"The Art of Encounter"

by Boris Nieslony 2007

E. P. I. Zentrum 
Europäisches Performance Institut
www.asa.de

East-West Study Project 2007
"Die Kunst der Begegnung" / "The Art of Encountering
II" 

Thoughts and motives about public, art in public
spaces and other casual forms of the cultural public
issues, as well as some theses about the conceptual
foundation of the "Art of Encountering".

What is the difference between various (big) projects
(more concrete "Art in extrernal Spaces", "External
Art Buildings" ("Kunst am Bau") etc.) or for example
the festival of the regions/Oberösterreich, bi annual
since 1993; "Occupation" and "Normal null", Berlin;
the festival "Kontracom" in Salzburg or in the
exploraions of of space paradigms at "Last & Lost",
Munic 2006 and the project "The Art of Encountering"?
And what is the difference between sire specific
actions/performances and the "Art of Encountering"?


First some thoughts about public/versus/ Art in
external Spaces and their accessibility

"Public is about the what of belonging to the people;
relating to, or affecting, a nation, state, or
community; opposed to private; as, the public
treasury, a road or lake. Public is also defined as
the people of a nation not affiliated with the
government of that nation.
Public also refers to the general body of mankind, or
of a nation, state, or community; the people,
indefinitely; as, the public; also, a particular body
or aggregation of people; as, an author's public.
"public Network" means a network that is regulated as
a common carrier.
Aggens (1983), in the paper titled "Identifying
different levels of public interest in participation"
states: "There is no single public, but different
levels of public based on differing levels of interest
and ability".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public

Opposed to all accessibility are uncountable
administrative and institutional ordinances and
interdictions. 
Social deployment shall be normative and controllable.
The term "Unauthorized Tresspassing" and a non visible
"property" dominates. Public gets run-down on the one
hand and impoldes more and more in the exclusive
equation "Man = Consumer" (Citymarketing) in a "goal
orientated determinded environment".


Street is Street and no Concept Art. Ulf Amide

Public exists here not inherently, it appears only
situativ. And - one should formulate as a convergence
to the theseses of Faucault, that public is not
connotated and defined by an existence in spheres
outside of any given power-structures, but defined to
be a fought over and hirarchic space. Therefore the
civic public (and all social movements) in spaces are
a solid integral part of power in multiple ways.


The arbitrary installation of "art" in the city is a
delict M. Walser
Public in Spaces by the power is a political delict. 

Crucial criteria for public is the accessibility, not
clearly defined which public is referred to, as for
example mutually exclusive publics exist
simultaniously. The various types interplay, e.g.: to
become prominent - self-potrayal - well wachsed
provacationmacheneries - to publicate and to make
public - discourses for the exchange of reasons for
various pretensions of caches - to align and
"eqaligne" social energies (soccer) - the establishing
of economig and political power - etc.
"Whether any event qualifies itself as public, is
determined in the further devolution about it-s
relevance, which means, which incidents appear
relavant in the social context".

In Belfast you find sign at public places, that
request the population to reconquer the public space
and to (re) animate it.

Furthermore one could mark public as a social
situaion, whose participants exchange thoughts,
arbitrate goals among eachothers and prepare actions
and operations, that are based on the there proximated
experiences. Persons, that create a public, are
partners, no group. They appeal to participants, not
to any audience. 

Iniatially, events are defined to be public, that
arise attention of persons. Only throught the
participating spectators, listeners or readers an
event becomes public.

Remembering as well, that there was a distinction in
the school of Athens between the interna (esoteric),
in closed rooms as internal (secret) knowledge
negotiated knowledge and the extern (exotic) knowledge
that was negotiated in public. This negogiating is
process and event at the same time.
Public events and public knowledge is blood in the
veins of the body of society. It-s the "self showing
people" in public, they are one of the most important
cultural ressource. 

The magazine ARCH+ dedicates it-s newest edition
(2007) to the Situationistic Internationale (SI)
/Situationistische Internationale (SI) and understands
the SI as the origin of many of todays strategies of
planning: "Inspite of the annulment of the
Situationistic Internationale (SI) by Guy Debord in
1972, it keeps on living as the "Phantom of Avagarde"
(Roberto Ohrt) and keeps on fascinating and became the
benchmark of the theoretic discours about art and
society - as well with impact on architecture and
cityplanning and -building. Was the city of Paris not
only the referencespace of the Situationistic
Internationale (SI), but as well the refugepoint of
their endavours about the abolition of art and the
conveyance of art into a free life".

... and i am growing ears, that-s a strange feeling,
but not too bad.... (B. Sturm)

"Stolpering, Stamping, Prancing, Walking and Rambling"
Practical methods are not only developed in the
anxious times after the second worldwar, but already
in 1833 Balzaz wrote the essay: "The theory of
Walking" as stipulated in the research-document about
the "Pathology of Social Life". Phenomenological
foundation stones are planted there, to interveave
stand and object, to indespensible interlace the What
and the the How, that are still more then up-to-date
today.

A Disruption dominates and is to be formed.


Situative Urbanism and the Spacing of/the World

Public takes place first in the head, and then evolves
into the various spaces, and then puts itself over
into the exterior. Various strategies of proceeding in
a "Exertion Space".
The walk itself as a narrative-theoretical model,
walking and thinking and the completely different
walking and thing. The putting over of movements, the
"stroll-walk", the betwixt usage in the fallow of
orientation. Walking as strategy in the everyday life.
Walk and Give. Common Practize. 


On the inner site the creation of the "distinct
classifiable entities" (the cognitive mapping) and on
the other hand the external/exteriour absence of the
classification. How does it look like, how shall it
look like?

Examination: to stage the self as a person within a
community of others, and to actingly comment the
staging of the found and given reality of what is
defined as public interest, shall get dematntled of
given rolls, play-acting of the public, demantled of a
reglementing definition of the common and as J. Gerz
defines it: "What was banned before into the exile of
the private, has to become public now".
No public hearings, no mesuring inspection but
interferences. Participation and Particygiving.

With the term "Somatic Kulture", i adumbrate
conditions, that are described as followed by the to
be anticipated intersections at the architectural,
cityspacial and social body:

Interactions with human entities of being,
coincidental presences, spacial conditions, with
laywers of folds of liveworlds, with realities.
Discours in the participating change, human and place,
gestus and habitus, trade adn modifications, discrete
intersections, integration or ignorance of the
pre-found, the found places, etc.
Not to define the personal attachment to capital and
ownership as a benchmark for world and to be connected
to daily activities.

Intercention in these laywers, folds. To deploy folded
in methods between participation and transformation.
To lead the discourse between communication
technologies. Inventions in given realities will
create visual interpretations and images, that can be
read dialectic, symbolic or poetically percieving. 


Interferences within the public means to revise one-s
worldviews and to found realities. 

Vivisections at living bodies (city- and
societybody/versus/body of the intervening artists and
other participants). Unfolding of fractions and cracks
in the conditions of encoutering.

Altering from the words by Hannah Ahrend is to be
written: Not things, works or posessions, that are
declared to be the public and are assigned form the
human being, but only the one, who takes his life and
person into the hazard of public, can reach it, the
public.
"The hazard of public seems to be totally transparent
to me. One exposes oneself in the light of the public
and this as a person. Even if i hold the belief, that
one may not appaer or act self-reflective in public,
so i more then know, that in any given acting the
person more then is expressed, then in any other given
activity. And now i would say, that this hazard is
only possible with a trust in human mankind. That
means - with a - hard to define but basic - trust in
the human within all humans. It would not be possible
in any other way."

And this view:
The magazine ARCH+ tries to define the opposing pairs
as floolwed: Derivé/Citywalk,
Psychogeogrpahy/cognitive mapping,
Détourment/Inbetweenusages, revolution of the
daily/daily life. 
And again ARCH+:"The orientation of a situation in a
given space will be a strategy to surrender to the new
consciousness of space. In this sense we assume, that
the new situation in a given space will establish
itself , the atmosperic unity of the "quartier" and
the archipelstyle classification of the town - as the
new leading definition of the situative urbanism - to
be thought further here, to extend this approach,
that-s what this edition shall stimulate. 

Methods and streategies that are embodied in the
project: "Art of Encountering II" the walking, the
walk and the fast changable situation. This in a
society, that constitutes continously a "double
bottom", as one is facing in any given normative and
authoritarian society. 


To well know that all this goals are highly
positioned, it means to approach them:

Not to dissemble, that this project does not exist in
any "empty space", but already interwoven within a
net(work) of artistic and cultural demands, that is
spanned worldwide (to avoid "global"). e.g.: ,New
Genre Public Art' - ,Mapping the Terrain' or
,participatory turn', where very exact analysises of
the "social body" were and are researched closely.This
is not the space either, to negotiate the difference
within the discours - "interaction" and "participatory
art", but it will a main issue of the alcertation
between the artist. 

How can a work (is it allowed to speak about a work?),
how can a situation depict itself, without obviously
being the actual (space) conferment. (Grafting as a
method of art)

Encounter
Encounter as intersubjective constitution is
temporary. It happyens, it enfolds, ealationless,
unambitious. The artistic interventions are of a
performative kind. 
In "public" it-s shown as "the temporary", prefigured.

It-s not the intention of the encounter, to design
works, that accomodate in any social or political
strategiesm, but nevertheless have an impact as a
consequence. 

While encountering, the pardoxical concomittance
happens (possible by the given framework and
-conditions), that cultur is implanted as a "white
spot" into one more or less functioning surrounding
urban context.

The project "the Art of Encounter" has to be seen as
way more complex, that swinging along with the fields
of: local/versus/transnational, east/versus/west,
public-representative/versus/public-non-representative
- the following:

° the model of the interdisciplinary colloquium shall
guide perception of the social body as well into
field, that are declared epiphenomena of social
processes. side effects, to be seen from the corner of
one-s eyes, often more then not at all recognized.
(Performance as listing and numeration, choreography
of splace and space and spot and the there moving,
fluctuating humans.)
(The model itself a side effect.)


The aura of a space, freed from any functionality,
freed to be useless

° Deriving from various deals of thoughts to "what is
public space", tending to "how is public space in
public" is to be noted, that there are not really too
many models and theories of temporary artical
interventions. But questions originated over the
years: how can an instrumantarim for the various
conditions, for the interventions in the various seen
and unseesn spaces, then non-spaces, the white spots
look like? Where does it make sense to imlant
intersections and to depict them?
The slowly but steady development of depictments, that
do not "personify" the incidental as a fact: f.e.:
here my own individual, artistic performance and there
the (incidentally free) space of a somewhat
coincidental public. 
To practize artistical exercise as a longterm
development of insightful methods.


The glances of the others have the power of the
subjective images. This glance is no medium, it is
communication. 

° The factor "Education" embodies for me a more
stringed sense, then the one of exchange. The
participating artists understand their participation,
ther particigiving more as a direction, then being in
the education. This of course shows and has impacts on
the methods of the various interferences and the
chosen strategies. Many questions affix exactly here,
that research the efficiency of the methods, that
examine their tools in sense of usability. 
Possible connection of public on the one hand: 
A person is protected by the interferences within a
group of persons, but simultaniously in the intention
of the interference is hindered. (The interference
would look different without the "group"). Cameras
prevent any interaction, and is coded and accepted as
a representative (enforced) public by bystanders or
participating persons. 
False estimation of it-s methods.The acticities of the
the public person are more effective and stronger and
in their depiction more present. 
On the other hand protection derives and new
possibilities in this encounters can be created among
the various users. Common standarts set new standarts
of normes within changing paradigms. 

°Changes and new orietations, - definitions
(selfdetermination) the sharing of ressources, the
cast of positions, receptive structures; definition
participants-audience, etc
Public in this new definition defines acting out of
inner needs and this as a counterpoint to the public
as the normative in the edict, carried out by justice,
authority, power and economic interests.
Then this public as a psychoanalytical public, that
pathologizes it-s participants and decruits them as
multifuncional users.

And suddenly there was wind.


Thanks to: Gerhard Dirmoser, the invited and
travelling artists from Japan, the German artists, the
participating organosators from Essen, Düsseldorf,
Köln, Hildesheim, Hannover and the thoughts of : G.
Deleuze, M. Foucault, P.Bourdieu. J.-L. Nancy, F.
Julien and and and ...


Literature:
. Arendt, Hannah. Vita Activa
. Babias, Marius. Die Kunst des Öffentlichen. Verlag
der Kunst
. Benjamin, W. Illuminationen, Seite 188-193. 
. Deleuze, Gilles. Die Einsame Insel
. Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit.
Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen
Gesellschaft
. Lettre 76, ( 38-46) Definition von Öffentlichkeit
Seite 28, Sp 3, (Jochern Gerz) Öffentlichkeit als
Körper, Seite 41 Sp. 2, 
. Lewitzky, Uwe. Kunst für alle - Kunst im
öffentlichen Raum.
. Mersch, Dieter. Esse est performari, zur Logik
ästhetischer Demonstration. In Ästhetik &
Kommunikation Heft 99, 1997
. Raabe, Katharina und Sznajderman, Monika. Atlas des
Verschwindens
. Sheik, Simon. In the Place of the Public Sphere.
Berlin 2005

. Callahan, Anna. www.anna-callahan.com/connections


Boris Nieslony 2007
Translation Sibyll Kalff 2007