Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience

Postscript to Generating the Impossible

135 PostsCriPt to GENERATING THE IMPOSSIBLE Good-Bye Technological Arts, Hello Trees The previous chapter, Propositions for Thought in the Act, was written as an invitation to voyage. Its purpose was to convey a terrain collectively traveled , in preparation for a coming foray. It was addressed to fellow travelers already in the SenseLab network, and to others who might be inspired to come aboard. It was a kind of conceptual bill of lading attesting to what was coming in the collective baggage, not as an anchor to a particular past, but more as a flotation device for the next lap. In its own terms, it was a platform for relation for the open-ended continuation of a journey. The destination was not premapped. Unimaginable in advance, where the collaborative process could go was precisely the “impossibility” to be “generated.” The invitation was for a collective pathfinding toward a destination that would come into being en route. In the end, less a pathfinding than a waymaking. We were fully prepared for the open-endedness. What we were not prepared for was losing our starting point before we set forth. The event lost site of itself. During our year of planning Generating the Impossible, the Society for Art and Technology (SAT) crossed a threshold we had not anticipated. The renovations scheduled to improve the site and add the immersive interactive dome dubbed the SATosphere were caught in the aftereffects of the 2008 economic crisis. The resulting budget deficit necessitated a rethinking of the SAT’s operating model. Henceforth, all 136 p r o p o s i t i o n s activities would be called upon to generate monetary returns. We could still work at the SAT in the SATosphere, but the new model required projects that were not fully subsidized from outside sources to earn their keep by bringing in a paying public. This was an obvious problem for a project meant to explore the gift as a living critique of the neoliberal economy. The SAT’s earlier proposition was that we “explode the gallery,” creating flows that might open the site of art to cacophonous interventions poised between modes of address (the conference paper), display (the art exhibition ), and collaboration (the participatory installation), as well as opening it onto its outside, reconnecting it to its urban surroundings. Now there would be no “explosion.” The site’s modalities were given in advance, and any experimentation would have to happen within its domed structure. Not only that, but experimentation would be more regulated: channeled toward exploring the potentials of a given artistic platform—that of this particular immersive environment. This exerted pressure on artistic activity to conform to a content-providing paradigm, prelimiting the eventfulness of the process and its participatory intensity by reinstating a dichotomy between the artist/technological expert and the paying audience. The site thus went from being an open proposition (the SAT as spatial-conceptual catalyzer of action, a platform for relation in building form) to a highstakes arena branded by its own proprietary technical system, one requiring special access and inside knowledge. In addition, the SAT’s underlying assumption in this new phase was that artistic activity should ideally provide “deliverables” to other sectors. The SAT was facing a Faustian bargain: die an ignominious death by debt, or fall more into step with the enterprise model of the neoliberal economy. Was it having the last “glass,” crossing the threshold into a different relational field than that of the exploratory community-based center it had been up to then? It was clear that Generating the Impossible could not function within these new conditions. The event had to remain open to its undoing. Even had we had subsidies and been in a position to pay for access, the SATosphere would have constrained us to a preestablished site that already presumed to know how to manage what art can be, and what art can do. The shift the SAT was experiencing seemed all too reminiscent of our initial concerns about research-creation’s growing indebtedness to the capitalist economy and its enterprise model. Later, we would come back to the SAT with a project to creatively explore the tensions surrounding this shift, but we 137 Postscript to Generating the Impossible felt we would not be prepared for this until after Generating the Impossible had carried our practices further. For now, we had to move on.1 This...