A conference paper given by Kate Southworth in November 2007 at Challenging Cultures of Death: Mercy Not Sacrifice conference at Trinity College Dublin. Organised by The Centre for Gender and Women's Studies,

Abstract
Making intimate places through everyday ritual calls for a fragilising and making vulnerable of the self, and creates a potential for healing within that which Bracha L. Ettinger has termed the Matrixial sphere.  Encountering without attempting to assimilate, master, control or reject the other, everyday ritual draws on that part of the human psyche that evades commodification and resists colonisation. This paper will explore three rituals that I have produced in collaboration with Patrick Simons working as Glorious Ninth: Love Potion, November (with Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow) and Tending.

 

Introduction

As glorious ninth I make artwork in collaboration with Patrick Simons that co-emerges from our everyday life together and which then is transformed into art and finds form online, in the gallery and as invisible networks within the collective realm. Our work weaves trans-narrative aural-visual work with ritual that is durational and performative: it exists as transformational space and time in which a potential for copoietic[1] acts of tending is nurtured.  Emerging alongside, yet distinct from, relational, socially-engaged and net art practices where human relations and ‘being together [is] a central theme’[2] our work is a fragile dance between the potential for trans-subjective encounters in everyday life and the ethics and aesthetics of their becoming art.

Attuned to ongoing social changes emerging with the rise of the network-based society some artists have shifted their attention away from making objects towards the realm of human relations, devising myriad situations within which participative activities take place.  The material impact of the network on our everyday lives develops in us a heightened sense of that which is invisible: rather than focussing on objects as markers of reality we begin to understand the world in terms of processes and relations, change and interaction. And whereas tangible borders mark the parameters between objects, network artists have found it necessary to use ‘protocol’ to call attention to and mark the borders between one set of relations and another.  These protocols ‘frame’ processes and relations and can be ‘sturdy’ in so far as they strictly define a space and the parameters of likely encounters, or ‘fragile’ and without intentional organization.

Protocol[3] is synonymous with the network itself and therefore there is no escape from it: as both apparatus and logic of control it refers to the rules that govern subject-object relationships within any interrelational network and is distinct from other technical and social mode of organisation such as hierarchy and bureaucracy.  Within the networking paradigm many artists emphasise the function of protocol, and like conceptual art in which ‘all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair’[4] devise protocols (rules or recipes) to be followed by the artist or participant. 

Running alongside this artistic interest in protocol is an engagement with the relational qualities of the network, and almost all network art is made with reference to collaborative, participatory, open source philosophy. This emphasis on participation and exchange – even between strangers – can be seen as indicative of network art’s desire to provide non-institutionalized spaces of encounter. Contributors to these spaces or communities do not directly sell their work, their ideas or their time.  Rather, the motivation for artists to participate is grounded in a belief that it is preferable to undertake creative activities within a decentralized, less hierarchical organizational framework free from the market, consumers and organizational control.  

Emerging from discourses around networks, however, is a growing understanding of the contradictions unfolding in the movements of late capitalism and recognition of the need for artists to focus on different sides of contradiction at the same time.  Networks manifest an inherent contradiction in that they facilitate relational activities such as cooperation, collaboration, participation, sharing and community whilst simultaneously controlling the parameters of those activities through the use of rigid protocol. At a social level the contradiction of the network is such that as well as promoting qualities of openness and connectivity it tends towards a logic that incorporates and assimilates the activities of participants or rejects them if they lie outside the protocols of participation.

Resisting this protocological orthodoxy, and with it processes of colonisation and commodification, some artists have turned to political strategies of counter-protocol - typically used by hackers - where fissures, cleaves and splits in the network are exposed and exploited (e.g. RSG, Kate Rich). Other forms of resistance to network protocol take the form of socially-engaged art in which artists work directly with communities developing creative practice within the everyday (e.g. Oda Projesi, furtherfield.org) in which the ‘rules of engagement’ or ‘situation of participation’ are either devised by the artist or in collaboration with participants.  Valuable as these strategies of resistance are in critically engaging the logic of the network, to an extent they exist within that self-same logic, and to an extent then become trapped in that logic, forever having to innovate to survive and unable to think an alternative. It is through consideration of resistance to protocols of controls within that which Bracha L. Ettinger has named the Matrixial sphere that the three glorious ninth artworks discussed here came into being. In this paper, alongside the question of how fragile an artwork can be before it collapses back into the everyday, I would like to consider whether there is a supplementary way of thinking protocol. The glorious ninth works that I will discuss briefly use what we might call heterotopic-protocol to mark mutable borders of interrelationality and which call attention to particular situations.  They are ‘fragile’ and without intentional organization such that they offer the slightest indication that a situation or space is emerging or co-emerging from the everyday through ritual and repetition into art.

Although networked, participative, relational and socially engaged art practices promote cultures of sharing and participative encounters with friends and strangers the ‘relation with the unknown other’ in a Matrixial sense ‘is not automatically’ achieved’.   As Bracha L. Ettinger has specifically stated ‘even though it may seem that art on the net is ‘perfectly’ suitable for adopting these terms’ there is a distinction between Matrixial trans-subjectivity and interactivity.[5]

I have named matrixial borderspace the psychic sphere which is trans-subjective on a sub-subjective partial level. A mental matrixial encounter-event transgresses individual psychic boundaries even if and when its awareness arises in the field of the separate individual subject, and it evades communication even if and when it operates inside intersubjective relational field.

Bracha L. Ettinger (2004)[6]

November

November is a networked performative encounter between four people that took place in October 2006. It was recorded simultaneously from Cornwall and London UK and was a Collaboration between Patrick Simons and myself of glorious ninth  and Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrrett of furtherfield.org.  The piece employs peer-to-peer instant messaging software and audio visual exchange, via webcam, and it was launched exactly 9 mins and 41 seconds before midnight 23.51.19 GMT (as determined by the length of the piece), on 31st October 2006.  The performance consists of a braiding together of spontaneous and pre-meditated actions, such as reading from texts, listening, and improvised speech. Celebrating Halloween and the changing of the season, the four participants met on line to exchange collected data whilst eating prepared garlic. 

November is a calendric ritual that marks Samhain, Halloween and the changing of the season from summer to winter. During the event, the performers collaboratively created a shared intimate space within which acts of tending co-emerged. Even when connected via webcam, a live trans-narrative developed as the performers listened attentively to the other at the same time as reading their texts, producing a rhythm which contracts and expands, pulsates, ebbs and flows.  The artwork grew out of a deep fear of the darkness, death and decay of winter and was transformed into an act of healing through an artistic encounter-event.  Bracha Ettinger’s writings on Jump - a collaborative work that co-emerged between herself and two other artists articulates processes similar to those that brought November into being. 

The work of art ‘begins’ when the artists – here the artist is the matrixial subjectivity composed of the three of us to begin with, but surely also of others who were not there and entered before or after – seizures in the catastrophe a potentiality, and for one reason or another, both ethical and aesthetical, must make of it the point of birth for another sense and another form, whereby the seeds of the catastrophic gesture, arriving from elsewhere, will grow into something else.

            Bracha L. Ettinger & Akseli Virtanen (2005) [7]

The catastrophe from which November co-emerged was a deep fear of the forthcoming winter.  Moving to rural Cornwall after having lived in the city, Patrick and I found our first winter there hard to bear, being so exposed to the death and decay of vegetation and the bleakness and darkness of the days we felt deep loneliness that created a field of negative emotions.  As spring arrived these feelings dissipated but an underlying fear remained. We needed to prepare mentally for what was to come during the dark months ahead.  We felt very strongly the need to act – to create something that would mark this change of season.  The original trauma of the hard winter was transmitted verbally and non-verbally to our friends and colleagues Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow over the course of the summer, and when we invited them to join us on October 31st to celebrate the change of the season, it wasn’t necessary to conceptualise or organise our encounter beyond a few protocols or rules of engagement, and these are written such that other participants can make their own performance whenever and wherever they like.

We decided to record our encounter, and as we wouldn’t all be in the same geographical location we decided to use simple peer-to-peer messaging technology for a live connection. We were each in separate locations but could see and hear the other three through our computers. Whether or not we could respond sensitively to each other without being physical proximity was something we were unsure about.  Each participant was invited to find or write texts around the idea of Halloween, darkness and death.  It was agreed that each of us would talk and listen simultaneously.  If we decided not to speak for a while, we would eat raw garlic that we had grown especially for the performance.  We agreed that we would allow 60 seconds of silence at the beginning of the performance, and then anyone could begin speaking.  We would allow 60 seconds at the end of the performance, although we didn’t know when the end would be.

In the video of the performance a co-emergence and co-fading[8] is seen.  The rhythm and the energy get faster with a release of laughter at the end.  Each participant is reacting to particular words, or facial expressions, actions or rhythms of the other, through which a collective instinct develops. We were making a moment – co-creating an encounter-event[9] – in which we were attuned to each other at a non-verbal level and responded rhythmically and intuitively. We wanted to co-respond[10] to the other and for the other co-respond to us, transgressing the borders of the individual to create a shared space[11]. This was a collective act of performance in which each artist opened herself/himself up to the other in constant reattunement and cooperation. 

love_potion

Love-potion is a durational performance artwork in three phases that uses borage herbs, seeds, magic spells, aural-visual trance-narratives and DIY installations. It is particularly difficult to articulate its parameters as an artwork because it almost-always slips back into everyday life, yet threads of it remain sufficiently visible to be picked up by invisible networks of participants. There is no single focus to Love_potion rather it weaves several elements together that exist as different tempos and forms.  Knowledge and memories of one element is transported across to another and back again. 

 

The first phase of the performance takes place over six months and involves seeding, tending, harvesting and drying borage herbs. It was first carried out by the artists as an everyday activity and subsequently transformed through repetition and ritual into art, and the process shared with others through the glorious ninth website.  The second phase involves preparing a magic potion from borage, an herb that reputedly drives away sorrow and melancholy, uplifts the spirits, and when shared with others nurtures compassion and peace.  For Bracha L. Ettinger ‘Compassion is intrapsychic, subjective and transsubjective. It works its way, like art does, by fine attunements that evade the political systems[12]’. In the third phase, performers co-create and co-tend an intimate place filled with aural-visual trans-narratives that can be downloaded from the glorious ninth website.  By co-creating the intimate shared space and opening themselves to others and to the potential of intrapsychic healing a transformation sometimes co-emerges between participants.  When they leave the co-created intimate space participants take with them borage flowers and seeds with the intention of making new intimate space with others.

 

When we have co-created and co-tended a space for love_potion at festivals or at home we cleanse the space with frankincense, immerse it in aural-visual trans-narratives, light candles and place bowls of borage and seeds at the entrance.  We continue to nurture and tend our space during the time that friends and strangers join us.  Opening our selves to a state of fragility and vulnerability we tend the space with visitors, connecting with them verbally and non-verbally and offering potion ingredients and recipe for them to take away, prepare and share with others.  love-potion extends outside the tended space weaving together processes and relations that co-emerge through growing ingredients, making potion and encountering others.  The work uses fragile heterotopic-protocols that mark the mutable borders of an encounter-event in which there is potential for acts of healing and tending to co-emerge through participants’ ritual making.  The heterotopic-protocols fade away as acts of tending co-emerge, and re-emerge as the acts of tending co-fade.  As part of an invisible network the activities of participants are never incorporated or assimilated into love_potion but exist alongside it.

 

Tending
Tending is a durational work drawing on rituals of mourning in which performers make a sacred place within their everyday environment.  It is the third part of The Tending Triptych – the other two elements being aural-visual trans-narratives. Tending is a distributed artwork that can be performed by anyone at any time or place.  |As a potential space of healing in the everyday it is transmitted to others through very fragile heterotopic protocols that offer the slightest indication that a situation or space is emerging or co-emerging from the everyday and transforming into art.

We connect to others partly through shared bodily tempos that act and react around each other.  In some ways, mourning is a process of feeling significant changes to that shared tempo.  Imagining a future without the rhythm of the other is sometimes painful and traumatic, and growing plants from seed is sometimes a way to re-connect to the movements of life outside our own severed tempo.  Tending is an artwork in which everyday performers grow plants from seed for a period of twelve months, moving through the different rhythms of the seasons and memories of the shared rhythms of the other.  Once the first flowers have grown, a sacred space can be created that is tended throughout the following months, with fresh flowers replacing those that fade.  Over time the mourner encounters other rhythms and is sometimes able to weave a new tempo of life.

Perhaps it is possible to imagine a supplementary and matrixial network art that thinks the contradiction between protocol and participation through Bracha L. Ettinger’s articulation of ‘copoiesis’ in which ‘transformational potentiality evolves along aesthetic and ethical unconscious paths.[13]’ Here, the artist ‘transforms time and space of an encounter-event into matrixial screen and gaze, and offers the other via com-passionate hospitality an occasion for fascinance.[14]’ This is not to suggest that just by attempting to nurture copoiesis it will co-emerge, nor is a copoietic co-emergence automatically art. ‘There are rare moments when copoiesis emerges, and there are millions of moments, or jumps, that ‘fail’ to make sense and do not make an art event’. Proposing Bracha L. Ettinger’s Matrix Theory as a different prism through which to think contradictions between protocol and participation our work as glorious ninth attempts to imagine supplementary networks of artistic encounter-events.[15]

[1] Copoiesis is a theory of co-emergence articulated by Bracha L. Ettinger

[2] Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses du Réel (English Translation), 2002, p. 15

[3] Alexander R Galloway, Protocol:How Control Exists After Decentralization, London : The MIT Press, 2004

[4] Sol le Witt, cited by Alexander Galloway at Disrupting Narratives symposium, Tate Modern, July 13th 2007

[5] Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, Impossibility of not sharing posted on <eyebeam><blast> 26th

 February 1998

[6] Bracha L. Ettinger,  “copoiesis,” Ephemera: theory and politics in organisation volume 5(X): p.703 (2005)

[7] Bracha L. Ettinger & Akseli Virtanen “Art, Memory, Resistance,” Ephemera: theory and politics in organisation volume 5(X): p.690 (2005)

[8] co-emerging and co-fading are terms borrowed from Bracha L. Ettinger

[9] co-creating an encounter-event is a term borrowed from Bracha L. Ettinger

[10] co-respond is a term borrowed from Bracha L. Ettinger

[11] Transgressing the borders of the individual is part of what Bracha L. Ettinger articulates as ‘borderlinking’

[12] Bracha Ettinger, ‘Compassion and Com-passion’ on Underfire (2006) downloaded at:     http://underfire.eyebeam.org/?q=node/512

[13] Bracha L. Ettinger,  “copoiesis,” Ephemera: theory and politics in organisation volume 5(X): p.703 (2005)

[14]Bracha L. Ettinger (ibid)

[15] Artistic encounter-events is a term used by Bracha L. Ettinger