Erotic Economies No.

1: Summer 2010

Editors Note
we can divert the time owed to the institution; we can play the game of free exchange, even if it is penalized by bosses and colleagues when th-ey are not willing to turn a blind eye on it; we can create networks of connivances and slights of hand; we can exchange gifts; and in these ways we can subvert the law that, in the scientific factory, puts work at the service of the machine, and by similar logic, progressively destroys the requirement of creation and the obligation to give.

Michel de Certeau

Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs but to a lack of connections.

Jacques Rancire

We are grateful to our friends and advisors for lending us their time and expertise in producing this, the first of what we hope will be many editions of Erotic Economies, and negotiating the process of launching its parent project (eroticeconomies.org). Most simply put, Erotic Economies is multitier gift experiment, which uses print and digital archives to explore the place of art and other cultural artifacts in the alternative structures that underlie, intertwine, and collude with capitalism. This issue focuses on work portraying invisible systems of value, exposing the bonds existing inside and outside of commodity exchange (bonds of and to the body, the economy, the land, etc.), and pushing the limits of remix culture. As a larger project, Erotic Economies is concerned with exploring gift-economies, money, property, ownership, theft, reproduction, bartering, borrowing, consumption, interaction, labor, law, value, black markets, censorship, capital and the dissonance between giving and taking in contemporary society. In the spirit of generosity and exchange that we have enjoyed, we are presenting these issues as free gifts to our readers. But of course no gift is ever really free, and so there is the intrinsic desire /expectation/obligation for reciprocity. Ours is simple: the reader, we hope, will pass this collection along so that it can be a part of many conversations. It is our desire that this action will not only be conceptual, but tangible making the 1 of 250 copies you hold in your hands right now, a truly dynamic object. It is for this reason that we resort to a more traditional media as a method of exchange. After all, it is these relics (however unholy) that keep inquiry alive long after its birth, facilitating a dialogue that will ideally continue beyond the first release. -Anna Scime and Liz Flyntz
Owen Brightman, Something to be Shared Between Two People, Something to be Shared by Two, digital print, 2009

Contents:
Hermonie Only, TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS...................................................................................... 1 Owen Brightman, Something to be Shared Between Two People, Something to be Shared by Two........................... 2 Lou Laurita, Waterfall 18................................................................................................................................................. 5 Lauren Scime, Spread/Over........................................................................................................................................... 6 David Knowles, Interview with Lucky Dragons ................................................................................................ 7-13 Rocky McCorkle, You and Me on a Sunny Day.......................................................................................................... 14-17 Vita Mae Hewitt, Abstain.......................................................................................................................................... 18-19 Gary Nickard, Philosophy in the Dungeon: The Erotic Economy of Thanatos ....................................................... 20-28 Brian Randolph, flora................................................................................................................................................... 29 Julia Dzwonkoski & Kye Potter, Untitled 1 & 2...................................................................................................... 30-31 Isaac Johnson, Caronteras Last Letter......................................................................................................................... 32&34 Jodie Cavinder, Untitled ............................................................................................................................................... 33 Shelby A. Baron, Complicated Machine ......................................................................................................................... 35 Shelby A. Baron, Peebag & Animal Mourn.................................................................................................................. 36-37 Loss Pequeo Glazier, Campanilla .............................................................................................................................. 38-43 Elizabeth Cayne, Group Portrait(s) (In & Out)........................................................................................................ 44-45 Liz Rywelski, MONEY ME............................................................................................................................................ 46-47 Lou Laurita, Gimme....................................................................................................................................................... 48 Sandy Baldwin, The Subject is Bound, the Subject Shakes Hands............................................................................ 49-52 Brad Troemel, Horse Coats, NBA Fonts........................................................................................................................ 53 Wendy Osher, Continental Drift............................................................................................................................... 54&55 Andy Cook, Images of the Recession ............................................................................................................................ 56-58 Michael Oman-Reagan, The Communication Project ................................................................................................. 59 Janine Slaker, Anatomy of a Performance .................................................................................................................. 60&61 Hermonie Only, Dramatist: Pentad Series..................................................................................................................... 62 A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, Cultivated Play: Farmville .................................................................................................. 63-67 Robby Rackleff, Plants 1, 2 &3........................................................................................................................................ 68 Contributors (Print Journal) ........................................................................................................................................ 69-72 Contributors (DVD) ..................................................................................................................................................... 73-75 Printing notes, acknowledgements................................................................................................................................ 77 DVD insert........................................................................................................................................................................ 78

Lou Laurita, Waterfall 18, gouache on 60x40 paper, 2008

Lauren Scime, Spread/Over, oil on 12x12 panel, 2006 6

David Knowles

Interview with Lucky Dragons

Sarah Rara and Luke Fishbeck have been traveling the world for years now making drawings, music, performances, and other less immediately classifiable products under the name Lucky Dragons. They have collectively released over a dozen records, many of which are available for free download on their website. In 2009 they played over 100 shows on 4 continents. For their live performances Lucky Dragons employ a dizzying combination of instruments: hand drums, thumb pianos, synthesizers, shakers, computers, and gongs, to produce a sound that skillfully deconstructs the distinction between electronic and acoustic music. Most instruments are played by audience members whose participation is further engaged by a homemade synthesizer, played by many people at once, which generates sound when one person touches the skin of another. Participation in a Lucky Dragons performance includes not only the cerebral experience of togetherness, but also actual physical acts of reaching and touching. Their performances are a series of beautiful confrontations with the sometimes awkward and uncomfortable role that technology (with its ability to facilitate but also inhibit togetherness) plays in the formation of a commons - an awkwardness that is often downplayed in the celebratory rhetoric of techno-futurism. I spoke with Sarah and Luke about the place and space of their performances on the occasion of their participation in the 2009 Transmediale Festival in Berlin. DK: I couldnt help noticing that you are both very tall. Did that in any way attract you to working with each other? LF: I thought you were going to ask if it was on purpose. (laughs) SR: Im not intentionally tall, but I definitely spotted Luke on the street and recognized a kindred spirit, so maybe that has something to do with it. But maybe its just luck. DK: How did you start working together? SR: Well, we met in Providence and were part of the same art and music community and we were both in school at the time and we just started collaborating. LF: We were actually talking about this the last time we were in Berlin. We were doing drawings for a book and we had to do a drawing together, and I was drawing my style and Sarah was drawing her style and we couldnt get it to work out and we had all these arguments about the layout SR: We got into a big fight, and that was the birth of collaborative art for us though because LF: After that we were like, we need to create some entity thats outside of either of ourselves SR: - separate from us as individuals LF: That will be the entity that makes this thing. Because if its Luke and Sarah making these things theres no end to the arguments we could have about it. SR: But if its a band identity, Lucky Dragons, or we call the drawings Sumi Ink Club, which now includes other people, its OK because theres a certain kind of ethos to collaboration when its separate from yourself and your own style. DK: So the band identity is a way to mediate conflicts. LF: I think it even has to do with really mundane things like format and logistics. In order to not have a personal investment in things that are so basic, then you can really invest yourself in the details of collaborating. DK: But you were collaborating on music together before you worked on drawings together? SR: I think they kind of grew simultaneously LF: But remember when we were making that tape as The Glaciers though? SR: Yeah, we tried another band without computers for a
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while. It was called Glaciers. SR: I guess for me, taking down my own ego is a major project. So all these different activities are designed to efface my own ego and disperse myself, and thats always hard. The challenge of life is getting along with other people and doing something together, so I guess through drawing and music we try to figure that out and negotiate how to do that. DK: Would you consider yourself first and foremost a band? SR: No, because I always want to hold on to the possibility of having multiple identities. I wouldnt privilege one over the other. So I wouldnt say my presence is going to be in a band primarily or as an individual primarily or that the drawing group will take precedence over the music or vice versa. I kind of always wanted to have the choice of these identities and play them like cards, or use which ever one is beneficial at the time. What do you think? LF: It really depends who you are talking to. SR: Or what context were appearing in. For instance, in this festival were presented as members of a cohesive group within this theme, and thats someone elses work too, and thats a collaboration with themnaming what it is that we do. And that changes all the time. DK: Im asking because I was thinking the other day about how its acceptable and common now to be an artist and in a band. Beginning in the 60s even, many different media and strategies began to be incorporated into what was properly understood as art, as visual arts. So like performance art would still be considered visual art, but I feel like you rarely see people who consider themselves musicians expanding their work in the same way. SR: I do have friends who, to my mind, they make performance art, but they self identify as composers. LF: Like David? SR: Like Goodiepal.

LF: Goodiepal, yeah. SR: Hes an artist, but he calls himself a composer and wants to be strictly a musician and not to bring art elements into the music. LF: I feel like its unfortunate when people are so steadfast about the name for what they do. DK: I feel as if people tend to fall back on artist because thats SR: - more open. DK: - more open, but also more respectable than if you were to say: Im a musician but I do drawing also. SR: I thought about this term entertainer. LF: Ive always been so afraid of that one. DK: Its a slippery one because it includes theater, it includes television, clowns, magicians, there are so many kinds of entertainer, and that term is even more open than artist. LF: Well I think its open but its attached to something so vague as entertainment. I dont know what entertainment means. SR: And it has this connotation LF: But everybody thinks entertainment is good. Its a very unpretentious thing to call it as well. I think sometimes calling yourself an artist is not very open and limits you in a lot of ways. I have friends who are video artists, and weve never seen their videos. And unless we can get to the gallery show in London or New York or wherever, then we wont see the video ever because its an edition of like five copies. DK: And its not on YouTube. LF: (Laughs) Right. Definitely not on YouTube. There are people I know who have made hundreds of videos and

theres not a single thing about them on YouTube. Do they even exist? SR: The means of distribution and sale of art are much more closed, even though maybe mentally its more of an open space, the way of getting it to people... theres fewer means than music, which can arrive in so many different forms. LF: I cant imagine living like that. DK: Then it really becomes a question of your identity as being defined by the economy that you are working in or the way that your project is circulated. LF: Thats why were going with entertainer. SR: For the moment DK: I think that for me, even in your work with Sumi Ink Club or these other projects, youre still using the framework of the band... SR: Its very band-like. DK: I heard your music before I knew about any of the other projects you do, and I think that for me its very easy to consider you as primarily a band, but a band that is not strictly musical, but is also visual or is also working in other channels. But you use the framework of a band to produce things. LF: My parents think that were conceptual artists, which I think is a really funny thing for parents to say. DK: Thats really cute actually. SR: Its very sweet. I think its because we dont make objects all the time. LF: The first question everybody always asks when youre in a band is: what instrument do you play? And were like, ...uh

SR: Im working backwards. Because I dont play an instrument, Im just using the pretext of being a musician to get all these people together, and then I play anything. LF: We dont play instruments. We play shows. SR: But Im working backwards, so after being in a band for four years I finally picked up an instrument, which is the drums. So Ive been learning the drums for the past year and becoming a drummer just so when people ask me I can introduce myself as the drummer. But then when Im on stage it will still be totally confusing. DK: So I guess if you consider yourself playing primarily shows rather than instruments, then theres this question of the place that you play. How does the particular place that you play factor into how the art works? SR: The number of people can determine the structure the show will have, and the size and shape of the room LF: I think a lot of issues about the place and the way the show is put together and the access people have to it SR: If its all ages or not. If its for children or for old people. Although we pretty much present the same show to everyone. LF: And well talso pretty much play any show people ask us to. DK: And any place, too? SR: Yeah. Its difficult to say that in a certain situation we act one way and that in another we change, but its more of a surprise. Well present a similar show but it will go in a totally different direction depending on the age and the room and the vibe and the energy around it, which is cool to see, because a different community comes forward - maybe one that didnt exist before the show can happen, which is the best situation. LF: I was talking to my friend about Indie 103, I dont know if theres an equivalent station in Portland, but its like the

indie Clear Channel station. We were talking about how it went out of business in L.A. and about how Clear Channel in general is not doing very well. And my brother used to do pirate radio stuff, and low powered FM stuff. And theres been this thing about Clear Channel being the biggest enemy and they own billboards, radio stations, television stations, newspapers, and concert venues, and my friend Randy from No Age was like, Have you ever played in a Clear Channel venue? SR: Have we? LF: And there was a point when I would have made absolutely sure that we werent playing in a Clear Channel venue, just because it was part of this media hegemony or whatever that was completely ruining any attempt for people to do things on a sustainable level where people were fairly treated and things were transparent, or anything. But the fact of the matter is SR: But my strategy is that if you play a club that is within a monopoly and then the next night you play a DIY venue LF: Or the same night even SR: Then you are busting apart the monopoly because you are saying You can continue to exist alongside other things. whereas saying You have to shut down. is just another way of shutting down. Because people need culture. LF: Theres one way thats trying to fight things head on and theres another way thats trying to do things in parallel. SR: When you bring something totally punk and totally small to a mainstream venue, you open things for the audience. LF: But I think as long as youre doing that and then youre also playing another show afterwards in a house SR: - thats important. DK: I think theres a certain type of band or entertainer who

is able to do those kinds of things. LF: I think theres definitely a tradition for it. Like the idea of jazz bands having the early and the late set. Who are the people who come to the early set and who are the people that come to the late set? And people that had to work until the late set, its good that theres a show for them too, but we try to play as many shows as we can in one night. DK: Im an old architecture student and also an old media studies student and I love going to see bands. This question Ive been working on is about the relationship between a band and the space that they play, and not just how the places groups play defines their image but also the way in which a band playing in a particular place can actually change the architectural feel of that space or can alter the context in some way. Youre a band or youre entertainers, that play in big museums like the Whitney Museum, but you also play in houses or in little rooms LF: - and on top of mountains SR: - on a mountain, on an island, we had a kayak too. We play everywhere. DK: So you play shows all over the place. SR: The context changes the interpretation of the show. LF: Are you thinking about buildings in a physical sense, or buildings in a cultural sense? SR: Like the function? DK: Like the culture and function of a space. Unless youve got some serious bass going theres no way that you can bust down a wall physically, but Im talking about the way people use buildings, like the experience of seeing you play in a museum as being different from the experience of seeing you play in a house. Do you think so? LF: For the one part this is really testing our intentions of stepping outside the performance and seeing it from a

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different perspective. We cant really answer this question because were so inside of the performance. SR: The audience would really be able to answer this question of whether seeing us in a museum is different. LF: I mean its difficult because we try to flip-flop and go on the outside of things and look in. I mean when we played in the Whitney Museum I went outside and waited in line with people while the show was going on just to see what it was like to see the show going on while you were waiting in line to get in, but its still me being very much a tourist in this other perspective. SR: Ive had an idea recently that you should treat your heroes like your friends and your friends like your heroes. Like you should lower one and raise the other to have this kind of sense of equality among people of all different walks of life, and Ive been thinking this about venues too. So when a person I meet on the street says congratulations I say, oh its no big deal. Then when we play a house show I want to tell everyone about it and brag about it. Its like the opposite impulse. Playing down the prestige and playing up the more humble things that we do or the weirder things. So Im always working against the context. I dont knowits a very difficult question. DK: I dont know the answer to it. SR: Its very deep. It runs through everything, but Im always trying to give everyone the same experience. When Ive had the best shows ever and felt a total connection with other human beings and seen them walking out of the club having a discussion with each other or with a stranger - I want to give that to everyone. So, when we are in a museum I want to give that to them and when Im in a house show I want to give the audience the same thing. And I also want to test the limits of playing the same show in different places and whether people can handle it in different places in different buildings with different functions. Maybe thats why our shows are almost like a discussion group, because were bringing them to buildings where discussion doesnt happen very often. So maybe the buildings with functions I really admire are like libraries or schools and theres something

about what we do in a rock club that is like that kind of building. Or even a cafeteria or something. LF: Theres also the question of the difference between doing something temporarily to change a place and doing something that will change it after weve left. I dunno. I like to think that were working towards some change that stays on DK: That has duration. Like it will always be the place where there was a Lucky Dragons show? LF: No but it will be a place where the next time a band plays there people will have a different attitude about it or maybe people think of other ways to use the space. I really like being part of a space where you have an ongoing contribution to the culture of the space, and the way that its used. Like a place like the Smell in Los Angeles is a place that weve played over and over again and seen the same people and helped contribute to the development of the culture of the space and when we go play a show there it has a definite feeling to it thats very unique. It feels sort of like a book club. People are seated very calmly. Its very strange because other bands, when they play there, its not like that, but thats something you can see continue to change. SR: And being very literal about changing the architecture of music spaces, Id really like to see lower stages and an audience closer to the band. I think we kind of test the boundaries of what is allowed on and off the stage, because technically its a bad idea to have a microphone in front of a p.a. but thats what we need to do. DK: Have you guys ever played any stadium shows before, anything huge? Like big outdoor festivals? SR: Nowell LF: We played in the square of an old roman town SR: - in Italy LF: We played in a city hall.

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SR: We played a show with 3,000 how many was it? LF: We played at the Hirschorn Museum, which is sort of like a stadium SR: With thousands of people which kind of pushed the limits of how many people the performance could accommodate. DK: Thats what I was thinking, because with City Halls and town squares its one thing because they are public places with people passing through, but then if you are in a contained space its an enormous thing. SR: Yeah weve never dealt with JumboTron or distant viewers, but I think my way of approaching that would be to ideally have multiple stations where the interactive things are going on, without us almost as performers, and were off somewhere else or traveling in between. But weve never done that. DK: How would you feel about somebody recreating your instrument and doing their own Lucky Dragons show? SR: I tell people how to do it all the time. LF: I wish it were easier for people to do it. DK: Im sure its totally hard. LF: Its not super-hard, I just need to sit down and do it. SR: We really believe in sharing but LF: -theres just so much about it thats so idiosyncratic SR: And theres so much about it that doesnt really work, like technically or electrically LF: Like we have a lot of it thats continually patched SR: - we repair it all the time LF: - and thats just like part of our style, is to patch it up.

SR: Its like tuning the guitar, but its really hard to tell someone how to tune an instrument for which theres no accepted scale. LF: Thats a good way of putting it. But soon, youll just be able to download the zip, open it up, have your own band DK: This idea of opensourcing or outsourcing seem to be very important components of your approach. Im imagining hoards of people having Lucky Dragons parties at their house. SR: If everyone had a Make a Baby synthesizer in their house that would be DK: Wed be living in the future. SR: - that would be beautiful. LF: We saw that a lot of things were possible. Like the sounds that it makes are not all of the sounds it can make, and it would be totally unfortunate to distribute it as a version where those were the only sounds it can make. Theres a lot of open possibilities for it that we havent fully explored and Id like to be able to distribute it in a way where those possibilities are still totally open. SR: Weve been working on this radio with a chip in it (an autotuner), and our goal for that project was to have something easy for people to build themselves, but for Lucky Dragons it hasnt been focused on that. Its been more on presence and being there and having an event or a moment or a gathering. Maybe distributing technology can do that on its own without us, but we havent done that yet. DK: I want to ask you one more thing. The park in L.A. behind your house SR: Elysian Park DK: Can you explain exactly what youre doing there or

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the museum plan you have set up or are planning for that? LF: It started when we were just walking around the park, and we found this old nature interpretation trail from 20 years ago, and there are all these plaques that say: root, rock, they just tell you what the things are. Its totally overgrown and disused and everythings all tagged up. And then there are also people who do things like make sculptures of birds and leave them in the trees, and there are all these strange ways that people use the park. The park is super fractured and different people use different sections but they dont really have any interchange. So we were thinking we should make a museum in the park and have it be no budget nothing just super simple. Cause theres also no park rangers for the park. Even though its as big as Central Park theres nobody looking after it reallyso you can basically do whatever you want in this park and its right by our house. Initially we thought we should take over the nature interpretation trail and make it into a museum space where we install things and have performances and things like that, but then the task of programming this seemed to run into the problems you would expect. We would get noise violations or people might get suspicious about what were doing or things might get damaged or destroyed, which are all things that we could accept. But then we thought that we could just redefine the park as a museum and just keep doing things under the auspices of this museum - anything thats related to the park. SR: It also gets back to this band identity because its also a way of curating shows where were not the sole organizers or planners, because museums have a board and a panel of experts and they have a museum identity. So we got this board of experts in all different fields in Los Angeles, who pick artists and come up with ideas. And people are really into plants and are going to help artists with the landscape. But its also a continuation of a tradition that I really like, which is outdoor public art or ephemeral art from the west coast and California. Work that is in the landscape, that can be walked around. So I guess I wanted to continue that and bring contemporary artists in, doing good things. And I also wanted to bring people to the park because its as big as Central Park and its this beautiful canyon

LF: But its a very complicated mixed-use space. SR: Its very complicated. Different communities use the park for different things LF: ...and there are so many secret parts to it that nobody knows about. SR: There are so many parts that I find, and then cant find again. LF: There are no maps of it. Theres no map of the trails. It doesnt exist anywhere. DK: Is it big enough that you can go into it and get lost and not find your way out? LF: Every time we go into it we do. SR: Its another way of facilitating other peoples ideas or dreams and helping those to happen, because so many people tell me these ideas they have, and now that theres this museum identity it helps that to happen. Even though its the artist working on their own installing it and theres no budget and it could be destroyed by nature or vandalized. Just the presence of this idea of a museum opens the possibility for people to do whatever they want to do. They dont even need an invitation, they can just come do it. And well help them. LF: Again, its something where we need to be able to hand over control of a lot and have other people get involved in it and excited about it. You know, whenever you have these ideas of collaborative projects it sounds really good until you actually try to get people to use it. Thats something that has to take its own natural momentum for people to have some ownership of it. SR: And if no ones interested, the project dies and you just move on to another project. It has to sustain itself and be self-selecting. It cant be something that I can force on people.

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Rocky McCorkle,You and Me on a Sunny Day (stills 1, 2, 4 & 5), 8x10 large format film print, 2007-2010

You and Me on a Sunny Day, is an intimate narrative told through as a series of sequential photo-montages which make up the memories of an elderly woman. She constructs these memories from a collective source - sewing together cinema, pop culture, and the uncertain history of a couple to whom she appears to be the other half. Through color, composition and careful fabrication (with up to 2 dozen 8x10 color negative prints comprising each composit) - the stills become the hypnotic notes of her silent discourse.

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Vita Mae Hewitt, Abstain, 21x 29 35mm film print, 2006

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Vita Mae Hewitt, Abstain, 29x21 35mm film print, 2006

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Philosophy in the Dungeon: The Erotic Economy of Thanatos

Gary Nickard
Editors Note: The following text is a transcription of a presentation given in Tim Deans Queer Theory Seminar (ENG 653 Critical Theory) at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the Fall Semester of 2004. We have cited references for your reading pleasure.

In Leo Bersanis characteristically confrontational essay entitled, Is the Rectum a Grave? he performs skeptical operations on the intersection of sex and politics. Bersani deprecates as pastoral any gay-affirmative polemics based on the rhetoric of sexual liberation and pluralism that received its most prestigious intellectual justification from Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Such redemptive calls are, in Bersanis view, dangerously tame. The argument for diversity has the strategic advantage of making gays seem like passionate defenders of one of the primary values of mainstream liberal culture, but to make that argument is to be disingenuous about the Real nature of sexuality (Lacanian overtones intended). Bersani is impatient with any assumption that sex in general has anything to do with community or love (Bersani, Grave? 215), or that the desires or habits of gay men are likely to be especially infused with political or protopolitical subversions of a status quo. A politically redemptive pluralism has, in his view, nothing to do with the Real force of sex that he stubbornly locates in a selfshattering solipsistic jouissance (Bersani, Grave? 222). Accordingly, Bersani celebrates the inestimable value of sex as anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving (Bersani, Grave? 215). Bersanis treatment of sexual pluralism is, as in Foucaults treatment of the repressive hypothesis, the exposure of a culturewide lie: In short, to put the matter polemically and even rather brutally, we have been telling a few lies (Bersani, Grave? 206). In other words, given the irreducible opacity of its relation to the unconscious, sexuality cannot be recuperated for redemptive projects. Bersani begins his essay with the announcement: There is a big secret about sex: most people dont like it (Bersani, Grave? 197). The secret he has to reveal about sex is how repressed and repressive are many peoples relations to the smoldering volcanoes (Bersani, Grave? 198) of sexual desire and its dangerous truth as a mode of ascesis (Bersani, Grave? 222). The reason, most people dont like it, I would posit, is that sexuality is the realm of the death drive and its aim is jouissance. Accordingly, to remain palatable, sex must be cloaked in the disingenuous apparel of joy, sweetness and light in order to mask its fearsome Real. Bersani, also makes note of the process by always being politicized, the ways in which having sex politicizes are highly problematical (Bersani, Grave? 206). Nowhere is the politicizing of sex and the sexualizing of politics more problematic than the fetishization of Fascism by elements of the S/M subculture. By raising this specter, it seems that Bersani seeks to dramatize the deep epistemological fractures that necessarily gape beneath sex as an uncanny experience of loss, mourning, and dread. Bersanis essay title Is the Rectum a Grave? undoubtedly references Freuds 1919 essay on The Uncanny and its
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examination of the forms and anxiety surrounding sexuality:

It often happens that neurotic men declare that they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning whenever a man dreams of a place or country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: this place is familiar to me, Ive been here before, we may interpret the place as being his mothers genitals or her body (Freud, The Uncanny, 245).

Freuds interpretations habitually center upon sexual neurosis (or psychosis) where sex, commonly assumed to be the source of life, is revealed instead through inversion as the harbinger of death. Home is the womb, and the womb is where we were before the beginning of our lives as individuals. Associated with the death of the self, this Heimlich/ Un-Heimlich doubling of ambivalent meanings, hovers as an aura around the female genitalia, and returns us, in fantasy, to a former safe, protected, but simultaneously deathly and frightening prenatal state. Freuds theories suggested that children who seek information about their own origin the question where do babies come from? are also forced to confront a potentially frightening fact the idea that they once did not exist and only came into existence in the powerful great dark unknown of their mothers bodies. The womb, the earliest home of all, may then be logically inverted into a place of death and existential terror a grave that predates our existence. A further logical inversion of the Vagina into the Rectum, a convergent locus of male homosexual desire and the object of the anal partial drive, seems to clearly align Bersanis analysis with Freuds. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud describes the struggle between what calls the pleasure principle (Eros) and the death drive (Thanatos) as accounting for all of human behavior. According to Freud, the pleasure principle is a tendency toward cohesion and unity - the death drive operates in the opposite direction and undoes connections and destroys. Neither form is found in a pure state, but are always mixed together in proportional arrangements. When the death drive becomes dominant in any social arrangement it becomes an inexorable force that endlessly generates a chaotic struggle for dominance. Freud observed:
The element of truth behind all this, which people are so ready to disavow, is that men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him, Homo homini lupus (Freud, Civilization and
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its Discontents, 68&69).

In Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle we have a psycho-sexual outline for the nature of the sadistic impulse:
But how can the sadistic instinct, whose aim is to injure the object, be derived from Eros, the preserver of life? Is it not plausible to suppose that this sadism is in fact a death instinct which, under the influence of the narcissistic libido, has been forced away from the ego and has consequently only emerged in relation to the object? It now enters the service of the sexual function. During the oral stage of organization of the libido, the act of obtaining erotic mastery over an object coincides with that objects destruction; later, the sadistic instinct separates off, and finally, at the stage of genital primacy, it takes on, for the purposes of reproduction, the function of overpowering the sexual object to the extent necessary for carrying out the sexual act (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 65).

It was in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that Freud stated, despite all the rosy illusions to the contrary; the goal of life is death (Freud, Beyond, 65). This echoes how Hegel ascribes being to non-being, to beings relation to nothingness. For Hegel, one apprehends identity as emptiness or nothingness, which serves as the basis for longing and loss. To be is always to lack. To be, therefore, is to desire. In desiring, in aggression and in risk-taking, one brings to life a fleeting moment, a momento moria. The death drive, then, lies at the root of all psychic reality. In his essay Why War? Freud maintained:
This [the death drive] would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found there is no use in trying to get rid of mens aggressive inclinations (Freud, Complete Works, 22:211).

How does the Freudian death drive function? As a source of negativity and destructiveness, it performs its dark task in two ways. It can be turned inwards as aggression directed towards the Self in masochistic self-destruction, or it can be directed outward as aggression directed towards an Other as a sadistic urge. These two paths of cathexis form a zero sum system, so any unused portions of the death drive must be externalized in order to protect the organism from its own destructiveness. Freud states: The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one (ibid 22:211). Directing aggression outwards is essential to the survival of the organism, otherwise this same aggression would be directed against the organism as selfdestruction. So it is in the interest of each organism to behave in a sadistic way, and to try to rid itself of as much aggression as pos22

sible. In this Freud seems to be saying that aggression, as a given and inherent psychic tendency, must be expressed as sadism. This grim assertion is further underscored by Laplanche and Pontalis:
Indeed there is no kind of behavior that may not have an aggressive function Psychoanalysis had gradually come to give great importance to aggressiveness, showing it to be at work in the early stage of the subjects development and bringing out the complicated ebb and flow of its fusion with and diffusion from, sexuality. The culmination of this increasing stress on aggressiveness is the attempt to find a single and basic instinctual underpinning for it in the idea of the death instinct (Laplanche & Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 17).

The abbreviation S/M can refer to both sadist/masochist and slave/master while the slash can be seen to indicate that for some that the two roles are in general not exclusive, but reversible. The term sadomasochism itself was coined by Richard von Krafft- Ebing in his Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia Sexualis (1890). It is derived from the names of its most infamous practitioners, the Marquis D.A.F. de Sade (1740-1814) and Baron Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1895). Perhaps because most sexual relations throughout Western history have been unequal and exploitative, sadomasochism remained a deeply embedded, but covert, element of hetero-normative sexuality that only coalesced into a distinctive erotic practice in the late-eighteenth century when equality and democracy coalesced into political ideals. But unlike homosexuality, sadomasochism did not produce a visible subculture until after the Second World War. When it finally did emerge from underground, it was characterized by clinical psychiatry, as well as by the media, as a very serious and highly dangerous perversion that could ultimately lead to lust murder. The association of leather with S/M seems to be a 20th century development because originally Sacher-Masochs favorite fetish was fur and Sade preferred satin for both boys and girls alike. But ever since the 1950s when a gay leather scene developed, leather as a fetish has become an important element of S/M. Other fetishes such as: high heels and stockings, Nazi uniforms and whips, slave collars and chains or even branding and mutilation, all express calculated relations of inequality and link S/M to numerous other forms of polymorphous perversity. Contemporary advocates have come up with a series of defensive claims pleading that S/M should be considered a consensual game that has little to do with actual cruelty or violence. Susan Farr, for example, described S/M as pure theatre; a drama [in which] two principals . . . act at being master and slave, play at being fearsome and fearful (Farr, Coming to Power, 185). She cites the clues to the drama in the interchangeability of the roles and the repetitive, scripted dialogue. Even though, she acknowledges, much of the scene may be pure improvisation, it is still theater. This dialectic between the scriptural and the spontaneous is a fundamental element of S/M. On the one hand, there is the pretense that the scene will be rigidly controlled, with a decided emphasis on the bottoms mastery of the limits. On the other hand, the eroticism of S/M depends on the possibility that limits might be pushed beyond

23

the breaking point and that the scene could actually cross over into the real. When limits are transgressed, the masochist will indicate with a code word that the game has to be interrupted or ended. This description of S/M as a parody is an apology that may well be functional as a disclaimer against criticism that S/M is harmful and abusive, racist, patriarchal and even ultimately homophobic, however, it does not fit the excesses of desire that quickly becomes apparent in S/M. Parody, Bersani states, rather emphatically, is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this. (Bersani, Grave? 14) Instead, S/M is about pushing pleasure to a point that lies decidedly beyond the pleasure principle, a set of desires motivated by the death drive wherein what the S/M enthusiast seeks is nothing less than jouissance. Self-conscious parody is a mere side-show; when the main act comes to town, we all want the real thing, or, more precisely, in Lacanian terms, we all want the Real thing. That is, sexuality is always, I believe, about our desire for the Impossible-Real, not the real of the illusion that passes for reality, but the Real that eludes symbolization. Bersani criticizes apologetic posturing because, according to him, S/M does not undermine, but instead repeats, the social structures of dominance and submission, masculinity and femininity, active and passive roles, penetrating and being penetrated, power and subservience. Bersani even suggests that S/M might not survive an antifascist rethinking of power structures. Notwithstanding this firm critique, Bersani does point to Freuds concept of selfshattering as it would apply to masochism thus enabling it to open non-identitarian politics. Gilles Deleuze, in his introduction to Venus in Furs by Sacher-Masoch, valorized male masochists as exemplary outlaws who have given up their prerogatives and annihilated the figure of the father. According to Deleuze, sadist and masochist are never complementary, but are instead very distinct figures. If the masochist indeed sets the rules of the game of desire, what he needs is not a sadist but the simulacrum of a sadist. Similarly, Georges Bataille, in writings like his The Story of the Eye, focused not upon rules for desire, but upon desirable transgressions, pointing the way to the mise en abyme of desire that Sade had revealed earlier. Masochism is a way to experience sexual desire in its extremes of torture and filth, but while Sade himself has been presented most often as a sadistic torturer, in reality his foremost interests were actually masochistic he desired to be fucked and whipped. Ultimately, the loss of self repeatedly enacted throughout Sades endless literary scenes of rape and torture can be analyzed politically as a corporeal revolution against the suffocating dictates of the Catholicism that served as the political foundation of the Ancien Regime. A century before Nietzsche, Sade went far beyond good and evil by delving into abysmal pleasures. These were no longer the forbidden and unmentionable vices of Christianity but were lustful transgressions that could be stimulated by both his stories and by his practical philosophy. Passion offered Sade in the eighteenth century a way beyond the restraints and denials of his time. He desired not so much an erasure of the self but rather an erasure of the Ancien Regime a revolution staged in order to create both new political configurations and new sexual pleasures. His utopia (or perhaps dystopia is a better word) unfolded in castles, boudoirs and bordellos that were devoted to scenes of forced surrender to total sexual abjection. Sades work offers a persuasive alternative for a contemporary culture that remains constrained by limits set on sex by ideas of chastity, love and hetero-normativity. Sadian philosophy goes beyond concepts of identity and community, volition and consensus, private and public, male and female, etc. by attacking such dichotomies because they
24

lock sexuality into closets of timid certainties, paralyzed preferences and stagnant practices. Sadism and masochism both have different forms that endlessly separate, mutate and intermingle. They have different backgrounds and perspectives and need specific explanations of how they work within certain social and historical contexts. They have come to represent polymorphous desires, and perverse subcultures that seem to be thriving and multiplying. As a result, I maintain that the question will eventually become one not so much of whether or not S/M can withstand an antifascist critique, but instead will be one of what desires desiring bodies might lust after. For example, in the third chapter of Homos, entitled The Gay Daddy, Bersani prefaces his views on queer S/M by attributing the intolerance of gayness to the political anxiety about the ways in which gays play with revolutionary and subversive social arrangements (Bersani, Homos, 78). S/M is an example of just such a revolutionary social arrangement. He quotes Michel Foucault who wrote about S/M as a creative enterprise engaged with the desexualization of pleasure, in the sense that pleasure was not limited to genital stimulation in these practices (Bersani, Homos, 7980). Bersani acknowledges Pat Califas view (Bersani, Homos, 84-85) concerning the parodic and subversive nature of S/M practices and claims that the reversibility of roles in S/M questions assumptions about power that naturally inhere in one sex or race. However, Bersani adds that this presupposes an acceptance of those power structures and rather than parody the structures: Everyone gets a chance to put his or her boot in someone elses face but why not question the value of putting on boots for that purpose in the first place? (Bersani, Homos, 86). For instance, he suggests that many gay men have responded to stereotypical images of effeminate gay men by adopting leather and thus appropriating masculinity as a challenge to homophobic and hetero-normative assumptions (Bersani, Homos, 85-86). Bersani works from Foucaults premise that the pleasure of S/M is derived from the deployment of depoliticized master/slave relations that aestheticize the model of dominance and submission so that it can become a source of pleasure (Bersani, Homos, 88- 89). He also concludes that S/M confirms the eroticism of Hegels master/slave configuration:
It is a kind of X-ray of powers body, a laboratory testing of the erotic potential in the most oppressive social structures. S/M fortifies those structures by suggesting that they have an appeal independent of the political ideologies that exploit that appeal, thus further suggesting the intractability of extreme forms of oppression, their probable resurgence even if the political conditions that nourish them were to be eliminated [and] S/M profoundly - and in spite of itself - argues for the continuity between political structures of oppression and the bodys erotic economy (Bersani, Homos, 90).

This allows Bersani to follow Foucault and view S/M as a laboratory (perhaps a Scientia Sexualis?) in which the pain that goes along with S/M will allow the ego to self-shatter and to renounce its power through surrender to mastery. By acknowledging the continuity between the political structures of oppression and the bodys erotic economy as
25

well as the inherent eroticism of Hegels master/slave dialectic, it seems as though Bersani reveals a segment of gay male cultures fascist tendencies: And yet, given the apparent self-destructiveness of civilization, it could be argued as Freud obliquely, but powerfully does in Civilization and Its Discontents that, on the scene of history, the promise of suicidal jouissance is what sustains the most aggressive self-affirmations and self-promotions. S/M strips away defenses against the joy of self-dissolution; in more general historical contexts, the countervailing instinct of selfpreservation drives that joy underground, buries it, so to speak, in proud displays of mastery. But as we have seen over and over again, with dispiriting frequency, the oppressed, having freed themselves from their oppressors, as if it were in the position of dominance that the drive toward destruction and ultimately toward self-destruction- could be most effectively pursued. S/M makes explicit the erotic satisfactions sustaining social structures of dominance and submission. Societies defined by those structures both disguise and reroute the satisfactions, but their superficially self-preservative subterfuges can hardly liberate them from the aegis of the death drive. S/M lifts a social repression in laying bare the reality behind subterfuges, but in its open embrace of the structures themselves and its undisguised appetite for the ecstasy they promise, it is fully complicit with a culture of death (Bersani, Homos, 96-97). Thus, does not Bersanis insistence upon the inherent eroticism of dominance and submission serve an articulation of mans inherent inclination to exert power over others as a result of being held in thrall to the death drive? In the fourth and final chapter of Homos, entitled The Gay Outlaw, Bersani provides us with a most striking example of this convergence of Eros and Thanatos in his analysis of Jean Genets idea that: betrayal is an ethical necessity and that betrayal gives homosexuality its moral value (Bersani, Homos, 151). Genets novel Funeral Rites was inspired by the death of one of his lovers, Jean Decarnin, a twenty year old member of the resistance who was killed during the liberation of Paris in 1944 by the bullet of a charming young collaborator (Bersani, Homos, 155):
The avowed aim of Funeral Rites is to tell the glory of Jean Decarnin, but Genet confided at the beginning, that the work may have some unforeseeable secondary aims. Indeed, a curious aim rapidly takes over: that of praising the murderous collaborator (Genet names him Riton) and, more generally, the Nazis who were Jeans (and Frances) enemy. In other words Genet mourns Jean through an act of treachery. I have the soul of Riton. It is natural for the conspiracy, the ultra-mad banditry of Hitlers adventure, to arouse hatred in descent people but deep admiration and sympathy in me (Bersani, Homos, 156).

As Bersani posts, for Genet: Treachery has a special function in this defiant rejection of the codes of mourning (Bersani, Homos, 156). What Genet does is to prove his grief to himself by embracing pain, by savoring the agony of his betrayal both as undisputable proof of his love and as a formula for self-knowledge: I would like to be an outand-out bastard and kill those I love handsome adolescents so that I may know by my greatest pain my deepest love for them (Bersani, Homos, 157). Much more interesting, says Bersani, is how Genet inscribes betrayal within homosexual love itself, in his fantasy (ibid 157) of himself as Hitler rimming a young Frenchman (Jeans brother). In psychoanalytic terms, the fury of anality (Bersani, Homos, 158), as witnessed by Freuds analysis of The Rat Man, reinforces the murderous impulses of orality (as in the Rat Mans fear of the rat devouring him from inside his own
26

rectum): thus Jean himself is fantasized as responding to Genets oral cannibalism with a rectal cannibalism that devours Genet (Bersani, Homos, 158). Bersani cites Sandor Ferenczis theory that in intercourse with a woman, a man seeks unconsciously to return to the security of existence within the womb (Bersani, Homos, 159). Thus rimming replays the origins of life as an original death (Bersani, Homos, 159) and: This death is relived both as fierce aggression and, in a parodistic reprise of the ecstatically sated infant slumbering at its mothers breast, as a lovely death within the cool bower of Jeans rectum, which I crawled to and entered with my entire body, to sleep on the moss there, in the shade, to die there (Bersani, Homos, 159). Thus Genets relentless flouting of any and all norms is a demand that others find him hateful and unworthy of human society [that] stands in sharp contrast to the tame demand for recognition on the part of our own gay community (Bersani, Homos, 161). Bersani applauds this flouting by stating: there is something salubriously perverse, especially today, in his refusal to argue for any moral value whatsoever in homosexuality and he is willfully offering transgressive spectacles to others, making himself into a gaudy performer of their most lurid views of him (Bersani, Homos, 161). If there is an ethical hero of historical dimensions in Funeral Rites and we must recognize this as the repellent center of Genets book it is Adolf Hitler. Hitler fantasized, to be sure, sexually mythologized and even ridiculed, but close enough to his monstrous real source that we cannot comfortably say that political sympathies are entirely irrelevant to Genets fantastic scenarios. But it is important to note that neither territorial politics nor any specific genocidal ideology plays a part in Genets fascination with Nazism. Hitler destroyed in order to destroy, he killed in order to kill. Nazism sought nothing other than to erect itself proudly in evil, to set up evil as a system and to raise an entire nation, with oneself at the summit of this nation, to the most austere solitude. The Nazism for which Genet professes in his ceremony of treacherous mourning for Jean Decarnin is a myth of absolute betrayal the betrayal of all human ties, the attempted murder of humanity itself (Bersani, Homos, 167). Bersani is careful to point out: with its casually obscene treatment of Hitler as an old queen, the work could hardly be picked up as an advertisement for Nazism (Bersani, Homos, 167). Thus, Genets celebration of pure destruction seeks to detach evil from its oppositional relation to good through extreme transgression. Through his ethics of betrayal, Genet (following Nietzsche) seeks to move beyond good and evil and embrace the apocalyptic appearance in history of an impulse to erase history (Bersani, Homos, 169) which might be translated politically as a revolutionary refusal to accept any relation at all with existing social structures:
This is Genets ingenious solution to the problem of revolutionary beginnings condemned to repeat old orders: he dies so that repetition itself may become an initiating act. This can be accomplished only if dying is conceived and experienced as jouissance (Bersani, Homos, 179).

In conclusion, I would like to draw a plausible connection between the deployment of transgressive aesthetic spectacles in Genets Funeral Rites and in S/M, with some shared concerns in 1970s Punk. There are multiple histories of 70s Punk, Greil Marcus recounts a Eurocentric and crypto-Marxist redemptive version in Lipstick Traces, Legs McNeils version tells the story of self-immolating American rock-sociopaths (no redemptive pretense here) in his significantly titled Please Kill Me, and most recently Victor Bockris wrote Beat Punks, to make a case for the Beat
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poets (e.g. Allan Ginsberg) serving as a seminal inspiration for 70s Punk. My contention is that there is a fair amount truth in all of these histories, but what they all share in common is a clear vision of Punks Thanatic underpinnings. Also, like in Genets Funeral Rites and in S/M culture, Punk occasionally flirted with fetishized fascism as a privileged sign of transgressive erasure of despised normative culture. The attraction of those symbols for Punk was, of course, the irresistible allure of an antic display of the death drive on its leather sleeve (so to speak). Also, like S/M, leather served as a significant sign of appropriated masculinity deployed to challenge to normative society. And finally, homosexuality was itself fetishized by a fair number of Punks as an aristocrat among outlaw practices that that deliberately flaunted their refusal to conform to normative social structures. In particular, it was William S. Burroughs, revered by Punks as a kind of homosexual saint, the heroin addicted, gun-toting, outlaw prophet of self-shattering jouissance, who pointed the way to kick back against oppression of the normative by becoming a gaudy performer of societys most lurid speculations about him. The directions that Punks took from Burroughs inspiration led some of them (quite literally) directly into the grave.

Bataille, Georges. trans. Joachim Neugroschel. The Story of the Eye. San Francisco: City Light Books. 1987. Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1995. Bersani, Leo. Is the Rectum a Grave? Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. Brockris, Victor. Beat Punks. USA: Da Capo Press. 2000. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism, Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books. 1997. Farr, Susan. The Art of Discipline: Creating Erotic Dramas of Play and Power. Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M. Boston: Alyson. 1981. Freud, Sigmund. trans. James Strachey. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XVIII: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (1920-1922). London: The Hogarth Press. 1922. Freud, Sigmund. trans. Peter Gay. Civilizations and Its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1989. Freud, Sigmund. trans. James Strachey. The Rat-Man. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X: Two Case Histories (Little Hans and the Rat Man) (1909). London: The Hogarth Press. 1909. Freud, Sigmund. trans. Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny. Penguin Classics. New York: 2003. Freud, Sigmund. trans. James Strachey. Why War? The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXII: New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (1932-1936). London: The Hogarth Press. 1936. Foucault, Michel. trans. Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books. 1990. Genet, Jean. trans. Bernard Frechtman. Funeral Rites. New York: Grove Press. 1969. Laplanche, Jean and J.B. Pontalis. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. The Language of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 1974. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1990. McNeil, Legs and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. New York: Penguin Books. 1997. Von Krafft-Ebing, Richard. Freiherr Von auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia Sexualis. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke. 1890. Von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold. Venus in Furs. New York: Zone Books. 1997.
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Brian Randolph, flora, ink on 18x20 paper, 2009

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Julia Dzwonkoski & Kye Potter, Untitled, gouache on 16 x 20 paper, 2008 30

Julia Dzwonkoski & Kye Potter, Untitled, gouache on 16 x 20 paper, 2008 31

Dear Thinking (Makes Your Bod)y

Isaac Johnson

We saw each other across the table ocean, every undulation of arm/skin/slip could soften lips. When he read my words reticular tension sought listless moods and models. Discussing several severed notions, discovered a couple grounding consumptions. Spoken thru sweet caresses ((leaving behind sores

What do you owe me? She, smoking more than tobacco, spokes untiedleaving from the center towards A body, every organ guiding me pressure gauged, meaning symptoms. Once it was established that every erotic posture equaled debt, he kept her toe in his mouth slightly longer, allowing his taste buds to be stretched and pressed (hot iron wet semblance/she could never have guessed what she was thinking) by calloused skin/calloused mousse/signals input. But when you hold me too tight the breath that slowly escapes freezes, hoping you will inhale it, like me Apoptosis necessary to survival Point being death foretells, even sex When recrudescent light falls upon the body positioned as if within a cinematic frameher engaged deal breaking scheme seeps thru the blinds as well She cant make anything out. He tells him it is only a passing demeanor. Worthwhile nonetheless, but passing. An old future. Our body. If this was written with the intent of reciprocity, it always already succeeds. My selfish feelings are shared by him. She promised me a secret every other day, failing to deliver still hides certain truths, certain fallacies, and the reverberating motion of morons. Dancing rigidly, attuned but nonchalantly paying attention to vaginal politics.

Whenever he licks her, me, twice. My tooths skin can feel it pleasure for price/annual economies Your one eye sex scandal, dreaming of an orgasm that involves no/body (the debtless act?) Surviving sincerely (being glared at, as a joke no less),

Bartholomew Mortales Carontera

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Jodie Cavinder, Untitled (detail from a home), plaster on 25x25 section of drywall, 2006 33

(July 23rd, 1995 What have I done? She told me months ago that I had been sleeping for a very long time, but who can be sure? He tells me to sleep on it (in him), and Im close to submitting. ) [everything following written on unknown dates] I am merely a child, no such thing as an adult (Godard). Everyone I know knows everything. Therefore, we only die once. Bartholomew Mortales Carontera was born in Mexico City on October 2, 1968. The scars of that date still permeate his soul. The fact that a baby could even be born (literally in the middle of it all too!) during such a heinous, violent event provides Carontera with a sort of morbid optimism. Writing about the plurality of gender, the automatic debt cycle instigated by looking (and fucking, and sucking, and thinking), Bartholomew meets being head on, attempting to find motion in stasis (impossible possibility, there is always motion in stasis, Mortales legitimizes this) A turning point in Caronteras life came after visiting the grave of [ ] I seem to have forgotten why it is I write. Or perhaps I write precisely because I forget (Barthes) Struggling with what it is, this body of mine, and hers. When she sits in a chair, I too, am sitting in a chair. Yet holding my penis in hands, we try to convince ourselves of sex (the fact of biology). Penetrating deeper, into history. I only uncover narratives. This supposedly started as an autobiography (what he told me to write, just in case), but I dont know who he/she/or I? am. I do, yet. But writing it distances me from him, and she elevates for a moment, above the bed, naked, only to fall gracefully into---I see everything thru the economy of exchange, a circle impossible to close (phenomena?), and when we say we love each other I know we are insidiously negotiating price (for a timeat once (and the same time) we love each other)

NOTEThese are the only surviving pieces/sections of Caronteras diary, found in his (Bartholomew might not like this gender categorization, I apologize if he ever gets hold of this) apartment in Mexico City after he suddenly disappeared two years ago. The letter on the page prior to these clips was his last poem.

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Shelby Baron, Complicated Machine, ink on 16x20 paper, 2009

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Shelby A. Baron, Peebag, ink on 8.5x11 paper, 2009

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Shelby A. Baron, Animal Mourn, ink on 8.5x11 paper, 2009

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_____________________

Campanilla
i.

Loss Pequeo Glazier

_____________________ A heated pool with lazy river, a meditative, or ruminating run-through, ensayo, an essai entering grotto. ii. Lleg la hora, existo, soy de luz y de arena. The hour came, I exist, I am of light and sand. (Neruda, from "Cycle", trans. Glazier) iii. Sly blues blueuets frais, jouet Frey Cancasmasa, marisabidilla, sand arndano and marzipan caonazo, cancn corola cangrena gangrena caneln
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boato Showiness bobalicn bbili

cncamo* ( eyebolt cancamurria

colonia de pinginos pequeos pingino, pjaro bobo pequeo lobo lo, boberia zanzibar cinnabun

garabatea scrawl garabateo garambina gomina gomorresina (retsina gnada (go nada) gndola mi gonococu gozo gonorrea en un pozo

"rook" grajo torre (pieza de ajedrez)

baco | "ss" in | staco | crab

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iv. engorro engorroso (bother) both (er) cagolosinar ( tempt engolfar ( sail

engaoso "up"

Mount Auburn Cemetery climbing the garden skerry

avenidas, flores, mujers rimbombar, rmel o rmmel eye shadow, eyeshades flavored lip balm caado caadulce o

caaduz. caal o caaveral. caamar. caamelar (miel) | avenidas, flores, miel caamiel. caamoncillo. cariego rimbombar, rmel irrigation, irritation rmmel ca ca bomba ftida ca stink bomb que asco! chives cebollino, cebolleta, hojas de cebolleta canes, spears zanzibar "cinnamon" tastes zinnabun like "candela" cranberry rspano arndano ex viruses, worms) grulla (ave)
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queriendo ver algo tpula the"s-s" in "asqueroso" staco, cangrejo de ro crab (manzano silvestre) cowslip prmula coyly esquivamente (coyote) (zorro)

't sorrow tomorrow

to word

v. The baths could accommodate 1,600 bathers at any given time. Piazza de la Rotonda. Winds E at 5 to 10 mph. [More.] Mellifluous. Melody St. Anne. We can't build our happiness on the Anastazi. Unhua, Huambo, Angola. Unhappiness of others. Huy, Unhua Hotels, Angola. Apotheosis. Ringorrongo. Rongorongo Script. Amanuensis. Digital "Digitalis" in "Campanilla" the way game (ludic) is in "school" (ludus), lupine (lupus).
41

damask rose delirio, plants Norse nurserying mantle of free-flowing redolence Death of a Pet Sparrow. Pet Sorrow. Espero. Express. Silenus You can tell the Russians by their hands and how they extend their arms. They are living flowers primose pansy, pussy-hyancith (northeest sweet swaemp s' weeping Higan flowering cherry tree (honey) from Digitalis purpurea or Campanilla flower. To her, miel only means beloved. Computer science, on the other hand, necessarily understands the campanilla in terms of the "numerous causal agencies" that constitute its components and operation. Campanilla. Spanish. English. campanilla. NF. bellflower. N. campanilla. NF. bell. N. campanilla. NF. bell flower. N. campanilla ... #
DESCRIPTION AND IMAGES OF DIGITALIS PURPUREA (Dedalera ... Flower: Blue, 5 petals. Height: 1.2 m. Image of Digitalis purpurea (Dedalera / Campanilla). Image of Digitalis purpurea ...

BAJO EL DOMINIO DE VENUS, LA DEDALERA O DIGITALIS SE LLAMA TAMBIN SOMBRERO DE LA GENTE MENUDA, PORQUE LAS HADAS USAN SUS FLORES PARA ADORNARSE. SE DICE TAMBIN QUE LAS
MANCHAS QUE TIENEN LAS FLORES INDICAN POR DONDE PASARON LOS DUENDES DEL JARDN.

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hammerhead schools, white tips, silver tips, stirrups; silkies, duskies, Galapagos and occasionally trifoliolate tigers. The hadas malas give them to the zorros to wear as gloves so they can enter the henhouse undetected [1]. Socorro island. Los Revillagigedos. Swan sounds. Silky sharks. Very zorro. vi. the honey in your mouth dulcetly swells your oral membranes vagile walls of moist membrane. Not clover, nor orange blossom, nor eucalyptus, but lamparilla, those fragments, semaphores, faint of fragrance, cario engorged, aroma "marry, I didn't know it meant miel" Middle English, marie, from Marie, archaic mudjar red-tiled roof for a Holy Week, if you saw the alfarjes so solemnly music rose to them I could only sleep and above all, windows that don't Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, 1664, except there it phased east crowned by a ceiling composed of una serie de vigas maestras denominadas jcenas open, then as released. That's why honey doesn't refer to any alimentary product but to saturate arterial viscosity, visuality, philosophos artemisian moistened with temerarious arousal, "chispa, candela. But you have yet to even savor miel de campanilla!" "To the point. I am waiting for my corolla both semantically and floraepoetically, yours" [2]

[1] El nombre en ingls, "Foxglove", uno de los ms antiguos para nombrar esta planta (siglo XIV), alimenta la leyenda de que las hadas malas les entregaban las flores a los zorros para que se las pusieran de guantes de modo que no se escucharan sus pisadas cuando entraban al gallinero.
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Elizabeth Cayne, Group Portrait (In & Out), paper print-outs and acrylic on 20x15 matte board, 2007

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45

MONEY ME
Liz Rywelski, 2007 - Present

A Financial Portrait Generator

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Money Me Portraits conceal the complex realities of the struggle for financial survival behind seemingly simple color fields. They capture the annual fiscal experience of a subject by cross-processing a digital portrait and its subjects budget, net-worth, and debt-to-income ratio. They combine a simple algorithm and common data entry-software, which allows for them to be coded and decoded in order to reveal an individuals fiscal lifestyle and/or financial well-being. In order to participate, the subject must commit to sharing their annual debt and income, as well as their image, with the artist.

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Lou Laurita, Gimme, gouache on 40 x 60 paper, 2008

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The Subject is Bound, the Subject Shakes Hands

Sandy Baldwin, charlesbaldwin@mail.wvu.edu
Your email reaches me. Arrives for me. Touches me? I open it and read: I love you. Intimate words, significations of attachment and emotion. The letters are pixels lit on the screen. I respond: Fuck off. Agape, our love, our hate. How does emailed I love you touch me? The letters are ASCII codes transmitted in packets across the Internet. Iloveyou converts to 105 108 111 118 101 121 111 117 and fuckoff is 102 117 99 107 111 102 102. A stream of ASCII converts to hex and to binary and to packets of data and to current differentials along the wires. I write and send. I can write what I want. I can write my desire. I can never stop writing my desire. I can never write anything but never stopping writing my desire. Turned and turning desire in writing on the net, utterly virtual and technical. Writing impossibility, impossibly writing. How is it that I love and touch? As before, my work presumes Alan Sondheims Internet Text,1 which already encounters the subject in process on the net. Sondheim writes of wryting towards the other. I am writing this way, towards touching the other, towards handshaking. My palm, smooth and warm. I offer it as a sign of greeting, humanity, peace, and civility. Take my hand. Hold it, squeeze, feel my skin. Your handshake in response may go beyond the encounter. Firm or weak or dry or caressing or otherwise: shaking hands may be expressive of personal style or cultural identity, beyond the simple act of acknowledging our contact through the handshake, but its that encounter that counts. Its the act of shaking hands. Handshaking occurs on the net as well. When networks interact and exchange information, handshaking is a process of negotiation of identities and rates of exchange. Information flows are set, as are security conditions. The handshaking protocol is set out as part of the nets transport layer security or TLS. The internet is, of course, a network of networks all engaged in sending hello messages and negotiating through handshakes. The internets fundamental end-to-end principle that guarantees information flow across the net relies on successfully negotiated handshaking across network gateways and boundaries. All this remains invisible. We do not see the handshaking, we see the smooth functioning of the network: email transfers, web pages loading, video streaming, all negotiated by protocols across networks. Handshaking transfers the semantics of human contact and interaction to network interactions. The transfer is mysterious, negotiation is always elsewhere. The semantics that grants interactions and contact to the technical protocols is always metaphorical, always deferred. Contact is other. The phenomenology of handshaking is a faint aura barely experienced around every successful communication. Modems squeal as they handshake and we understand. The invisibility of negotiation is significant. In Humberto Maturana and Franciso Varelas autopoietic system theory, communication requires a domain of mutually orientated organisms. Organisms are mutually oriented because their interactions are recurring and dynamic. Where changes in one organism are coupled to changes in the other organism, the mutually oriented organisms are structurally coupled. Maturana and Varela further define such a domain as linguistic, since observers can describe the interactions between structurally coupled organisms in semantic term.2 Such language is simply whatever tokens pass between organisms coupled in communication. The handshaking of networks, like two humans handshaking, orients and establishes contact and the possibility of linguistic communication. In this way, networks are sites of language. Networks form such a sites not only because they circulate tokens within sign systems, whether hu-

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man systems or those specific to the machine, but also because they establish communicational relations between separate systems. Language arises because networks are in communication. The missing part of Maturana and Varelas theory in this application to the network, however, is the precondition of consensual orientation between organisms prior to coupling and exchange. Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores application of Maturana and Varela in their fundamental work Understanding Computers and Cognition showed that computers can only be designed within a consensual domain of shared concepts, behaviors, activities, and horizons of understanding.2 According to Maturana and Varela, structurally coupling occurs between organisms that establish a consensual domain. Such organisms live together. Moreover, they engage in the root sense of consensuality, as feeling together or shared feeling. For Maturana and Varela, consensuality is prior to communication. Language only arises at the site of systematically coupled organisms if they establish a consensual domain. The linguistic closure of the system, under conditions of a finite and negotiated signifying economy, is closed precisely because of the fact of a consensual domain. Where is consensuality in the communicational sites and language fields of the network? True, there is end-to-end communication and flow of information. True, the net is a field of language. But consensus is not simply prior to the network. If this were the case, then we would be assured that our every act and experience on the network involved the prior encounter with the other and tactile palpitation of the others flesh, the handshaking and situating of bodies. Instead, consensus is absent and is sought across the network. Consensus is both absent and structurally a priori. The displaced time of consensus unsettles or puts out of joint the time of the network. This is one way of understanding the paradoxes of real time, both as a measure of system time according to clocks and other devices where the systems artificial time is set against a putative realer real time of the outside the system and, at the same time, as a measure where the systems time purports to calculate and synchronically map onto the real time of the outside, where real time is the time of the real. The uncanniness of net time and of the existence of objects on the net is due to this structure of both given-ness and emptying. Every object and every event on the net is given at some earlier or prior moment, as if there were a place and a time, a person and a community outside the net that negotiated its existence, but also, at the same time, every object and event on the net functions as if there is no consensual relation. Consensus might be the heat and sweat of palms contacting, the weight of the body and the gaze behind the shake, the locking of eyes in a moment of agreement. On the net, consensus is marked within the system by its own functioning. The act of consensuality is not necessary. Instead, this act is construed within the normal operation and throughput of the net. As Niklas Luhmann notes regarding systems, it is redundancy and self-reference that ensures ongoing communication and not consensus.4 Of course, we enter into negotiations all the time. The localized act of consensual relations across the net is everyday and common. Think of logging on the net or think of the license agreement for newly-downloaded software. The repetition and automaticity of these acts, where I login or click-through the agreement without a thought, indicates the ease of agreeing, the formalization of consensus. Who reads those licenses? Just click and agree. We can prove this technically. We can demonstrate the perfection and emptiness of everything on the net. The existence of the net as a fact, as a datum, as an aggregate of protocols, is tied to the persuasive simplicity of technical explanation. The net is fully-interpreted in Alfred Tarskis sense of a formal language composed of sentences that can be defined as either true or false.5 The aggregate of data on the net is a metalanguage containing itself and its description. Everything is set by hash tables, secret algorithms, Boolean functions, and the like. Truth tables show the range of states of a logic circuit. They show possible operations and combinations. Digital engineering speaks of truth table construction as the mapping and
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defining of operations. Such mappings are a simple matter of switching and swapping. True becomes false by setting a byte or flipping an integer. Beyond this, there is no imperative that regulates trusting programs and their functions, and this extends to the entirety of the net. UNIX-creator Ken Thompsons famous article on Reflections on Trusting Trust promised that there is no way to trust that a computer program does only what it says it does and that it does not install viruses or Trojan horse backdoors.6 The program code is utterly true, utterly determined, but not for me. Its abstraction and execution are elsewhere, beyond my grasp. Sartres famous keyhole7 is the model for our experience of the net. Peeping voyeuristically through the keyhole, I am totally absorbed in the image there, the other spread in front of me as a spectacle for my consumption. Everything disappears except this surface of pleasure: my body and my ego absorb into its surface. Everything is an instrument towards the end of the spectacle. I am a project organized by spectacular desire. It is a spectacle for me. To gaze on the other is to consume and incorporate. I hear a movement, the floor creaking behind me, and suddenly I am caught in this moment the entire situation is reversed. I am an object of scrutiny. If in the first case, everything was given over to the project of taking the other in, in the reversal I am displayed and pinned in position for the other to consume. The other is localized, captured, and introjected. I am put on display and grovel under the others gaze. The reversal follows a tempo, a time of the net that is styled in relation to a presumed consensus. The tempo pursues this double articulation of real time, fissuring across the surface of inscription. The situation is reversible but remains the same either direction. I incorporate the other in Flickr images, Google Streetview, Texts From Last Night, and FML. I tag and rank and social network. I emote. Everything is control and construction. Everything is finely and fully positioned. Take it from me, we are masochists on the net. We constantly enter into consensual relations with the opacity of a technical infrastructure. For us, the net must exist as if there were consensus. You offer yourself respond to my email, text me, Facebook update as if I gave you permission, as if I bent over and agreed, as if you and I were in safe contact. It is implied and invented in all that we do. As if we were in contact. As if I gave you permission. This as if points to the necessity of the imagination of the net, or of our imagination of the net, as a communal production, as the production of a narrative about the nets existence. It is for this reason, and only for this, that we can speak of digital poetics. Just as the metaphoricity of network handshaking is a constant deferral, which is to say observation and language are an outcome of functioning networks and not a tool for network analysis, so too the absolute alterity of consensuality is the condition of poetic production and narrativity on the net. When networks handshake and negotiate identities and exchange rates, they also share algorithms and complex hash numbers to establish a set of secret preconditions. Setting these preconditions through shared random numbers creates a secret shared only by the networks involved in the handshake, a secret that is the guarantee of their negotiated and secure interactions. Not the secret that you and I may share, not the secret of touch or contact of bodies that we hold on the surface and that is a flesh memory triggered in every renewed encounter, but the secret of a number, exchanged and known only by the networks engaged in handshaking. Communications occurs on the net through such handshaking and secret conditions. The dense, complex cryptographic key exchanges, hash algorithms, and the like, substitute for the bodily specificity and immediacy of the consensual encounter. The secret is the contact of consensuality on the net. The secret of numbers, the hidden sources, become thick and flow with the imagination of consensuality, with the dream of our contact. For this reason, I can write to you. I can write my desire on and on. I take pleasure in being bound and
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held before your gaze. I share in the secret. In the secret of numbers and source code held within bodies. The display, the computer display, the subject display. As Yukio Mishima described in Sun and Steel, muscle and tissue and bone are the antithesis of words. 8 The body is developed and nurtured and cultivated. Words remain indifferent and the body absent from the words. Or rather: these codes, these lengthy random numbers that the network holds within are the absence of the body, understood in the sense described by Drew Leder as a transcendental conditioning of all else in its absence..9 The imaginary potential of the net: I email to you or text to you as if we agreed on each other, as if you and I negotiated our positions. I respond to your email in delirium and imagine your body. You sext response netsex ooooooo or nnnnnn and this is orgasm, this string of characters, even as it converts again to ASCII, converts to hex, to binary, to packets, to current differentials, and sends back, orgasming in response. I dream that I touched you. I dream the net and its nettings of others. If not a handshake then a poke. A dream of our communication as consensual, safe, negotiated. For Julia Kristeva, chora as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, versimilitude, spatiality and temporality.10 Chora is segmented and laminated on the surface, a mobile vessel or inhabitation of inchoate pre-symbolic drives and supra-economic intensities. The screen is chora. It hollows. In this hollow, I insert self, stuff the command line and cursors, take in and open myself to downloading images. The atemporal rythmn of this encounter is there in screen refresh at 85 hz and up, where the flicker means I am held in your time, in that absolute other time beyond the screen. An alien space lights up and radiates in and on the surface of the screen. Liquid imagination flow freely.

1 Sondheim, Alan. Internet Text. Web. http://alansondheim.org. Accessed August 1, 2010. 2 Maturana, Humberto and Francisco J. Varela. eds. Cohen, Robert S., and Marx W. Wartofsky. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: Dordrecht: D. Reidel. 1980. 3 Flores, Fernando and Terry Winograd. Understanding Computers and Cognition. New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation. 1987. 4 Luhmann, Niklas. Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia University Press. 1990. 5 Tarski, Alfred. ed. John Corcoran. Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Papers from 1923 to 1938. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. 1983. 6 Thompson, Ken. Reflections on Trusting Trust. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 27. No. 8. August, 1984. 761-763. 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul. tran. Hazel E. Barnes. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontlogy. New York: Washington Square Press. 1990. 8 Mishima, Yukio. tran. John Bester. Sun and Steel. New York: Kodnasha. 2003. 35. 9 Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1990. 10 Kristeva, Julia. ed. Kelly Oliver. Revolution in Poetic Language. The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. 35.

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Brad Troemel, Horse Coats, NBA Fonts, (.0. 7:00 am 11 May 2010)

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Wendy Osher, Continental Drift (details), clothing tags on 19 x 9 fabric, 2009

These ephemeral land masses represent a snapshot of the postindustrial textile landscape in our closets. Here, one very specific collection of clothing labels donated at SubRosas installation for the Interventionists exhibition at MASS MOCA in Western Massachusetts (2004), is reconfigured in Continental Drift revealing a geography shaped by politics, resources, fashion, and quotas. The size of each country is determined by the exact number of labels collected (and sent to me) during the run of the show at MASS MOCA. The maps magnetic pole, latitudes, and longitudes emanate from the northeastern United States where they were collected.

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Andy Cook, Images of the Recession: (left) John Hawkins, (right) Amy Pintus, digital print 2008

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Images of the Recession

Andy Cook
Lee County lies on the Gulf coast of Florida, about half way between Tampa and Miami. It saw a development boom a few years ago, but last year Cape Coral, a primarily residential area laced with canals, led the nation in home foreclosures. More than three quarters of the homes sold in Lee County as a whole last year were in foreclosure or close to it. Though the county attracted urban planners, construction workers, and homebuyers five years ago, it now has the highest unemployment rate in the state of Florida. John Hawkins is a 55 year-old heavy equipment operator. He moved his family from Long Island down to Cape Coral four years ago to work in construction, clearing and grading land for housing developments. He worked for the same company all four years until this past Thanksgiving when he was laid off. He is pictured here at one of the sites he worked on, where many homes remain unfinished or vacant. John and his wife have three children, and while she works part-time, their financial situation is growing dire. He describes job hunting: I go to the career center here in Fort Myers, which is a frustrating experience in and of itself. You stand there at 6:30 in the morning and theres a line in front of you of 30 or 40 people. The doors dont open until 8. I spend the whole day there because Im not fluent with computers, I have to seek help. I fill out applications for jobs all day, some of which Im qualified for, some of which Im not. Then I go home, only to not get any replies,. One of their sons has moved back to Long Island to find work, and their 16 year-old daughter has taken a part-time job at a movie theater. John himself is studying to qualify for new classes of licenses. He is pictured above with the handbook he is using to gain a license to drive a bus. What Im trying to do is invest in myself while I have this time, he says of the effort to give himself more of an edge on the job market. But he believes his familys future in Florida is uncertain.
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Ive even begun applying to trucking jobs out of state, but I want to wait until my daughter graduates in June. Its up in the air where we go from there...if it doesnt get better, who knows? If I dont get a job in the next two months, were not going to be able to make rent. In 2002 Amy Pintus brought her family to Fort Myers, a city just east of Cape Coral. They came because Amy was an urban planner and Lee County was one of the fastest growing counties in the country at the time. They soon realized Floridas climate wasnt good for a respiratory condition Amy has and planned to move to North Carolina. In 2006 she left her job in preparation for the move and to care for their new daughter Evelyn. The couple soon found they were unable to sell their house for what theyd paid for it. Additionally, they owned eight other properties in the county, all of which had depreciated greatly. Before they knew it, the family was facing foreclosure and had to declare bankruptcy. Amys husband Rick is a car salesman and now works 10 hour days, seven days a week, to make ends meet. Theyve moved into a rental home, but dont know how long they will stay there. They are being enticed to stay in Florida because of the incentives offered through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a part of Obamas stimulus package. I believe in the NSP program because theres a lot of people here, myself included, who are in the construction industry that dont want to have to take unemployment, they want to work. But theres no work, so what do you do in that situation? You create work, says Amy. The program allows local governments to redevelop foreclosed properties, and offer them to low to middle income families at reduced rates. The hope is that it will create jobs again in the construction field and help families get homes they can afford. It has already spurred an upswing in home purchases in the area in the last four months. While Amy realizes staying in Florida is not good for her health, she feels they have the best opportunity here now. Ive got to do whats best for my family. Where else can we go where my husband can make $60,000 a year and were going to get a mortgage?

The Communication Project

Communication Project - Dia:Beacon (Installation Detail), 2008

In this project, art objects produced in the studio are installed in dedicated cultural spaces and the installation is documented. Photographs revealing the artifact in situ are published and the name of the cultural space is included in the documentation. If no witness is present during the installation, a report is shared with a trusted critic, theorist or artist. The report includes confidential photographs revealing the specific location of the installation. Once the work is installed it becomes an artifact of the communication project. It may remain in place or be removed by the institution and kept, sold or exhibited in collaboration with the artist. The work may also be destroyed or ignored. The artist perpetually defers any decisions about the appropriate parameters for the objects reception. The dialogues produced by the communication project are ephemeral like intimate conversations - they may or may not be remembered or recorded beyond the original installation and documentation.

Michael Oman-Reagan

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Anatomy of a Performance
A core of 15 people were asked to document their actions while participating in a two day performance. The goal was to gather and place material needed for the making of an earth oven with the purpose of cooking a large community meal, consequently displacing land and transforming the landscape in order to do so. Necessities included food, river stone, firewood, clay, metal tools, and the digging of a large pit. The diagrams below attempt to visualize the labor involved in order to better understand the ensuing land transfer through these seemingly ephemeral actions. Materials were gathered within a one mile radius from the site of the meal, which was at the quarry. Having the performance culminate in a meal is a poetic gesture allowing the process of transfer to continue after the materials used were discarded and the food consumed. (Janine Slaker, 2009)

Quarry 30 foot incline

1000 ft.

High Meadow

Middle Meadow

one half mile

Stone Collection
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Clay Collection

Meal Consumption: 30 people

Lower Meadow
Food Collection

100 foot cliff

River Bed

0 elev.

Wood Collection

Digging Pit
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Hermonie Only, Dramatist: Pentad Series, digital image, 2009

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Cultivated Play: Farmville

A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz
Im worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what theyre doing.

- Howard Zinn

The great social historian Howard Zinn, author of A Peoples History of the United States, died yesterday of a heart attack. Zinn devoted his life to educating Americans in their countrys history, that they might better understand their place in its present. Such understanding is today at a premium. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions. As Zinn might have said, the wheel keeps spinning faster, and the faster it spins the harder it is to see. At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time. Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this. After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. Most any concerned parent might say, Play

is an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money.1 So said Roger Caillois in his book, Man, Play, and Games. Of course, Caillois went on to praise games as a source of joy, as well as a healthy means of escape from responsibility and routine.2 For Caillois, as for Aristotle, games are in fact essential to citizenship: they allow us to refresh and renew ourselves, help to socialize us, and afford us opportunities to cultivate our imaginations and reasoning skills.3 If games are essential to citizenship, then this could be a promising time for our democracy. According to a recent survey, over half of American adults play video games, and one in five play everyday or almost everyday. Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of American teenagers play video games.4 Does this mean they will become more politically active? Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in October 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. S. Presidential candidate to advertise in video games, when his Early Voting Has Begun ads appeared in Madden 2009, Burnout Paradise, and other Electronic Arts video games.5 Much has been made of President Obamas sophisticated use of new media technologies. He utilized the internet extensively in organizing and raising funds for his campaign, and has maintained an active presence on popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. To illustrate, he is currently taking questions about last nights State of the Union address via YouTube, and plans to answer
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those questions next week in a live, online video feed.6 While it remains unclear how such events are affecting politics, it is clear that new media technologies pervade the sociopolitical realm. So we cannot simply dismiss video games and Facebook as mere wastes of time. Instead, we are obligated to educate ourselves about them, and to try to understand what they mean, and what it means that we use them. With this in mind, it seems appropriate to examine the most popular video game in America. Farmville is a free, browser-based video game that is played through ones Facebook account. Users harvest crops, decorate their farms, and interact with one another, in what is ostensibly a game about farming. While this may sound like a relatively banal game, over seventy-three million people play Farmville.7 Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.8 This popularity is not surprising per se; even in the current recession, video game revenues reached nearly twenty billion dollars in America last year.9 The video games industry is a vibrant one, and there is certainly room in it for more good games. Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight oclock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant
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the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of landwhich is relatively small for Farmville takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesnt sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this? One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest. This seems plausible enough: people work over time to develop something, and take pride in the fruits of their labor. Farmville allows users to spend their in-game profits on decorations, animals, buildings, and even bigger plots of land. So users are rewarded for their work. Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions.10 Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville. If people dont play Farmville because of the play itself, perhaps they play because of the rewards. Users can customize their farms with ponds, fences, statues, houses, and even Christmas trees, and compare their farms with those of their friends. Its important to note that Farmville is a public game, shared with friends across the largest social networking site in America. It makes sense that some people would enjoy the aesthetics of Farmville, of designing and arranging their farms. No doubt some users want to show off their handiwork, and impress and compete with their virtual neighbors. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isnt fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses. After all, we have real life for that sort of thing.

Even Zyngas designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow. As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious. Meanwhile, Zynga is constantly adding new items and giveaways to Farmville, often at the suggestion of their users. Hardly a week goes by that a new color of cat isnt available for purchase. What fun. Again: if Farmville is laborious to play and aesthetically boring, why are so many people playing it? The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville. My mother began playing Farmville last fall, because her friend asked her to join and become her in-game neighbor. In Farmville, neighbors send you gifts, help tend your farm, post bonuses to their Facebook pages, and allow you to earn larger plots of land. Without at least eight in-game neighbors, in fact, it is almost impossible to advance in Farmville without spending real money. This frustrating reality led my mother who was now obligated to play because of her friend to convince my father, two of her sisters, my fiance and (much to my dismay) myself to join Farmville. Soon, we were all scheduling our days around harvesting, sending each other gifts of trees and elephants, and posting ribbons on our Facebook walls. And we were convincing our own friends to join Farmville, too. Good times. The secret to Farmvilles popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When

users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.11 We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people. One wonders if this is a good thing. It is difficult to imagine Aristotle or Caillois celebrating Farmville as essential to citizenship. Indeed, when one measures Farmville against Roger Caillois six criteria for defining games, Farmville fails to satisfy each and every one. Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from real life, uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules, and make-believe.12 In comparison: (1) Farmville is defined by obligation, routine, and responsibility; (2) Farmville encroaches and depends upon real life, and is never entirely separate from it; (3) Farmville is always certain in outcome, and involves neither chance nor skill; (4) Farmville is a productive activity, in that it adds to the social capital upon which Facebook and Zynga depend for their wealth; (5) Farmville is governed not by rules, but by habits, and simple causeand-effect; (6) Farmville is not make-believe, in that it requires neither immersion nor suspension of disbelief.
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Of these points, the fourth is the most troubling. While playing Farmville might not qualify as work or labor, it is certainly a productive activity, as playing Farmville serves to enlarge and strengthen social capital. Capital is defined as any form of wealth employed or capable of being employed in the production of more wealth.13 New media companies like Zynga and Facebook depend upon such wealth in generating revenue, just as President Obama depends on social capital to raise money, to organize, and to communicate. Unlike President Obama, though, Zynga is not an elected official, and is not obligated to act with the publics interests in mind. Zynga has recently used Farmville to raise almost one million dollars to support earthquake relief efforts in Haiti.14 Social capital can allow organizations to do great and noble things, and to do so quickly and efficiently. Zynga actually began its charitable efforts with Haiti last fall, around the time my family began playing Farmville. Also at this time, Zynga was engaged in numerous lead gen scams, or advertisements that trick customers into making purchases or subscribing to services. As of November, one third of Zyngas revenue (roughly eighty million dollars) came from third-party commercial offers, such as Netflix subscriptions that came with Farmville bonuses, or surveys that involved hidden contractual obligations.15 One user reportedly was charged almost two hundred dollars one month, as a result of cell-phone services for which she had unknowingly signed up, while following Farmville ads in search of bonuses.16 So many users were scammed, in fact, that Zynga and Facebook are now involved in a related, multi-million-dollar class action lawsuit.17 The wheel keeps spinning, faster and faster. More people are signing up to play Farmville every day, as well as other similar Zynga games, such as Mafia Wars, YoVille, and Caf World. Analysts estimate that, if the
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company goes public in the summer of 2010, Zynga will be worth between one and three billion dollars.18 This value depends in its entirety on the social capital generated by users, like you and me, who obligate one another to play games like Farmville. Whether this strikes you as a scam or just shrewd business is beside the point. The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game. Seventy-three million are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people. It is precisely at a moment like thiswhen Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has made it legal for corporations to spend unlimited monies on political advertisementsthat we must talk about our relationship to corporations, and to one another. We are obligated to examine what we are doing, whether we are updating our Facebook status or playing Call of Duty, because the results of those actions will ultimately be our burden, for better or for worse. We must learn above all to distinguish between the better and the worse. Citizens must educate themselves in the use of sociable applications, such as Wikipedia, Skype, and Facebook, and learn how they can better use them to forward their best interests. And we must learn to differentiate sociable applications from sociopathic applications: applications that use peoples sociability to control those people, and to satisfy their owners needs. As cultivated citizens, we are obligated to one another. We care about one another. As Cornel West has said, democracy depends upon demophilia, or love of the people.19 Unfortunately, sociopathic companies such as Zynga depend upon this love as well. The central task of citizenship is learning how to be good to one

another, even whenespecially whenit is difficult to understand our own actions. If Howard Zinn had but one lesson to teach us, it is that cultivated citizens must constantly look around and examine what theyre doing, because there is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone elses crop.

1 Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961 (pp. 5-6). 2 Ibid (p. 6). 3 See Aristotle, Politics, from line 30 of 1337b, to line 15 of 1338a; see Caillois, ibid, pp. 37-41. 4 These statistics were derived from a PEW Internet Project Data Memo, dated 7 December 2008 (http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/ Reports/2008/PIP_Adult_gaming_memo.pdf.pdf). 5 This was reported in various media outlets, including The Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/14/obama-video-gameads-feat_n_134668.html) and Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/ story/0,2933,437763,00.html). 6 See AFP article, Obama to take questions via YouTube, answer them online, 27 Jan. 2010 (http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ ALeqM5g0E0ZXCheQrRnvquv2DaSuntCi3A) 7 Fussell, James. The Farmville Craze is a Firmly Planted Phenomenon. The Kansas City Star 22 Jan. 2010 (http://www. kansascity.com/851/v-print/story/1692350.html) 8 Newheiser, Mark. Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction. Gamasutra 04 Dec. 2009 (http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ MarkNewheiser/20091204/3733/Farmville_Social_Gaming_and_ Addiction.php). 9 Ferro, Mike. 2009 Video Game Industry Revenue Breakdown. Gamer.Blorge 16 Jan. 2010. (http://gamer.blorge.com/2010/01/16/2009-video-game-industry-

revenue-breakdown/) 10 Reuters Blog, 17 Dec. 2009 (http://blogs.reuters.com/ mediafile/2009/12/17/facebook-nearing-1-billion-revenue-run-ratezynga-revenue-triples/). 11 Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Chapter One of version available online at Google Books France (http://books.google.fr/books?id=xlkVAAAAIAA J&printsec=frontcover&dq=Marcel+Mauss+The+Gift#v=onepage&q= &f=false). 12 Caillois, ibid, pp. 9-10. 13 http://www.dictionary.com/ 14 http://www.ventureloop.com/ventureloop/startup_news_article. php?natId=676&p=1 15 Arrington, Michael. Scamville. TechCrunch 02 Nov. 2009 (http:// www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/02/scamville-zynga-says-13-of-revenuecomes-from-lead-gen-and-other-offers/). 16 Lusicombe, Belinda. The Troubling Rise of Facebooks Top Game Company. Time Online 30 Nov. 2009. 17 Arrington, Michael. The Scamville Lawsuit. TechCrunch 12 Nov. 2009 (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/12/the-scamville-lawsuitfacebook-myspace-zynga-and-more-face-possible-class-action-suit/). 18 http://mashable.com/2009/12/15/huge-farmville-maker-zynga-raisesan-astounding-180-million/ 19 West, Cornel and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. The Future of American Progressivism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998 (p. 12).

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Robby Rackleff, (from top left to bottom right) Plants 1,2, & 3, digital images, 2009

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Contributors
Sandy Baldwin is Director of the Center for Literary Computing and Associate Professor of English at West Virginia University. He co-directs the international E-Poetry Festivals and is a board member of the Electronic Literature Organization. His critical and theoretical essays about virtual writing and bodies are widely published. He also creates hybrid codework texts and performs in Second Life with Alan Sondheim. He wants to be your special internet friend. Shelby A. Barons drawings are based on observations and lustful daydreams, a practice that began as doodles on any surface available to her growing up in both Buffalo, N.Y. and San Antonio, T.X. Exposure to two remarkably different cities in two households resulted in Shelbys dependence upon hyper-observation and obsessive drawing to catalog inconstant circumstances, odd characters and uncanny contraptions. Ink as a medium is the most immediate and convenient means to mimic progression and control imagery to depict lust and madness. Owen Brightman / NOLA resident / puppeteer & performer / circus & annoyance arts / has been known by Performance Thanatology & Annex Theatre in Baltimore, Puppet Uprising & Puppetyranny in Philadelphia, Crunchtown Players & Mudlark Public Theatre in the Big Easy / wants to be a hack of all trades... Elizabeth Caynes work explores femininity, sex, domesticity, and mythology using collage, video, paint, and performance. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Cayne studied film and art history at Yale before settling in San Francisco. The artist has exhibited at SFMOMA, the San Francisco Art Institute, Queens Nails Annex, Root Division, and Yales British Art Center. Her Group Portraits (In and Out) fuse antique, miniature portraits with modern, sexualized bodies, creating collages that recast once socially prominent men, who lorded over societies that predominantly repressed women, as female porn stars. This hybrid crew, posed in the style of classical group portraiture, entices the viewer to explore contemporary and surreal scenarios about sexuality. Jodie Cavinder is a sculptor and multimedia artist working in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her Bachelors of Fine Art from the Cleveland Art Institute in 2002 and her Masters of Fine Art in sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. Her work varies across media, touching conceptually on ideas of identity, self and other and the body. Andy Cook is a freelance photographer and writer based in New Orleans. In the spring of 2009, he traveled around the country collecting stories and images from people whos lives had been drastically impacted by the recession. The collection titled Faces of The Recession has appeared in a variety of publications and exhibits, and can be seen in its entirety at www. facesoftherecession.blogspot.com. Andy is currently working on similar documentary projects in the Gulf Coast region. Julia Dzwonkoski and Kye Potter have been working together on paintings, videos, and books for eight years. Theyve also curated numerous exhibitions of visual and media art, including Made in Prison: Art by Incarcerated Men and Women. Their paintings have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and they recently published a book of interviews, The Sky Opened Up With Answers (OneStarPress). They live in Los Angeles. Their website: www.jd-kp.com. Poet Loss Pequeo Glazier (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/) is presently working on two new full-length books, E-Po tica, a theoretical study of trends in digital poetics, and Territorio Libre, a full-length Latino/Language Poetic Instal69

lation. He is the author of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (Salt Publishing, 2003) and the award-winning Digital Poetics (University of Alabama Press, 2002), Small Press: An Annotated Guide, and the collections Leaving Loss Glazier, The Parts, and other books, as well as numerous published poems, essays, kinetic works, and online projects including sound files, hypertexts, and CD-ROM publications. Dr. Glazier is Director of the Electronic Poetry Center, an extensive resource for innovative and digital poetry (http://epc.buffalo.edu/) hosted by State University of New York at Buffalo, where he also works as a professor. Bryan Hewitt is an artist and independent curator currently living and working in Mill Valley and San Francisco, California. He has shown both nationally and internationally, with work in the permanent collections of Yatoo, The Korean Nature Arts Association and SF Recycling & Disposal. Recent exhibitions include Alogorithmia at Root Division, A Night of Intimacy with the San Francisco Writers Grotto and Subversive Complicity at the LAB gallery. Recent collaborations include Dinner with Chuck (with wife, Vita), Food For Thought co-curated with Terri Cohn at the Chandra Cerrito Contemporary and (with others) the Garage Biennale in San Francisco (2005-2008). Hewitt attended Southern Oregon University where he earned a B.A. in Art with a minor in Spanish Literature in 2000. He received an M.F.A. in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. Since that time he has been an Instructor in the undergraduate and graduate departments of the Memphis College of Art, the Art Institute of California-San Francisco, the UC Berkeley Extension Program, the Academy of Art University and the San Francisco Art Institute. He is currently working as a freelance photographer. Vita Mei Hewitt is an artist living and working in the Bay Area. Hewitt creates art by working within existing systems such as organic materials, biological organisms, and the stock market. She received her BFA from Southern Oregon University and her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. Recent projects include Dinner with Chuck, A Night of Intimacy with the San Francisco Writers Grotto and Subversive Complicity at the LAB gallery. Curatorial projects have included Overlap in Green co-curated with her husband Brian Hewitt and Sam Bower of greenmuseum.org at The Garage in San Francisco, Plant Lives Co-Curated with Emmanuelle Namont Kouznetsov and JD Beltran at The Garage and Algorithmia at Root Division with Lauren Scime. Chuck Johnson was born in Medford Oregon. His is the first of five children. Chuck attended the University of Oregon where he earned a degree in Business Management. He began his career in Life Insurance at the Another Day Agency. After two years and several promotions, he moved up to a sales training position at Maximum Inc. After reaching an advanced position at Maximum, he departed to start his own company. Chuck, Inc. is dedicated to providing the best in Ar Force Management. Chuck is not afraid to admit that, apart from being a very successful businessman, he has an artistic side. He discovered this side of himself while visiting a museum with an ex-girlfriend. He saw the art and knew that he could do better. Chuck thinks that artists do not take the opportunity to package and sell their art. Chuck makes art to maximize his selling potential, and trains other artists to increase their market penetration. Isaac Johnson likes movies. David Knowles was born in Portland, Oregon, lives in Berlin, Germany, and makes work in and around music, architecture, performance and writing. His site-specific musical scores, band shows, sound installations and listening environments have been shown in the US and Europe. www.openofficepok.com Lou Laurita juxtaposes words and images in paintings of that vary from the sordid to the botanical. The images themselves form texts that are not always immediately legible. Its a blanket of words to crawl under when the reality of that loneliness
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can bring our stories to a predictable conclusion. Theres a party going on. The party we sometimes assume were not invited toTheres a party going on and we see images posted of the party that has happenedI am a participant, looking in the mirror and telling myself what I want, trying to make a wish a reality. An affirmation which works with the predictability of a crap shoot in a cyber universe where I pray to be grounded and whole, imagine theres no heaven, want you to love me forever, and to fuck me as hard as you can, all in the same paragraph. He is currently represented by SLAG Gallery in New York. A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz is a media artist and theorist, an assistant editor at the online journal Anti-, and a member of the art collective RUST, LTD. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Alphabet Man (Slack Buddha) and Count as One (New River), as well as a forthcoming full-length collection, Afeeld: Computer Games as Poetics (ETC/MediaCommons). His recent work has appeared in Diagram, Hobart, Kotaku, Otoliths, Word for/Word, and the Zaoem Festival of Contemporary Poetry. Rocky McCorkle is a fine art photographer living and working in San Fransisco. He received his BFA from Ohio State University and his MFA from San Fransisco Art Institute. For the past few years, he has been constructing a silent film narrating the internal discourse of an elderly woman, which explores the impact that film and fictional media has on her way of life. Dr. Gary Nickard is a conceptual artist committed to exploring the interstices between visual art and literature while engaging such diverse topics as science, philosophy, psychoanalysis and various historical knowledge systems. He works in photography, installation and a variety of time-based media as well as electronic music. He joined the UB Art Department in 1995. He is and has also been a writer, editor (Aperture Magazine), and curator (Alternative Museum, Artists Space, Burden Gallery and CEPA Gallery) and is a founding member and bassist for The Vores. Hermonie Only. b. 1985 in Compton, CA. Lives in Baltimore, MD. Reads Heidegger. Is developing a screenplay based on Gigantomachy with elements of OCD, teenage lust, Modern dance, & incest titled FEMME BOBBIE (2012). Is pursuing a degree in Biotechnology. hermonieonly.com Wendy Oshers practice works deep in the seams of the discrepancies in our relationships with the natural world, each other, the things we use, and community. The materials she chooses emerge from the dynamics of each exploration. In recent years, discarded materials, installation, stitching, and documentary video have surfaced regularly. Her meticulous, labor-intensive approach betrays a rootedness in process, while her sense of humor always lurks in the wings. Robby Rackleff is a Baltimore-based video and electronics artist. He received his MFA from the Mount Royal School at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also a member of the Wham City art collective. Brian Randolph is an artist living in Los Angeles. Before LA, he lived in Baltimore, where in 2001 he received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Recently, hes exhibited at Five Thirty Three and Volume in Los Angeles, Gallery Four
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in Baltimore, and Galerie Uschi Kolb in Karlsruhe, Germany. Michael Oman-Reagans object installations and projects examine the datum plane of the viewer, the syntax of communication, the commodification of art and the negotiation of cultural spaces. His research as an anthropologist is at the intersection of religion and technology, focusing on the emergence of new religious movements within cyberculture and the mutual shaping of technology, religion and social justice movements. Born in Missouri and raised in eastern Oregon, he currently works in Brooklyn, New York. Liz Rywelski creates narrative between performance, storytelling, and integrated media. This narrative defines the medium within her singular practice as an artist in search for identity, community, entertainment, and meaning. Her project archives can be viewed here: www.lizrywelski.com Lauren Scime is a conceptual painter and multi-media artist currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. She has shown her work extensively throughout the United States and internationally, and is included in the permanent collection at the Griffis Sculpture Park in Ellicotville, NY. Lauren was co-director of Gallery 698 in Buffalo, NY, and has curated shows and events on the east and west coasts. She was a resident artist at Root Division in San Francisco from 2007-9 and has taught classes in painting, digital media and web design. She received her BFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work varies between being serious and reflective, comedic, sterile and scientific, and hyperbolic. She is consistently involved in exploring the human psyche and the constructed limits we set between the self and other, and the real and the virtual. Janine Slaker received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in general sculptural studies. Her artworks investigate the social network created during collaborative site specific art making and how representation of this phenomena affects conceptions of humans relationship to their environment. Janine currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Brad Troemel is an artist and writer living in New York. He is currently an MFA candidate and adjunct professor at NYU. Troemel has exhibited internationally and his writing has been featured in publications such as Rhizome and Art Fag City. His work focuses on the liberatory potential for the internet to serve as an alternative exhibition space to institutions dominated by the art market.

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DVD
This selection of short works is being released alongside the Erotic Economies print journal as a specially published DVD. While widely varied in both topic and approach, with work ranging from video documentation of internet-based experimentation, to narrative event, to hand-processed abstract film - from the raw to the fine tuned, to just about everything in between - each exposes the inherent bond(s) between erotics and commerce. Featuring: Jamie Moore, excerpt from Cobra Tv, 2009, (DV) Max Bernstein, excerpt from Yellow Rose in Formaldehyde, 2008, (DV) Josh Parkins, Spec-trum, 2009, (HDV) James Boatwright, sample from YouTubeorator, 2009, (DV) Tony Conrad, Putins Gas Station, 2003/2010, (Hi8 to DV) Joshua Strauss, excerpt from Hero of Monstrosity, 2007, (VHS & DV) Scott Ries, AvData_r, 2010, (DV) Robby Rackleff, Developer Diary, 2009, (DV) Mili Pradhan, excerpt from Foot in a Pool 934, 2010, (DV) Sophie Hamacher, Der Nebel (the Fog), 2010, (DV) Michael Beitz & Masha Sha, Observation, 2009, (DV) Justin Chouinard, The Sound of Crickets, 2008, (16mm to DV) *The DVD menu is an excerpt from Wood (2009, DV) by Reinhard Reitzenstein* *The DVD cover image is a detail from the series See my desire. Break through yours. by Alkis Hadjiandreou. Michael Beitz received a BFA in sculpture from Alfred University and an MFA from The University at Buffalo. He has worked as a fine woodworker with world-renowned furniture artist Wendell Castle, and NYC furniture design firm BDDW. His work includes drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and animation. He currently lives in Roswell, NM. Max Bernsteins work attempts to fuse abnormal psychological states, elements of social performance, and philosophical subjectivity. The formal representations of his ideas utilize the sculptural qualities of light as they related to the conventional proscenium dynamic of cinema and theater, which includes various aspects of participation and consciousness of audience through video installations and performances. Max received his BA in Media Study from the University at Buffalo in 2009, and is presently working on his MFA in Studio Art and Film at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with an expected graduation of 2012. James Boatwright is a graduate student in the Media Study program at SUNY Buffalo. His work focuses on the massive amount of content uploaded to the internet through the labor of its denizens. Boatwright spends his spare time doing

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nothing and writing in the third person. Tony Conrad is a Buffalo-based artist, musician and composer, film and video maker, and teacher. He became known for his 1966 film The Flicker and for his minimalist violin playing. In 1976 he came to UB, where he still teaches video in the Department of Media Study. He served on the board of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center for more than 20 years and was a founding board member of Squeaky Wheel. In the 1990s he co-produced several hundred local public access programs here. His work has been seen at the Albright Knox and the Burchfield Penney galleries in Buffalo, and last year he was included in the Venice Biennale. Justin Chouinard is an emerging artist from Douglas, Wyoming, and currently based in Buffalo, New York. He works in a variety of media including camera-less film, animation, video, and performance. His pieces explore themes such as the mechanics of perception, the reflexive qualities of film, and cinemas dual nature as time + light experience and object experience. He is most recently concentrated in a series of private and public film/projector performances exploring artist and apparatus relationships. Chouinard is an MFA Candidate and Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo. Alkis Hadjiandreou is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work straddles the line between architecture, visual and performing arts. His research focuses on the ephemeral and fragile character of performed space, employing this practice as a means of questioning conditions of certainty in social stereotypes. He lives and works in Paris, France. Sophie Hamacher, an artist and filmmaker from Berlin, Germany, works primarily with collage, reconfiguring media images by using documents and reclaiming them from their mere informative quality. She has written extensively on the relationship between art and document, and the unconscious or conscious witnessing of historical events through photography and film. Jamie Mohr currently produces a television series called Coma Club that currently runs on Cable Access stations in Western Massachusetts (it can be accessed through inter-library loan or by special order from her V.H.S. label Liquidation Tent). She performs in bands such as The Bunnybrains, N.P.R the Band, as well as with her daughter in Degeneration Dripping with Blood Fading Away. This summer she is running a gallery & performance space in North Adams, Mass. called Be Your Own Placebo. Josh Parkins is a video artist currently working in Buffalo, NY. He got his BFA at Kansas City Art Institute and is currently working on his MFA at University at Buffalos Department of Media Study. His video work embraces the dirtiness and grittiness of low-res, low budget video. He utilizes an aesthetic of artifacts and pixels to make viewers aware of the superficiality of the medium. He uses HD video only as a larger canvas with which to sketch with pixels. His videos are created in the same way that a butcher slaughters an animal: a grotesque destruction and repurposing of the physiological into a virtual form that need not bear any resemblance to the original. Mili Pradhan is drawn to experimenting with resources from her environment. In this video work, she uses the camera as a mediator for experience of intimacy with her surroundings. Months later, she discovers the images and decides to work with them to engage on another level of immediacy and to probe further in search of a form a space and time that is structural yet elusive, like house and memory like home.

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Robby Rackleff is a Baltimore-based video and electronics artist. He received his MFA from the Mount Royal School at the Maryland Institute College of Art. He is also a member of the Wham City art collective. Scott Ries is interested in the noise to the signals of cinema, music, the alphabet, and their social organization. He broke a bootleg of /Avatar/ and directly manipulated its data to produce /avData_r. /Mister Ries is completing his MFA in Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, and in his spare time, he is an archivist, disassembler/reassembler of things, and vehicular insult taxonomist. Reinhard Reitzenstein is an artist and educator whose work has consistently explored ways to interconnect nature, culture, science and technology. His large-scale tree-based works, which critically engage forestry practices, have been installed in Chile, Germany, Venezuela, Finland, Taiwan, and throughout North America. He is currently an associate professor at The University at Buffalo where he also directs the sculpture program. In 2005 Masha Sha graduated from the Pro Art Institute and Saint-Petersburg State University of Art and Culture. She was awarded the Innovation 2006 prize in the Russian Contemporary Art Competitions New Generation nomination. In 2009 she received an MFA from the SUNY Buffalos Department of Media Study as a Fulbright guarantee. Her works have been screened internationally in exhibitions and festivals. Joshua Samuel Strauss is an Abstract Expressionalist and a perpetual art machine. His Hero of Monstrosity is an experimental documentary, which explores the beauty of found art via video. Joshua Strauss and his artistic friends showcase a storyline where the creation in itself is being questioned, resulting in a beautiful and hedonistic ode to remix culture.

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A special thanks to all of the participants and the University at Buffalo Graduate Student Association, Bauhaus University Weimar, The Law Office of Harvey F. Siegel, Kitchen Distribution, Sugar City, Squeaky Wheel & Dorothea Braemer, Hyeyoung Shin, Andrew Rippeon, and all of the rest of you for your generous support. Covers printed at the University at Buffalo Visual Studies print lab wth the help of Hyeyoung Shin. Journal printed at Alphagraphics, Buffalo, NY, August 2010. Inserts printed by participants. The Erotic Economies print journal is made possible through funding and in-kind support provided by the University at Buffalo Graduate Student Associations Scholarly Publication Grant, the University at Buffalo Sub Board Grant, & the University at Buffalo Departments of Media Study, Visual Studies, English, American Studies, Philosophy, Classics and the Graduate Poetics Group. It is also sponsored in part by Kitchen Distribution & by Sugar Citys Sunday Soup Grant. Cover image by Brian Randolph (arc, ink on 24x14 paper, 2008). The Erotic Economies print journal and its contents are curated and edited by Anna Scime and Liz Flyntz. All journal and DVD content copyrights belong to the individual artists and authors of the work.

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