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It occurs to me that X Notes on Practice belongs nowhere in academia; It belongs right here on the internet, as a hypertextual document. Academia’s stubborn insistence that her students continue to turn in papers to her is, I think, demonstrative of an internal prejudice against any form that reaches out like a growing tree. The paper is so limited as a form of expression. In order to take the form of a paper, the tree must be stripped away of all of its substance, all of its strength. Like a tree, this essay is attempting to plant its roots deep into the ground of tangible experience while still reaching up and out to ideas that are above and beyond our daily experiences of reality.

The original ferment of influences from which X Notes on Practice came into being, owes something of itself to the Tropicália movement of the ‘60s. I have been deeply impressed by the strong sense of creative agency that surfaced in Bahia Brazil in the late 1960s. Tropicália, though it may be written in the margins of global cultural history, is paradigmatic to my belief in the power of creative agency to both bring us back to ourselves, while moving us beyond as well. The above lyrics, written by Gilberto Gil and Torquato Neto, were recorded by Gil in his song Marginália II. The chorus of this song, “aqui é o fim do mundo” translates to “the end of the world is here.” According to Tropicália scholar, Christopher Dunn, this refrain is an idiomatic phrase, expressing “something like ‘we’re in the middle of nowhere.’” In many ways, the work which I am presenting to you in X Notes on Practice has a very similar refrain about it. The constant reminders that I have littered throughout my essay that you are “here” and that this is happening “now” are signs calling for my reader’s immanence within the text.

As I see it, immanence is both about being here, and now, and about being nowhere, the composite of here and now. In this way, it seems to be the same thing as transcendence. If we accept what was said in the beginning, that this essay has no place in academia at this time, then, on the other hand, it necessarily follows that X Notes on Practice is the literal embodiment of today’s academic utopia (utopia = no place).

Preface by Raqs Media Collective

“Sometimes, adjustments have to be made. Schedules need calibration. There are contingencies, questions, obstinate demands, weak excuses, strong desires. Journeys are abandoned midway. Aeroplanes sit on wooden platforms in a wilderness like widows on a funeral pyre. Flights are grounded, engines rust, propellers turn idly. The debris of the unrealizable accumulates on the surface of the eagerly expected. Time to pause, to take stock. Sit still and let a conversation begin…

I.

…There has been a change of plan.”

Our original journey must be abandoned. We will not be flying around the globe in search of an“other” anymore. We will not be flying into any “centers” of the world any time soon, nor will we be flying out of a “center” in search of an imagined “periphery.” There will be no departures today, because we have already arrived to our alter-destination. We have already arrived now, and from here we must take our journey on foot and in mind. We are here, now, to consider our collective cultural practice today.

II.

A Concise Lexicon Of/For the Digital Commons

In order to make this consideration, I have decided it useful for us to appropriate some ideas and practices that I have learned from Raqs Media Collective, an ensemble of New Delhi-based media practitioners. Ultimately, this essay should prove itself to be only an active re-iteration of the media practice which Raqs is engaged in. The real kernel of the research that I am presenting you here is centered on the collective identity that I am offering “us.”/

/“We” are those who take our modernity as quotidian to our being. Today, our modernity is measured by our bandwidth within digital domains. We often take for granted the access we have to this very crucial frontier of society. As we interface with our computers, we are closer than ever to hacking the normative code(s) of modernity and using its tools to write the one(s) which should define our alter-destiny. Alternative modernity is the meme through which this occasion must be met. Alter-modernity is born of a rescension of the heterogeneous histories of our collected culture. Through a collective journal we may be able to ascribe portability to the yarns that we collect and send them out along the infinite pathways of society and culture today. We are defined by our ubiquity in our time. Even as we are no/w/here, we are connected to a web that has the potential to situate us everywhere. Everywhere, we have the potential to be connected through the fractal unity of a cooperative agency of information sharing. Similarly though, we also have the potential to reject such an enterprise and the xenophilly that it entails in favor of the normative enterprise of our contemporary moment which is defined by isolation, exploitation, and denial. The vector path of modernity is in our hands.

My goal with this paper is to actively embody and recuperate creative agency by making a gift to you of this scholarship which situates itself in a space that is consciously liminal to existing academic research in an attempt to practice a radical alterity in the representation of modernity today. It is my hope that this attempt may inspire others to become active practitioners of free culture and alternative modernity.

[All throughout this site, we will find ourselves in close orbit of Raqs Media Collective’s zone of agency from which I have mined most of my data. Please, at the risk of becoming too esoteric, I encourage you to follow all of the nodes I have made available for you, most of which Raqs has made available for us.]

III.

How Information Delivery Service is Happening

The fall of ‘09 was a time of many new beginnings in the city of DeKalb, IL. The first decade of the new millennium had been marked by the greatest spectacles of terror and hope on many fronts, all of which seemed to come to a head that fall.

There was a sense of disquiet about the precarious destinies of both ourselves and our environment in the hands of global capitalism, dissatisfaction with the stubborn structures of normative education, and a general unease about the continual decline of critical public culture.

At the same time, DeKalb, IL has been witnessing a rebirth of an independent arts and media scene. This is becoming evident in the exhibitions and screenings that have been taking place modestly in alternative venues, outside galleries and institutional spaces, and in archival initiatives that are becoming active. In the university, professors are beginning to initiate platforms for collaborative, interdisciplinary, and experimental pedagogy (ARTLab). The local music community has begun to create alternative forums for musical exchange (Coffee Jam Collective) besides the open-mic scene (which blew up in a very big way here in ‘09). There has been a vibrant energy evident in front porch improvisations with new technologies (like skyping live free-jazz performances to the house café). People are looking outside of their fields of knowledge/expertise for new ideas and modes of communication through collaboration and experimentation. It is promising, for those of us who have been involved in some of these affairs to see that the micro-utopia is possible, and that it does happen, now and again, here and there. We are beginning to see the way towards an alternative structuring of the world.

It is from within this ferment of ideas and energies that the conceptual foundation of Information Delivery Service is being imagineered. Here, Raqs Media Collective is providing a model of glocal proportions. Their work in initiating Sarai is invaluable for those of us who share their concern in critical media practice as well as their desire to create spaces where people can gather, share, and work together. In the interest of “thinking globally,” whilst being sure to “act locally,” I propose that something resembling a Sarai ought to be constructed in our own community and projected for the rest of the world.

The challenge before us then, as I see it, would be to build a reflexive structure that will assist us in communicating our ideas and arranging our energies, ultimately leading us to an uncovering of the front of our creative agency.

It may take two years, (or it may take too many) to translate this conception to a plan for a real space and a design of a workable interdisciplinary program of activities. Information Delivery Service embraces the improvised, and is therefore interested in the here and now.

Information Delivery Service is being founded on the basis of a collaborative vision and it will grow by continuing to include and engage with new people and ideas.

Initiators:
Foamface
ARTLab?
IV.

Altermodern Reader

Altermodernity has recently surfaced as critical concept of our current global epoch. Following in the tails of postmodernity, altermodernity is a concept of art’s identity in the here and now which has been put forward by critic Nicolas Bourriard for his curatorial inclusions in the 2009 Tate Triennial. In his Altermodern Manifesto he puts forward his belief that travel is having profound effects on the evolutionary consciousness of humanity and that the globalized state of the world has brought on a new epoch of global modernity which is definitively distinct from twentieth century modernism and post-modernism. According to Bourriard, the defining characteristic of altermodernity is translation. Through translation and the subsequent creolization of cultures that occurs in its wake, we may be able to produce new universalisms to which all peoples may be connected. Most recently, altermodernity has further surfaced in the mainstream of alternative culture in the pages of Adbusters

V.

“Temporary Autonomous Sarai

…is an attempt to give form to an ethic of improvisation, conversation and hospitality through an impermanent structure that can contain itself as it moves from place to place. The structure […] privileges itinerancy, flexibility of usage, and the possibility of role-shifts between users and producers, players and viewers, guests and hosts. In this spatial configuration - all visitors are encouraged to be playful with the presences and traces of others.”

Here, I am opening up a temporary autonomous sarai as a space where you may literally enter the conversation. Please be my guest and take some time now to journal your feelings about your time here and I will post it in this note:

VI.

On the Other Hand

“Things are more than what they seem.”

Time, for us, cannot simply be described as a time-table of work and leisure. Our time is really a complex of emotions responding to the demands of our modern world system. Some of us are ahead of the times, and some of us are behind the times. Occasionally, we are right on-time, but most of the time, we are wrong on time. All of these spaces in time inscribe us with the feelings we inherit in the natural course of our modernity. We often forget that we have a choice in the spaces of modernity that we choose to inhabit. On the one hand, we may be isolated in our fear. On the other hand, we may find ourselves opening in the ecstasy of influence (contra Harold Bloom’s anxiety).

---

Journal Entry (Tuesday, Dec 1. 2009 10:05 – 10:10 PM) On the one hand, this is the hour of panic. I feel panic because I am so far from having achieved any comfortable degree of progress on this paper. (This semester, I have continuously occupied a position that lags behind in the progress that syllabuses expect of me. Is this what it feels like to be occupied in the rearguard?) On the other hand, I am overcome by anxiety that I will not be able to finish this paper. This combination is terrifying. Together, these conditions wrap me up into an unbearable stress. As the stress begins to surmount however, the anxiety about failing to write this paper washes into a sense of duty that I must complete the task, that I must persevere. Some things need to be heard.

VII.

“Utopia is a Hearing Aid

…emerges from an understanding that the possibility of another world is actually always latent within the materiality of this one. One has only to listen to the sounds of it stirring to make it manifest. This requires the cultivation of a hermeneutics of listening, of listening very carefully. Of paying attention to the things that are being said, not only aloud, but also in whispers, not only in proclamations and manifestos, but also in forms of disguised and coded speech, and not only in reasonable discursive forms but also in acts of parrhesic, fearless speech. It calls for fearless and attentive listening.”

The reason that I have requested you to impregnate my scholarship with your voice is because this should allow us a possibility of birthing a consideration for just what it is that this ubiquitous “we” have to say, as well as what we are interested in. It is this activity of speaking and listening which may help lead us to the self-discovery of an agency weaved together of the yarn of our collective story-telling. That a heterogeneous array of voices should occupy the center of this writing is not insignificant. Conversation is central to the practice of alter-modernization.

Alter-modernization is a humble and peaceful, yet active and virulent process that is rendered possible through careful listening. Alter-modernization re-iterates the stories of history which are forgotten or repressed by the major discourse of modernization. Today, these re-iterations are meant to remind us of the exclusionary nature of the writing of history and to help us develop a practice apart from the modern processes that have written histories as dubious as those which we have inherited. It is time now for us to listen to history’s residue.

VIII.

With Respect to Residue

“Residue connects us to memory, to the things that got left behind in the process of the making of the world. In them, we can often find, not just traces of the past, but also all our desires, and alternative imaginations for the future. For us, ‘residue’ is a powerful, resonant and generative concept, and we find that sometimes, the residual and the imminent share a powerful and paradoxical solidarity”.*

Let us begin to claim our collective art history. Let us claim the residue which remains after this last century of great and dubious progress. Here, I make a claim upon our collective cultural and its product. I claim, for us, as our collective artworks, the mountains of refuse which constitute our land fills. They are great earthworks: dubious, but great. They act as beautiful metaphors for all of the existing reality that has been repressed below the surface of modernity. The landfill that is claimed here is Prairie Hills, a land fill outside of my hometown of Morrison, IL, where I first learned all of my habits of consumption and refuse.

There is more to be claimed.

IX.

An invitation, says Foamface

It began with a change of plans. Somewhat untimely. Now, it is opening up a discourse towards future collective agency.

X.

[altermodern] Information Society Bibliography

1. Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu
2. Liberty, Quality, Machinery by Aldous Huxley
3. The Planning Myth by SPR Charter
4. X Notes on Practice: Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage in a Networked World by Raqs Media Collective
5. Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida
6. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History by Carolyn Steedman

Afterwords: It’s after the end of the world…
This essay has been the most stressful and laborious piece of work that I have ever attempted to create. One must blame me if it gives off an aura of artifice, for this is no divinely inspired work. I cannot find a perfume of holiness about it. That being said, it can be modified. And it will be modified. I am looking for suggestions & critical commentary . If you would please submit it into the Temporary Autonomous Sarai that I have established in this post, I should be very grateful.