on something that could potentially be a mistake. I think that an error, if the system is false,
then an error can be very well, can come up with a truth. So I think that as long as you think of a machine and something that is programmed to fulfill that system, you cannot go out of it in this or the other way. I thought I would just ask a question of each of you and then perhaps we can move on to what comes up between us just to give space to everybody. So although I thought just now, and you mentioned a penicillin in Viagra, that in terms of misunderstanding and error in the process of such technologies, that apparently Viagra causes temporary blindness in some people who take it.
So I don't know what the truth value of blindness caused by Viagra is, but it comes to mind. I mean, you can understand an error also as a kind of an opening that allows you to cross through different levels. Perhaps subconsciously, you can make a certain shortcut that logically does not make sense. But that can lead to discovery. And perhaps this ability of linking things in a way that we not necessarily understand the logics behind it. Maybe that's this one element that we're that we're missing in constructing artificial intelligence, the one that it could truly mimic the way we're thinking. Yeah, on the other hand, face pareidolia is not really an error. It's more like a quality of our perception.
Do you all know what face pareidolia is? It's when you approach something and you feel it looks like a face. And it can be a car, but it can be a building which which has two windows that look like ice. And it's actually a very interesting phenomenon that comes from the fact that unlike any other objects that we see as groups of elements, for instance, if you look at the table, your brain will recognize the legs and the table top, and you will cognitively understand it's a table. But when you look at the face, there's completely different processes happening in your brain. So you see a system where a ratio of distances between eyes and nose and mouth are equally important to those elements themselves. That's why, for instance, you have this phenomena
called Thatcher illusion. It's called like that just because Margaret Thatcher served as a model for the poster where the phenomena was presented. So basically, if you see a face upside down, you will not recognize the emotions on that face. Because it goes down to the plasticity of our brain and how we learn to perceive things. So if the face is upside down, but the lips are not upside down, it's kind of hard to recognize at the very beginning, because we see it as a system. And even more interestingly, there's a research run by a Japanese scientist that speaks about what actually happens in your brain when you see a face.
So what happens is that you not only understand that you saw a face, but you also have a feeling of the presence. That's why, I think that's why quite often when there is an emergence of some image that is face-like on some random element, it's often that it's felt that it's, I don't know, Jesus Christ or Virgin Mary because you have this feeling of presence that is not so easy to explain. Or perhaps also the Hopi mask, the mask of the Hopi Indians, where they believe that But once the mosque is being finished, it gets actually inhabited by a spirit. Yeah, and that's kind of homologous in structure to the arrival of the face in the Shroud of Turin. So I think that contemporary Shrouds of Turin
being found in toast and sandwiches is something you speak about in your essay. I thought I might ask David a question. Well, I'll introduce first that David Joslet is distinguished professor of art history at the Graduate Center at CUNY. His art historical work has approached the history and theory of image circulation in the 20th and 21st centuries from a variety of perspectives spanning Marcel Duchamp's strategy of the ready-made to the current conditions of contemporary art under dual pressures of globalization and digitization. He is the author of Infinite Regress, Marcel Duchamp, 1910 to 41, of Feedback, Television Against Democracy, and after art. Joslet is also an editor of the journal October
and a frequent contributor to Art Forum. So the essay in the volume is an excerpt from After Art. And you speak about ways, sort of recognition among sort of contemporary agents of the art market that art functions as a kind of currency. So you kind of begin with the question of what is the nature of this currency. So the beginning of the essay is grounded in ideas of aura and site specificity as it relates to repatriation debates between Greece and the UK. But then you also go on to say that aura is an inadequate model to describe global image saturation.
And there is a moment in reference to Ai Weiwei in which you say that his detention for 81 days in 2011, he was certainly released because of his international reputation. And then you say, if art has a political efficacy in the 21st century, it may lie in cultural diplomacy as opposed to the invention of avant garde forms as new content. And my bringing these works together, in fact, is sort of a provisional attempt at a response and ideas of work turning toward ideas of cultural diplomacy in place of avant-garde, formal innovation. But I was interested in the way in your essay that artworks are often described in terms
of their treatment, in terms of markets and circulation. And there's a moment in that I'll just locate later in the essay in which you say, is what the contemporary global artwork must be, an emissary whose power arises out of cultural translation rather than avant-garde innovation, a form of international currency that can cross borders effortlessly. And I was just kind of curious, I guess, about the distinction between an artwork's treatment as currency and what might distinguish an art practice or production that is oriented toward what you call cultural diplomacy rather than avant-garde formal innovation. OK. Thanks.
There are a lot of strands in that. So let me sort of try to build a little base first. What I think is important, first of all, when I was talking about what an artwork that circulates globally must be, I really want to be quite specific about saying that it's a criterion of circulation in that network, as opposed to a criterion for what art needs to be. I think that one just basic thing that we have to be careful about is that under global conditions, we tend to think that all works of art meet the criteria for circulating in that way,
and they don't. Many would like to, but don't. many would purposely resist those conditions. So the metaphor of currency, or it's actually more than a metaphor, actually. I mean, did you see that Larry Fink, who is what? The head of some suspiciously named hedge fund said that art is a better hedge than gold now. So I mean, and this has been widely quoted in all of the financial press. So in fact, it's literal. The fact is that on some level, people who make that world run believe that art is a better investment than gold in terms
of its staying power. So it seems to me that there's that side of things. And then there's the notion of a currency as a medium of translation. I mean, that's what a currency is. It makes it possible to avoid bartering one object for another through mediation of a third term. So if we think about, I mean, in a way, it's very interesting to think, I can't say that word, the facial recognition word. Paridelia. Paridelia. Anyway, that. In a way, a currency is also a mode of recognition of value. But it can be a very debased one. Or it can operate, it seems to me, on other terms,
in other modes of exchange. So what Josefina was saying that I think is really interesting about faces is that what makes a face is the relation between the parts, as opposed to the parts themselves. And for me, going back to this global question, what makes a work of art significant in a global context is not the innovation of a new language, which is the avant garde model in a nutshell, in a soundbite or a tweet level. But what a global work of art that might be working off of the innovations of the historical avant-garde will do
is enunciate in a language that already exists. So I think there's a way in which one has to value enunciation as much as innovation. And I think in the art world, or at least in the West, or the art world that I inhabit, which is a subset of the West, innovation is valued above all else. So how can one think of value that's not based on the invention of something that claims to be new? Let's forget whether it's new or not is irrelevant for this discussion. So the value of that is in the value the transactional in a kind of exchange, which one can think of as a currency, the same kind of exchange form
as the exchange of dollars or RMB, et cetera. I was kind of curious, because there's a distinction you made, I think, in the interview and in the essay between art as a currency and its monetization, that there's some distinction there. I was kind of curious about the difference. Well, I mean, that's what I think I tried to articulate just a second ago, that just as a commodity is about a transaction, not necessarily about the transaction with currency, with money, so too I think a currency need not be money. It can be an exchange. And I think that works of art can stage certain kinds of exchanges that are not monetized,
but they're deeply embedded in a monetized form of exchange as well. Frankly, for me, this is the biggest challenge that one has to deal with if one's interested in contemporary art and trying to understand the conditions of its circulation along with the conditions of its being, I guess, as a philosophical and aesthetic form. And I'll just say one. I know I've been talking a lot. But let me just say one last thing, which is going back to the masks thing and the relation thing. What I think is really interesting about art, and this goes back to a value of enunciation as opposed to invention, is how images are staged in various ways. So the mask, I think, is really interesting
because it wraps an image, or it's a wrapper. And I think that there are all kinds of ways of thinking the plasticity of images, how they move, their rates of motion, their relative capacity to be dissolved and transmitted. It's what Hito Steyerl calls the poor image, but there's much more than the poor image. There are all kinds of plasticities of images. And that to me, it's that rhetoric of how images just behave and move that I think art is capturing right now, as opposed to some kind of content. It's not really opposed to content, but I would say that is its content.
I think that actually is a good segue into the question I had for Reza. And I'll just interrupt myself to speak a little bit about Reza and the bio. Rizan Nagarastani is a philosopher based in New York, or Connecticut, or both. His current project is focused on rationalist universalism, beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing toward contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures, as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct. He is the author of Cyclonopedia, Complicity with Anonymous Materials, materials and has contributed to journals including collapse and sea theory and anthologies such as the medium of contingency.
Nagar Astani has lectured at numerous universities and institutes, including MIT, CUNY, and Frederick Shani M. Kassel. I guess the thing that came up most in my mind when reading your contribution to the essay is that it kind of affords a framing analogy for some issues in art in particular that David speaks about in his essay. So I thought I would just read a little bit from the very beginning, which is about the sort of project of philosophy itself. And I thought I might just read the quotation from Wilfred Sellers that you open your essay with.
The ideal aim of philosophizing is to become reflectively at home in the full complexity of the multidimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act. I say reflectively because there is a sense in which by the sheer fact of leading an unexamined but conventionally satisfying life, we are at home in this complexity. It is not until we have eaten the apple with which the serpent philosopher tempts us that we begin to stumble on the familiar and to feel that haunting sense of alienation which is treasured by each new generation as its unique possession. This alienation, this gap between oneself and one's world, can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core, for after the first bite there is no return to innocence.
There are many anodynes but only one cure. We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize. And the essay begins with a model or a description of philosophy similar to Sellers, which are saying that philosophy drives a wedge between the mind and the world, which you describe as an enabling alienation from home in a certain sense, from home concepts of good and truth and from the mind conceived as an ideal object into its realization in social projects, if I understand it correctly. And it seemed to me that this sort of philosophical project
of leaving home in a certain sense, leaving the unexamined home, and leaving the object, the mind as an object to the mind as a project, seemed analogous to David's point about arts movement from the avant-garde, formally innovated object to cultural diplomacy. And I was sort of wondering how that resonated with your ideas of artificial intelligence, as described later in the essay, and how you think, and the bearing that you think this project has on art in particular. What, you mean in terms of alienation or...? Yeah, I guess what I was thinking about when I was reading the essay is there's a moment
in a recent book by philosopher John Drabinski in which he sort of takes up a comment by Deleuze about Godard and he says that Godard's cinema is philosophy and Drabinski makes the point that this is kind of a shocking claim that philosophy might not just illustrate, or that art, cinema, might not just illustrate philosophy or afford it interesting examples but actually perform philosophical work. So that seemed to me like a potential bridge between this sort of fundamental project of philosophy as you describe it and the field of art in particular. And there's a nice moment in your essay in which you describe like philosophy is always exceeded in its scope
by the particular fields whose base of knowledge it seeks to disorient, if that makes sense. Well, I'm afraid in terms of, OK, I will start with basically why I emphasize on the concept of alienation. But I'm afraid this relation between the philosophy gesture to alienate, which I kind of define it as an enabling gesture, and its relation to art is kind of, I have something very intuitive in mind, but I'm afraid it's not incoherent. So first, let me talk about the more philosophical aspect
of this, and why is it alienation is important, and what exactly is the context of this alienation. There are different forms of alienation. There's a specific form of alienation that is usually attributed to the history of philosophy and sharpened by modern sciences. And that's the one that I'm particularly emphasizing. A couple of things that came up during Josephine's response was this emphasis on errors, on basically
associating creativity with errors, with what we call in logic and philosophy, diffusibility. The feasibility means that basically you allow your theorems to be revisable. You allow your concepts to be revisable. You allow your norms and rules to be revisable. In order to be that, you need to have basically a form, a complex system of interaction between either the agents that produce knowledge or the concept using creatures like you and me, or within the rules of logic themselves,
there should be some sort of interaction that allow for this revision, that allow for this diffusibility to take place. And yes, the fundamental point of this diffusibility is that diffusibility is usually associated with non-monotonic reasoning. And non-monotonic reasonings are the form of reasoning in which, as you add new axioms and premises, you do not increase your theorem. You do not simply bolster your theorem. You actually, as you add new axiom and premises, you revise. You end up revising your theorem. And that's how you basically allow for more cognitive inquiry and more cognitive discovery.
And so this is kind of a just wanted to bring this before I get back to this idea of alienation. So this idea of error and diffusibility, yes, is very important. And there is a completely clear link between this and creative forms of reasoning, like making of hypotheses, abductive reasonings, inductive leaps, so on and so forth. Now, why is that this error and the feasibility is important? is because it is a form of attack on an implicit index of knowledge.
And that's the idea of our accumulated forms of knowledge, what we have accumulated, the kind of knowledge that we have already generated. And basically, which is the locus of our beliefs, our current beliefs. If we do not have diffusibility, or if we do not have various types of error, and we are not able to detect these errors and elaborate them, basically our beliefs are epistemically entrenched, meaning that we end up with dogmas, with doxastic conservatism, with basically our cognitive inquiries end up to be basically transmission
of cognitive biases throughout generations or throughout modes of production of knowledge. So one of the things that this idea of alienation talks about, or the kind of alienation that I am referring to, is this kind of a battle or basically procedural battle, procedural move against the idea of categorical given. This given can appear, very crudely speaking, can appear in different forms. It can appear as basically what is immediately given to you, in terms of cognitive resources, in terms of practical resources, in terms of the sphere that you can perceive
and appears to you. So appearances are usually given. And this idea that given, insofar as it is linked to appearances, insofar as it is limited by local resources, is obviously not the locus of truth. And it's not a good, you know, it's emphasizing on this given, basically, you end up in a kind of dogmatic position. Forms of reasoning or forms of procedures of knowledge production or creativity
that draw on the given end up biased positions. You basically, various cognitive biases, various epistemic biases, various belief dogmas, so on and so forth. So it kind of creates some sort of epistemic maiming, epistemic maiming, this given. May I ask if by given you mean a kind of equivalence of the thing in appearance? Is that what you would mean by the given? The given appears in different senses, actually, in philosophy. For example, Wilfred Sellars himself talks about the myth of the categorical given, myth in the sense that it's an ideological fixation.
For example, the given theory of meaning means that language, the meaning of things are given inside the language. Simply when we are saying this bottle, we're really representing the bottle. We have the knowledge of the thing, the bottle, in our language. This is another, for example, is a form of given. We have also given in the sense that, for example, in terms of our self-narratives, in terms of who we are, how we appear to ourselves is essentially not true.
And obviously, it is not. And this is exactly what science does to show us that what we think we are is not really the case. So these are different categories of the given, which is usually the given is logically identified in terms of particularities or certain specificities that's basically encoded in your local sphere, in your local sphere, whether it is epistemic, cognitive, practical, so on and so forth. So it has a kind of a local immediacy feel to it, the given.
This local immediacy is basically the territory of the given. And one of the things that philosophy does is that it tries to battle the given in various guises. And this alienation is basically how you can basically break away from the tyranny of the given in various forms. Which of course, philosophy comes up It's the first gesture of philosophy that's integrated. But really, what debunks the myth of the given
in the sharpest way possible is in modern sciences, really. And the way that how it generates knowledge via different epistemic procedures, the feasible epistemic procedures, the ones that have incorporated errors, revision, conceptual revision in their basically systematicity. That's what you describe as error-tolerant games. Error-tolerant, yes. Error-tolerant is basically a word for non-monotonic reasoning or non-monotonic forms of reasoning. Simply the idea that we are creatures capable of revising our own rules. And that's what is basically the core of being sapient means.
We have sapient awareness, or sapient consciousness, is a form of rationality, a rationality that is defeasible. And so far as we institute our own rules, and these rules have social institution, we can also modify these rules and the contents of them. Yeah, and so I think that sort of leads to you saying those who would seek to know should be most afraid of what they already know. Yes, yes. I mean, this is actually, you know, it's quite actually a trite Twitter saying, as you might say, that what we should be afraid of is not, you know, what we don't know, but we already know. And this is, you know, kind of a crude saying,
crude elaboration of this idea of the given, once we see it from an epistemic perspective, our given knowledge, our accumulated knowledge, is actually the most dangerous locus of knowledge. Because if we proceed to generate knowledge from what we already have, we are susceptible to various epistemic biases, various cognitive biases. In fact, some of these things that came up, I mean, this idea that I think you said something about language, that we don't need to necessarily invent language,
but we can recursively use the previous ones. I think this is actually, I can see myself in agreement with this statement, but also I can see that there is something troubling underlying, which doesn't discredit it by any means. But this is exactly what I'm saying, that we need to pinpoint, detect the given, and see does it lead to cognitive biases, does it lead to dogmas or not. And the troubling point about this is that these recursive procedures of Paradan coming, for example, and we have it in, for example, various forms of systems, education, that
instead of inventing a new language, simply we recursively generate languages from previous structures. One of the things, the curious aspects of this recursive generation or simply not using something new, not completely a fundamental breakage, like an emergence of novelty, but using your old structures and organizing them anew, is that this recursive procedure creates a form of hierarchical structure in which if you had bias position in your previous stance, it will be transmitted to the other points of your hierarchy. So actually, there is quite a formal discussion
around this whole idea of using old languages rather than new languages in logic, and especially artificial intelligence, and the whole idea of recursive structure of language, so on and so forth. That recursive generative processes usually are good because it creates self-similarity, But this, which actually provide access. Different people from different cultures, from different contexts can actually latch onto self-similarity because we can approach self-similar structures better than a structure that is fundamentally different from its previous structures
that have come before it. We have much more potency to work with things that have some sort of recursive repetition and recursively repeated than pure emergentic novelty. But as I said, these recursive generations also are limited in their aspects because they are susceptible to transferring dogmas and biases. Yeah, I was thinking it seems kind of relevant to pareidolia actually as a transmission of what you could call a bias or a previous system in the mapping of faces
onto novel formal structures one encounters. Yes, actually visual systems, quite correctly, visual systems have recursive structures. And one of the things about this whole face recognition precisely is the recursive structure. You get a small visual input generated. And if there is a error tolerance error in it, it will be transmitted to basically the visual structure that you create out of a small visual cue. I thought I might take questions for the speakers now if people were interested in conversing with them. Does anybody have a question?
Can I have a question? Yes, of course. I was wondering how much the idea of the buzz you're speaking about in your essay, how much the buzz is created from what's already given, in a sense that Reza is describing that, and if there is a danger that relates to that. that. What I was arguing is that it's hard to talk to you with the microphone. What I was arguing is that in this text is that, whereas Benjamin's idea of the aura is rooted to a site-specific and inalienable situation, a work or a thing that can't move, that buzz, on the other hand, as opposed to aura,
is produced through a kind of accumulation of enunciation around something, as a restaurant would have a buzz or something like that. So it would be, I mean, it came directly from that. So as opposed to reproduction draining away, horror, reproduction, constitutes a different kind of draw, like a kind of almost, what's the word, the reason the apple drops, a kind of force that draws things to the earth. So So gravity. So a senior moment in real time.
That what I think, I mean, to go back to something that Reza was saying, responding to the language question, and I think this gets to what you were asking and maybe draws together some of the points that we were all making, is that in art history, at least, the semiotic has been a kind of ruling metaphor for visual enunciations, visual signification, for quite a while now. And my own work participated in that. But more and more, I think that there there are image rhetorics that are outside
of a linguistic semiotic that become more and more visible and urgent under conditions of rampant image circulation. So for instance, to take one of your articulations, The crash is actually a kind of signifying entity that maybe has no, I mean maybe it does have a semiotic analogy, but why even care about it? I mean there's the crash, there's the swarm, the buzz, there's the poor image as I mentioned before. I mean there are others. I think that obviously, I think it would be very interesting.
And it seems to me that artists are, in fact, doing this now. That this is why appropriation has become, to art now, what photography was, to art in the 70s, maybe, or whatever, or before then, 60s and 70s, or even earlier in montage. That there is a way in which the meaning structures are about how images can react to one another. And they don't necessarily have to be routed through a semiotic structure that is based on language. And so that's why, I mean, to me, the crash, the mask, that kind of thing, how images wrap one another,
how images damage one another, how images amplify one another, it seems to me that that could be an interesting way of moving forward. And that's why I was using a concept like Buzz. And do you think that if we think about there's something like roughly 70% of transactions happen without actual money involved, do you think that that is kind of mimicked in art production and something that could be maybe reformating, of how you don't have to actually get into creation of a new content. you could actually create a new meaning out of the content that already exists and put that just back into circulation? Well, yeah.
I mean, I think that, yes. I think there are a couple of questions embedded in what you just said. One is, can value be made without something being produced? And I think the example of Instagram, all kinds of ways in which that's absolutely true. I mean, I suppose in conceptual art, there was Lawrence Wiener's idea that a work could be made it need not be made now, you can have a work and exhibit a work without having to have physical space necessarily, which has its bad points and its good points. But maybe the bigger issue that you're talking about is how value gets accelerated up through various scales, how many kind of invisible actions or even immaterial
actions sort of produce a surplus at the end. And I'm thinking, because I'm just reading this sort of late, this book by Colin Crouch on post-democracy, the way he talks about the corporation being completely weakened in terms of its structure and decentralized. But what the corporation must continue to do is produce an image of itself and to produce an image of its brand. And of course, this is Naomi Klein's argument too. But I think that's really, I think we should think about that really carefully. I mean, that there is a way in which the executive function,
the capital function in the sense of the head, is the production of images. And that that, in a way, is, I mean, that's what New York and London and Tokyo are doing, while the rest of the world is making the stuff that we consume. So I mean, not that the only place that images are made is there, but that there's a way in which images become an executive function in a different way, in a very material way. I should stop there. Is there someone visiting here that wants to join the conversation? Anybody in the audience want to ask a question? Right here.
I guess there's sort of two separate questions. One's a comment, the reference to art being as good a hedge as gold. It's not art, it's specific artworks that are agreed upon as having a certain amount of scarcity. So then that leads to the question of, I guess, the distinction between an epistemic and a cognitive bias. And if there is a difference, and maybe what that kind of leads to is there's this bias that we can actually produce new content, as if somehow there's this agreed upon recognition that a certain body doing a certain thing at a certain time equals new content. And that the content, it doesn't already exist in many ways.
But there's not that causal relationship. That causal relationship is perhaps one of these biases that we somehow think that an artist doing something is new. Well, I don't have anything that much to say about art, but yes, there is a difference between cognitive bias and epistemic bias. I mean, there can be approached via kind of a Kantian perspective that cognitive biases are basically those kinds of biases that you are distinguished by the way that for example how we apply concepts how we you know we work out the relationship between concepts namely inferences this
is what inferences relation between concepts reasons rules how we apply rules, where we apply them, in which context we apply them. If there are, you know, there are ways that we wrongly or improperly or out of context we apply these rules, we are basically committing a cognitive bias. Cognition in the sense of the Kantian idea of cognition, namely deployment of concepts. You know, thinking is deployment of concepts according to rules. And epistemic biases, yes, also connected to this. Because once we apply rules in, you know, out of context, apply wrong rules to wrong set up, for example, premises
or axioms, we can, the kind of knowledge we generate out of these applications, out of how we use concepts in accordance, for example, with evidences, so on and so forth, for example, things of science, empirical evidences, it can generate an epistemic bias, various forms of epistemic bias, epistemic procedures, bias modes of knowledge production, so on and so forth. So they are distinguished from one another, but they essentially correlated. They can, in fact, reinforce one another. And you can apply this to the whole point of much bigger than art and philosophy. And that's, I think, the point of the essay that I'm arguing
is basically the idea of Marx, what Marx talks about. And what Althusser talks about, Marx's monumental discovery is that he sees the content of knowledge, history as a content of knowledge. And what is history? in the sense of Hegelian history, in the sense of that you develop concept out of yourself and you transform yourself according to this concept. Concept, concept. And this is exactly a cognitive procedure that has transformative implications. And if you have cognitive biases in your knowledge of history, of past, present temporalities, you create bad knowledge of history and then you act, of course, you know, in a kind of a dogmatic or biased way.
Is that what you were describing when you said the maladies of the mind and the pitfalls of knowledge in relation to the pitfalls of knowledge? Yes, yes. Mind in the sense, when I'm saying mind, I specifically use it in the sense of Kant and Hegel, mind as a social edifice. Because our capacity, the way Kant defines mind is as the capacity to, again, cognitive capacity, the capacity to use concepts. And the way that Hegel uses this is mind in the sense that even the capacity of the use concept is not an individual capacity, it's a social capacity. It requires discursive linguistic practices. And so the kind of mind that I talk about is this kind of Hegelian mind, namely a community
of rational agency that can have a self-narrative of themselves and according to which they they can basically transform themselves, which is basically what it means to have a history rather than just a past or a natural past. I want to just make a quick footnote on that, because one of the things I found very interesting in your essay was, which you haven't talked about tonight, is that there's a strong future orientation, that a kind of imperative to make knowledge about possible future navigation, which revises the past. And it seems to me that we need, I personally think it's really important to listen to these things
said about art. Of course, you're right that it's a tiny, tiny little proportion. However, it taints, if you will, the whole discourse, and in very material ways. And therefore, I think we have to kind of imagine. So that's part of my use of currency, that we started with is to take over. It's sort of like the way queer theory took over queer. Like, why not take it over? That it doesn't have to be only about storing gold and duty-free warehouses in Geneva or wherever. It can work for us, too, on some level. There are more questions?
Thanks. So I'd like to stay on this track of the recursive procedure a little bit. And I was thinking, as you were talking about how Norbert Wiener calls information the content that we exchange with our environment that allows us to live effectively within our environment. And I was thinking about the day that today it seems like we are exchanging ever more content with our environment with the goal of living as effectively with our environment as possible. We're sharing more and more data about ourselves. We are allowing ourselves to be profiled in a way. And in doing that we are using language and we're using images as recursive procedures.
And I think that that is what is being embedded within a certain search engine logic that sort of pollutes our environment. So if that is the case, and I might argue that it is without sounding too dystopian, in what way does then image circulation affect globalization as a form of making everything homogenous and making everything homogenous procedures that are becoming ever more recursive, ever more simplifying? Yang. And in that case, where does that leave cultural production if we think that cultural production still has the purpose of creating images that are oppositional or has an outside to anything or at least can reshuffle images in a way that might present different types
of narratives? Is that? That's for me. Well, I have an addendum for that. Oh, good. Okay. I would say what I think is... Sorry. One of the kind of potentials that seems to me that groups of multitudes of images might have is to produce a kind of extraterritoriality that is beyond, let's say, either state or NGO. I think that this has nothing to do with invention, really, although invention may be part of it.
And there's a way in which image worlds can create genuine publics, it seems to me, in the best possible case. I don't think that it always does. But I mean, I think that there are real examples in the 20th century that we can look to. One is anti-apartheid photography, which changed opinions outside of South Africa and ramified back into South Africa. Another is AIDS activism, which is very image-based. The Gorilla Girls are an example in the local context of New York. You know, we can all think, I think, of examples like that. Not all art practices are going to do that.
But I think it's a complex, you know, at the bottom of all these discussions is what is the value of art? Which is, you know, like a big teenage question, but a very big important one. And I think so, if you want, like, politics that feels like politics, the argument I just gave is the one. But to me, I think there's something very real about breaking open spaces, like pushing things away so that there is a space for something. And I think artworks do that. I think they... I actually... I've been thinking a lot about lately. So in your essay, this interested me a lot, your emphasis on futurity in this essay.
I think that works of art have a genuine futurity that is where perhaps their politics lies. I don't think art is going to change elections. I don't think art is going to create an equal society, unfortunately. I wish it could. I personally don't believe that's going to happen. But I do think art can do other things really well that might, in fact, have an effect on those other conditions, maybe. I'm kind of in agreement with some of these points. Yeah, sure. I just wanted to, that addendum was about this idea that, you know, we need to kind of define these terms a little bit more carefully.
Language is not fully recursive, and when we are talking about recursivity, I at least meant it in a very, you know, a specific sense, how it is defined not as a form of repetition. Recursion is not iteration. Recursion is not repetition. Recursion is embedding of constituents within the same kind of or type of constituents and that allows for you to create variations. Variations that actually might have different rules of manipulation, rules of modification than the previous forms of constituency relations that you made out of this recursive process.
So the main aim of recursive process is to create dependency relations between constituencies, between elements. There are different, you know, various, it's a big controversy in, you know, history of linguistics, especially after Chomsky's, you know, revolutionary essays on different formal grammars or syntaxes. Is language recursive, natural language especially? The majority of linguists say no. Language is not recursive. It has recursive structures, but in its totality, it's not recursive. Even though if it was recursive, this doesn't mean
that it is basically has that kind of idea that if really something was you know in the kind of restricted in the structure of language will be transmitted down the line. No I think these are I think a little bit more specific than you know this idea of that recursion simply means that something if something was wrong or something was flawed or something was biased will be essentially repeated. It's not a form of repetition. I just wanted to make this clear. I was kind of curious in response to you speaking about the formation of publics, David. I was reading an essay by Sarah Resnick in Triple Canopy recently in which she's kind of speaking about conceptions of the
political efficacy of the left and ideas about futurity and critiques of Futurity. There's an essay I'm not as familiar with by TJ Clark called For a Left With No Future that is, I guess, sort of a critique of ideas of politics premised on what might be achieved for future generations. And she also speaks about critiques from the perspective of, from queer perspectives and from perspectives critiquing the sort of heteronormative reproductive expectations of the future generations that like the political in art might be affecting rather than I like the idea of a public formation as something that's possible in the present I guess well I mean I think it really I don't think you
can expect all art I mean actually not to be too possibly recursive here but I I think that a certain notion of arts politics is part of what Reza's calling the given now. It's an unexamined sense of what art can do. And I mean, I believe in art, but I think that when claims made for art are exorbitant and impossible for it to accomplish, that is setting up like a really just a kind of arena for defeatism and failure. And when you add in the huge amounts of money that gets pumped into the situation, it goes haywire.
So what I'm trying to think about is, what can art really do? When I talk about futurity, I don't mean our future generations. I mean, we're looking at stuff that was made 2,000 years ago. And an artist who cares about their art has got to be thinking about that, even if he or she is not going to admit it, right? I mean, it is about a set of values that is precisely not political in the sense that politics is about the back and forth of the everyday struggle, which I'm not saying is unimportant. I just don't really think that... I think that art can participate, but I don't think that art can resolve those questions. And in fact, I think that in a way,
that is one of its great virtues, is that it has a time scale and an ambition that is so beyond what actually politics does that I think, why continually denigrate that? You know what I mean? Especially when the space for philosophical complexity is ever smaller and smaller, why not try to expand it on some level? That seems to me something that we can actually do. So that shouldn't limit the other kinds of ambitions, but the kind of defeatism that someone like T.J. Clark exhibits throughout his career,
the farewell to an idea, the whole thing is like, it's the end and it all really, the good days were when gay people had to be in the closet and you had to work in the fields. believe me, the good old days were not so good, really. They were pretty shitty for most people. So I think we have to be a little careful about it, really. I think maybe we have time for another question, if someone has one, and then maybe we'll let people shuffle around, look at the art a little bit, have a beer. Maybe one more in the back there. Hi. I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful presentation.
And I'm wondering if you can speak to, I think you said something like, art no longer functions according to a semiotic logic, and that there's a different rhetorical structure that it's moving into, and that relates to circulation. And I'm just wondering if you could flesh that out a little bit. Well, I mean, I just mean something really pretty basic, which is that images in combination communicate differently from the parts of language in combination. You know, it's like no surprise to anybody, but it was a comment really on the norms, or you could say the givens of my own discipline, my academic discipline art history, which
has been very interested in the becoming semiotic within modernism as a kind of threshold of some kind of success or a kind of accomplishment that moved outside of, let's say, market realities on some level. Whereas I think that there are other ways to think the grammar of images. I think that there's a kind of thermodynamics of images, too, and that this might be a productive vein to think about. I mean, then we'd have to look at specific things in order to see how that would work. But everything around you is trying to do that on some level.
And as I mentioned, the crash, I think the interest, maybe you guys could talk more about what you mean by it, how your work with that material, and how, in a way, When you destroy an image, you release another image from it. It's inside it. It's somehow a latency. It's one future that was released from it, while all the other futures, to use again these terms, are still embedded in it. There's something very powerful about that, it seems to me, that an analogy to language is simply not going to capture. It really was a kind of simple parochial point I was trying to make. I think that analogy to language is interesting on many levels.
I mean, simply because we tend to make it. I think that it's, you know, in our text we try to say that if you study a certain phenomena and you find yourself projecting a certain image on a phenomena that is false. You think of an ant hill and you think of perfect society, but it's not. The genetic structure, the selection in ants just works so completely differently than making that. Any kind of an allegory of the perfect society just doesn't make sense. But it will still do it. You will have children fairy tales from different countries, different cultures repeating that. So if you examine such a phenomena,
you maybe learn very little about this thing. But you learn a lot about how we share a certain approach to it. And I think that for that reason, this analogy to language is something that we'll always fall back into. And if doing so, I think that there is a few interesting moments, a few questions that I can't really answer for myself, but I find them intriguing. Like one of them would be, we recently had a conversation with Tom McCarthy about his latest book and the position of anthropologist. And what I think is significant in a work of anthropologists
is that his work is about naming things. That in many cultures, naming is more like a work of a god. And then a work of an artist would be more a work of a demurge, like doing things out of the things that have been already there, because you cannot do things out of nothing. So I thought that the question of naming, like how much when you work with the content that is already there, when you reformat contents, how much this work actually shifts from this work of the demurge. Or maybe it is still a work of the demurge, but it gains a new type of perspective. And then another question is a question of understanding. I mean, I always thought that what we try to do is to create a certain language that communicates
on the levels that perhaps verbal communication cannot. And that is what is needed in it. And this measurement of the success in communication was important for me. But then actually thinking of Gershom Scholem, You think of language that succeeds not in its communication, but it's while being performed simply. And then you have art that is successful not by communicating, but simply by performing. So I think that there's quite a few interesting points that one could focus on when thinking of art as language, even if it's not language, but it's it's still helpful to draw those analogies as a picture, perhaps.
And then thinking of a crash, then you referred to the work with the crashed object. What was interesting for us is that you have an object that is being approached with a completely different cognitive background. So those particular objects are made in research for car safety, so the crash barriers to which the car is being driven at high speed. And then those objects are being observed and measured. But if you move this object and you present it to someone who's not an engineer and knows nothing about the car design, but knows art history, then the same object will evoke completely different memories or different allegories that, I mean, were not intended, but if something
is not intended, it doesn't discredit that. It might be still meaningful, I think. Well, I thought we might end there and let people look around the art a little bit and talk and I just wanted to thank everybody for speaking Josephine, Kolya and David and Reza thank you very much and thanks everybody for coming thank you Richard and Artist Space.