Asseemblage for Collective Thought

8/3/2019 Asseemblage for Collective Thought

1/6

Assembling Collective Thought

Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie

ACT - assemblage for collective thought is an ongoing conceptual and aesthetic collaboration, anassemblage of technologies and techniques for collaboration. It enables participants to think collectivelBy "think" here we do include thinking conceptually. However, following a century that has had to cometo terms with thinking through aesthetic processes, we also mean thinking affectively, via images, text

and sounds. More than this, ACT asks what kind of thought is produced in the mix- in the middle of thvery act of collaboration, when DJing, VJing, dancing in front of a camera perhaps, are all opened up tothe mix. Is there a different quality of thought? A different experience of thinking? An especiallycollaborative thought?

So much new media composition and production still concerns itself with technological conduits andinfrastructure. We wanted to fashion a kind of assemblage that explored new media to produce newconcepts. The assemblage, then, had to be mediated via technologies and software such as wikis,distributed media sites and servers and video and audio editing and remixing packages. But none ofthese are the focus of or rationale for ACT. New media as various systems of technics (that is, thedeployment of technologies as part of the constitution of ourselves as humans, sentient beings andsubjectivities) are seen as some 'collaborators' among others in this project. Although not autonomousthe machines and technologies we deploy in making mediated concepts play a part in changing and

shaping the collectivity of ACT's thinking processes. We found ourselves following particular pathways the process of collaboration and in remixing all the media material for ACT performances as a result ofboth the potentialities and constraints of the media assemblages we contrived and which contrived us.

Screenshot from 'Task 4: Become empirical - radically' of the ACT wiki

ACT began in 2006, using rich and networked media, remix software and techniques. Its firstmanifestation involved a small group of invited participants who work with text, video, audio andsoftware in and on collaboration: Dragana Antic, Michele Barker, Gillian Fuller, Mathew Fuller, Lisa Gye,Ross Harley, Brett Nielsen, Anna Munster, Andrew Murphie, Kate Richards, Trebor Scholz and Mat Wall-Smith. For a two week period during June 2006, this group contributed to a structured wiki byresponding to 'tasks' concerning collaborative thought, relations and partnerships. Material deposited ithe wiki space and in external web publishing portals such as YouTube and Multiply was downloaded,reformatted (text was converted to audio, for example) and taken into VJing and DJing packages. It


2/6

was then re-presented as two different remixes at the ISEA 2006 (International Symposium ofElectronic Arts), ZeroOne San Jose Festival in San Jose on August 12 as the final performance/event othe ISEA Symposium. The mixes took place using the sound system of the large auditorium, along witits three large screens and many flat screen televisions distributed throughout the audience.

In the first mix, brain scans met low-res video of dogs fetching sticks from the water, animated graffitiand a morphed video looping between Immanual Kant and Robert Moog (both champions of synthesis)Carefully modulated computer vocalisations of texts about honey as the result of making collectivethought 'in the hive' met transmissions caught from Messier74, "a spiral galaxy that makes up part ofthe Pisces constellation" (Mat Wall-Smith). The latter were caught, "using a satellite dish (mixing bowl)

and some custom electronics".

The second remix of the material followed directly afterwards and included the use of live feeds -camera and microphone available for use by the audience on the day.These were remixed into, andused to trigger different visual effects upon, the ACT material. The audience brought cut-out shapes antextures (such as scrunched plastic), objects (cigarette lighters), their faces, their dancing bodies, intothe mix in real time. After the performance, one of the audience members commented on the visualeffect of mixing pre-produced material with live audience participation. She noted that this gave a kindof layering effect to the mix, where 'hi-tech' met 'lo-tech' and that what was interesting about that kinof remixing was they way it visually revealed the material strata of media technologies.


3/6

This initial collaboration and performance comprise the first stage in an ongoing production ofassemblages that thinks collectively - assemblages through which you think, which think through you,and which "evolve" along with shifts in thought. With this initial event we are dipping our toes into thetechnozoosemiotic "ether" within which diverse and rapidly mutating semiotic forms, along with diversmediated and collective practices, have drawn breath. The aim for the future is for divergent forms ofACT to take on a life of their own. Maybe in a DVD-ROM that is infinitely remixable and which helps yotake your thoughts places you never expected. Maybe in a shifting online database of media elements,codes, and evolving tags (thanks to Kate Richards for this idea..).

ACT also stages the inevitable tensions raised between "forced collaboration" and "free cooperation" in

thought production with other humans and nonhumans. At the same time, in constantly returning theprocess of collaboration to the mix, it attempts to draw collaboration away from the temptation tofreeze the process in one iteration of it. There is a sense in which ACT only occurs within the movemenof the images and sounds, the bodies thinking through the encounters within this mix. Collaborationhere is indeed forced, but in a very different sense to common network models of collaboration ininfocapitalism; that is, where everyone profits by pooling their pre-existing institutional needs forfunding and recognition. In ACT, collaborators are propelled into the mix, away from pre-existingstances, assumptions and forms of recognition. Cooperation is free - although here freedom is only thefreedom to cooperate in forms of expression here and now. Cooperation is also premised on the projecitself - commitment to its continuation, deformation and mutation rather than to obligation to otherplayers. Freedom is also freedom to leave the project and the mix without remorse and regret, to take

the projectsomewhereelse, to let theproject continuwithout anindividual'spresence.

ACT responds the stagnationof new mediaorthodoxies asthese rapidlyfall back into a

sometimes higtech version ofold mediaefficientcommunicationbound up withnew forms ofproperty. It isalso a responsto theprovocations othe like ofTrebor Scholz,

Geert Lovinkand Christoph

Spehr, concerningnew forms of collaboration and the need to open up these within new media. Scholz, Spehr, Lovink andothers held a conference on Free Cooperation where the idea of using networks and art to exploreprocessual collaboration was worked through. In a similar way, we hope that ACT will remain responsivto change, to the fact that, as Brian Massumi puts it, "change changes" constantly (Parables for theVirtual: 10).
http://www.freecooperation.org/http://www.freecooperation.org/


4/6

The processes of making and remaking ACT felt like thinking collectively. Not only ideas, but imagesevolved, mutated, merged, diverged. The mix was a constant surprise, especially when it involved theaudience - there was a real sense that thinking was occurring collaboratively. One could never say -"that's beautiful and I made it", only "that's beautiful" or even, "that's awful but that's what happenedthrough the project and in the mix".


5/6

There was some stringency needed to realise a colloborative working space, especially as we wanted toenact it remotely. We had to really think through the tasks in both rigorous and open term and provideformats and 'rules' for images, video, length of text and so on. The latter were, of course, ignored fromthe beginning, although not, we are pleased to say, the former. So whereas rules were transgressed,tasks were committed to a nice balance. Each task had its own wiki page, with an extra page for anoptional related task. Of course, ACT is infinitely open to other tasks, but the recent version had six:

1. Return to Nature

Task 1. Collaborate with the natural world

Find a relationship in nature which assists you to produce thought, image, video or sound. Produce thetext, images, video or sound and leave them below.Task 1.1 optional.Become either cellular or marine in your mode of collaborating.

2. Be Passionate

Task 2. Be passionate with anotherGive vent to any passion that was produced in relation to another living or nonliving thing. Leave yourresponse below.Task 2.1 optional.Make it almost monochrome.

3. Work the Abstract

Task 3. Create an abstract collaborative relationshipBy this we mean you could also do something very concrete, like using sound to feedback on itself andmodify the original signal in order to embody the abstract process of modulation.Task 3.1 optionalModulate the modulation.

4. Become Empirical - Radically

Task 4. Work the real, experienced relations in a radical empiricism, as per William JamesOnly deal with the real relations and the transitional experience involved.

"To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any elementthat is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directlyexperienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences mustthemselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must beaccounted as 'real' as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed beredistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found forevery kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophicarrangement." (William James, Essays in Radical Experience:42)

Task 4.1 optionalrecord the changes in your immediate relations.

5. Re-Assemble the Assemblage

Task 5. Re-assemble the assemblageCreate changes in the social and technical assemblages so that all the elements participate differently.Task 5.1 optionalMake the assemblage cycle.

6. Conserve the Virtual

Task 6. Make a contribution to virtual ecologyDo your bit for conservation - make something that preserves or enriches our relations to the virtual.By the virtual wemean the real reservoir of relations between all the different potentials in the assemblage.


6/6

Task 6.1 optional...in 3 seconds

Screenshot from 'task 1: Return to nature' of the ACT wiki

ACT is special not in its originality, but in its tendencies - its very own desire to keep changing, todiverge, to find new homes and turn them upside down, to try things out, to break down (the eternalaccident of mix technologies as they stretch the assemblage), to reform differently. One of thesetendencies is movement away from the proprietal, from funding regulation - towards the new emerginculture of constant co-creation which truly makes mass media redundant. Its politics is something likethat of an open source, multi-mediated, cross-signal processing folk culture. But it does not value'openeness' per se. Rather it wants to contribute to an ecology of media practices that respects theinterrelations of open and closed systems and the elements that comprise and cut across all of these.ACT is desperate to break out of the academy with its specialisation and management of performance.

We think it would work well in clubs where a space and time for thought might just add something tothat mix.

Documents

Asseemblage for Collective Thought