In this beautiful text we can experience the postive notion of institutions. Freely after Claes Oldenburgs text I Am For an Art. This text has over the years developed into a signature text for International Festival.

published in Visslingar&Rop: Feg Teater February 2008

The Theatre

Theatre was originally a public activity engaged in a public space. It was drama and story as much as it was a lived situation of socio-political exchange. Theatre was an activity that provoked differences in society, if not through direct critique so through allegories. Today theatre is a private activity and its site has transformed into private space. It has lost its potentiality for actual exchange. Audience participation substitutes the once activated spectator today absent in the theatre. What has happened to theatre? Has it lost its very specificity to be a site where individuals share and exchange in processes of subjectification?

from: Art in America Number Two, April, 1965

When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi re-verberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters -when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up. When the cost of all this tackle is half of the total outlay (or more, as it often is) what is the house doing except concealing your mechanical pudenda from the stares of folks on the sidewalk? Once or twice recently there have been buildings where the public was genuinely confused about what was mechanical services, what was structure-many visitors to Philadelphia take quite a time to work out that the floors of Louis Kahn's laboratory towers are not supported by the flanking brick duct boxes, and when they have worked it out, they are inclined to wonder if it was worth all the trouble of giving them an independent supporting structure.

published in Transformations Issue No. 15 November 2007 The instantaneous transmission of information appears to absorb temporal location into the immediacy of its re-presentation and to displace spatial location into a free-floating world of simulation. For this reason any image has the potential to serve as both an historical icon and a geopolitical map. For example, the “events of September 11” have become one the most dramatic and dramatised occasions around which different discourses about space and time have been mobilised. 9/11 almost immediately became the logo for a new spatial aggression (the War on Terror) as well as enshrined as a national trauma of the gravest kind. Meanwhile a hegemonic silence was imposed regarding any other historical traumas these events may have recalled. Yet such a conjunction of the virtual and the traumatic remains to be conceptualised differently: as a potentially radical interruption of habitual experience in which our sense of both the past and the present can be reconfigured. This essay proposes that Benjamin’s final writings, in which concepts from both Bergson and Freud form a new critical constellation, enable us to understand trauma and virtuality in such a transformative relation.

Contemporary theoretical work in the discipline of architecture has a particular focus on aspects of digital technologies as these begin to redefine our notions of spatiality, habitation and form making. Theorists such as Stephen Perella and Greg Lynn have pointed to new thresholds for thinking the architectural, as cyber architectures begin to proliferate. In this context, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze is often invoked for his thinking of the virtual and the fold, while the theorists John Rajchman and Elizabeth Grosz have been instrumental in sustaining a dialogue between key architectural practitioners and a series of Deleuzian problematics. This paper critically examines some of the work of Perella, Lynn and other cyber architecture
theorists in the light of Deleuze’s own distinction between virtuality and actuality. A key Deleuzian term that allows for a critical analysis of virtuality and architecture is his notion of the ‘diagram.’ This term has been introduced to architectural discourse by Rajchman in the Any series of conferences, and has been taken up more recently in the context of the works of Peter Eisenman.

One could argue that virtual reality and cyberspace are merely fashionable passwords to contemporary culture; however, this chapter takes the position that addressing questions of virtuality may enable a fuller understanding of some of the changes which deeply affect the notion of aesthetics today. Wolfgang Welsch, in his book Undoing Aesthetics, asserts that aesthetics is undergoing a process of epistemologization, referring no longer only to questions of the beautiful and the sublime. Welsch argues that we are witnesses to a profound aestheticization of knowledge and reality, time and space, and even truth itself. On the other hand, a similar shift in the definition of the paradigms of reality, time and space can be traced through the function (i.e., definition, meaning and significance) of cyberspace and virtual reality. Issues such as the nature of the human being, the difference between reality and the real, and those of the changed parameters of space and time, seem to be not only more deeply, but above all, differently questioned by the theme of virtual reality with its postulated construction of perfect, simulated environments.

Introduction: Hyperbolic expectations and one-sided assessments in praise of electronic media

Brian Massumi is one of the most interesting thinkers following in the footsteps of Gilles Deleuze today. Massumi address Delueze thinking in various ways among others notions of virtualiy and affect. Massumi bring to todays political as well as e.g. architectural discourses some of Delueze text.
Read an extra ordinary interview made by Thomas Markussen starting with the kitschy blur building by Diller + Scofido but going into rather curious matter thinking through the digital regimes of architecture today.

In this text Simon Sheikh, active in Malmö, is proposing a few crucial perspectives in how notions of the public has changed with global capitalism. Starting with Hambermas concept of the public Sheikh lay out concepts of what the public sphere the “artworld” can be and how it can be understood as a critical potentiality.

The second of Delueze books on cinema address start out form the mid 40s with the Italian Neo-realism and its different address to cinema. In the book he develops the concept of time image and crystal image. Delueze cinema books is also an address to philosophy and academic writing as Deleuze over and over offer new neologisms often overlapping and contradicting. Totaro makes magic of Deleuze writing and gives an excellent insight in Delueze writing.

Bergson used in the first chapter of his fundamental work Matter and Memory cinema to describe his concept of duration. Gilles Deleuze a sworn Bergsonist returned to Bergson and his relation to moving pictures in two books on cinema. The two volumes lay out on the one hand a history of film in two parts divided by a shift of the understanding of images from movement image to time image describing a division from an image based on causality, so to say, fulfilling the spectators expectation and an image in which the spectator has to engage precisely because the causality is not proposed. The engagement in the image implies an affectual production i.e. a movement towards political emancipation. Here you get a short version written by the excellent film theorist Donato Totaro.

Michel Foucault's philosophical mission focused to a large extent on the production of power and its relationships to the establishment of a subject. Through his three major works on the history of madness, surveillance and sexuality Foucault laid out a set of technologies of the self. An parallel line of his work worked instead on macro levels of how e.g. the nation state and the individual citizens permission each other to repress and be repressed, interests that took shape in bio politics and gouvernmentality. In this text Deleuze reflects on Foulcaut's concepts of discipline and control, two fundamental terms to come closer to Foucault's thinking.

Over the last five or so years utopia has been abundantly used in contexts of artistic production, but utopia is there and then so what, one can ask, does utopia actually produce except to postpone what has to be done. With the opening page in Thomas More over Eldorado and Shangrila discussions when into spin PDQ and, for some got straight into radio shadow with Utopia Station at the Venice Biennale 2003.
Immanuel Wallerstein has turned to utopistics which generally implies to skip over the grand vision of utopia and get the going going here and now – small scale hands on and attitude. Brian Massumi has over Delueze brought to the here and now via affectual production, and it pretty much works.
Central to this entire discourse is a short text by Michel Foucault, where he develops the concept of heterotopia which “first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found.”

Economizing tendencies and globalization effects have all made their mark on art institutions' structures and practices in a variety of ways. Academic disciplines - like Cultural Studies or Art History -, museums, private collections and exhibition venues have increasingly become the subject of both artistic and theoretical investigations in recent years, critically tracing the changes that have come about in this context.1

It is apparent that Alain Badiou’s father had very bad influence on his sons philosophical endeavor, or maybe only on his dress code, but in this lecture given in London a few years ago a good situation takes place. The father is mentioned PDQ and is then out of the situation, a rather inspiring patricidal attempt that Badiou shall be credit for as he makes a leap of faith conceptualizing around a new body.