top of page

[Valuing this world
defined by humanitas.

 

Placing categories aside — functional, criticism-oriented tools that don't concern us here.

This is a living thing.

 

Voicing the need for a practice. A continuous, monadic, inclusive practice, capable of connecting by dismembering; uniting by diversifying; of making us seize our collective intelligence, extended beyond the centralized structure of life forms with a single body, a single metabolism, a single brain. Voicing a form capable of guiding without restricting. Enlightening.

 

Light on objectivity as something to be generated, not unveiled. Space to the datum value, of existences, of choices, of execution. Space to those who pay rightful attention to under-skin dynamics, and make data complete. Those who oppose relativism as a curse. Space to the fertility of auto-nomy and auto-poiesis, of self-erection, of a positive, propelling, generative control.

 

Voicing Human, destroyer as realizer, realizer as destroyer, representative of progress, ruin and rebirth as discreet, potentially unsequential moments of a real, emotional continuum.

This latter is what we are concerned with.]

 

  0

  Spelling out a practice. New in being continuous, monadic, and inclusive.
The soil, not the avant-garde. Constant, not latest. Dwelling under skin. 

Voice this substrate. 

The result is a quiet, non-restrictive formula. A silent call. 

 

  Any image — alteration, manipulation, action, invention, naming — that is generative (that grounds more) originates with-in a conception of the World inside, according, in the aegis of that specific image.

Making is the making real of this conception, freely, auto-nomously, poietically. 

Value your freedom, your autonomy: right here, this practice entails presence, shared.

 

 

  1

  This is a defining and making-real practice. Your practice is in the extent to which it defines reality. Interpersonally, physically and conceptually, emotionally, socially, structurally. Don’t depict the real: make it what it is. No dependency, no mimesis.

1.1

  Art is its definitional element
                                 Prolonged, ex-tended, opening.

1.2

  Your practice is Relation.

 

 

  2

  Make real.

  2.1

  Making real bears all its senses. Senses of realizing, of emergence, diversification, projectionality, figurativeness, finalization, reach, attainment.

  Realizing begins with conceiving and emerges in representations. To represent is to auto-nomously, poietically set free what is conceived in its specificity — to define it, to make it real — to give it form, creating its own, concretely realized experience.

 

  2.1.1
  The world is representation; it exists as it thinks, as it does; it begins with an image and it ends with an image, with definition as flesh joining the two; on this tissue, technique and reality have always been woven and keep growing as versions of each other. [1]

  2.2

  A representation is a documentable definition of your world.

 

  2.3

  Within realization there is no relevant difference between genres. Genre differences acquire relevance within and between us who realize.

 

  3

  A work is flesh of an organism living beyond the piece itself.

 

  3.1

  It is in its relation, in representation to what is conceived — in defining and showing/presenc-ing it — that a work is real. 
A work is real only as definition of a world. Only as such can it evade a documentary dimension.

 

  3.1.1

  The ‘viewer’, ‘spectator’, ‘visitor’, ’audience’, must enter co-creation to seize this real dimension.

  3.2

  What is conceived can be conceived in a multitude of ways, but it is untranslatable, unknowable, inexpressible before and beyond realization. It can be developed and presenced, exclusively in the moments sequencing its own definition (the acquisition of form) — that is, its representations. In other words, nothing else than its representations can define it.

  A circuit, a band, is thus created: on one hand, representations can be appreciated as such (as real) only in relation to the conception they define. On the other, such sequence of states that are valuable (that are identifiable and acquire value) on its basis is the only 'thing' that can truthfully identify what is conceived. This opening system, the world thus defined, is its organism.

  3.2.1

  Understanding a work is to represent it, representing a work to understand it.

  3.2.2

  Responsibility is continuation. To be responsible is to be able to continue your work.

  4

  A piece is mere documentation of its organism, something otherly and diverse.

  4.1

  Works represent real cells of what is alive — however when isolated, they are observable only as documentation, or impressions. They become 'pieces': (positively) noisy, unstable, forking things.

The organism itself can be realized, or lived, yet not ‘observed’; due to its own kind of uncertainty principle, only its documents, its little deaths and births, can be observed, as discreet moments of a continuum.

 

  4.1.1

  What we commonly call art is just traces, debris, keyholes, lenses.

 

  4.2

  There are works that tighten the gap between piece and organism.

  5

  A number of definitions interact with each other according to the their degrees of inclusiveness, or completeness, richness. A definition’s ability to conceive all its effects can represent the other in their full, pure otherness.

full text 2
full text 3
full text 4
full text 1

[1]

I am but the publisher of a text that feeds on too many influences and draws on too many references to be considered, at any rate, to be authored. However, and it is important to point this out, the wording of paragraph 2.1.1 presents strong similarities with texts authored by Hito Steyerl and Eduardo Kohn.

DEF21 © 2023

def 21 manifesto / updated FEB 23

bottom of page