Exhibition: September 11

September 11
September 11, 2011–January 9, 2012

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

http://www.momaps1.org

Since that fall morning in 2001, “September 11” has come to connote a broad swath of feelings and subjects that range from the personal to the national; it has been used to justify political, security, and military decisions the world over, while continuing to weigh upon the landscape of New York and its inhabitants, particularly those directly affected by the attacks. Witnessed by an estimated two billion people, the attacks on the World Trade Center were among the most pictured disasters in history, yet they remain, a decade later, underrepresented in cultural discourse—particularly within the realm of contemporary art.

Responding to these conditions, MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey brings together more than 70 works by 41 artists—many made prior to 9/11—to explore the attacks’ enduring and far-reaching resonance. Eschewing images of the event itself, as well as art made directly in response, the exhibition provides a subjective framework within which to reflect upon the attacks in New York and their aftermath, exploring the ways that they have altered how we see and experience the world in their wake. September 11 opens on the tenth anniversary of the attacks and occupies the entire second floor of the museum, with additional works located elsewhere in the building and in the surrounding neighborhood, including one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s street altars from the late 1990s, which will be installed for the first month of the exhibition on a street corner near MoMA PS1.

Artists in the Exhibition
Diane Arbus, Siah Armajani, Fiona Banner, Luis Camnitzer, Janet Cardiff, John Chamberlain, Sarah Charlesworth, Christo, Jem Cohen, Bruce Conner, Jeremy Deller, Thomas Demand, Shannon Ebner, William Eggleston, Harun Farocki, Lara Favaretto, Jane Freilicher, Maureen Gallace, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jens Haaning, Susan Hiller, Roger Hiorns, Thomas Hirschhorn, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Mark Lombardi, Mary Lucier, Gordon Matta-Clark, Harold Mendez, Mike Nelson, Cady Noland, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, John Pilson, Willem de Rooij, George Segal, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Stephen Vitiello, and John Williams.

Catalog
September 11 is accompanied by a fully illustrated 248-page catalog designed by Kloepfer-Ramsey and published by MoMA PS1. In addition to Peter Eleey’s curatorial essay, it includes new contributions by Robert Hullot-Kentor and Alexander Dumbadze, as well as texts by Alexander Kluge, W.J.T. Mitchell, and Retort. Distributed by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., available online and at the ARTBOOK shop at MoMA PS1, +1 (718) 433-1088. ISBN 978-0-9841776-3-9.

Exhibition Support
The exhibition is made possible by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, the Teiger Foundation, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Generous support is provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.

Project / Open Call: Twin Towers Go Global

Open Call
Where Would You Rebuild the Twin Towers?

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Twin Towers Go Global is issuing an international open call for responses to the question “Where would you choose to rebuild the Twin Towers? Why?” In collecting and archiving voices from across the globe, TTGG hopes to create a memorial expressive of the Towers’ significance to a wide array of individuals and cultures, as well as their continuing unifying power.

Responses can be as simple or complex as you like, and you can enter as many times as you want. They can take the form of image, essay/text, sound, video, or a mixture of these (you can even handwrite your response and take a picture of it!) Images should come in jpeg, mov, mp3, or pdf format, or type text directly into an email. Submissions will be accepted beginning July 30 and ending September 2, 2011, and all responses will be posted on an ongoing basis on our submissions gallery. Ten finalists will be selected to be highlighted on the Twin Towers Go Global website. Five will be selected by popular vote. The other five will be selected by a jury we are currently composing. On our list of possible jurors are artists, architects, scholars, celebrities, and 9/11 family members. If you would like to nominate someone for the jury, please send us their name, contact information, and why you think they would be appropriate.

The ten finalists will be posted after Tuesday, September 6, and all participants will be notified by email when finalists have been posted. Finalists will receive a special mention during the public reception of a 10th anniversary exhibition organized by TTGG resident artist Pedro Lasch at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York City on September 7, 6-9pm. They will also receive a dedicated page on the TTGG website, and will be included in the 2nd Anniversary Report published by Pedro Lasch and Twin Towers Go Global on September 11, 2011 for inclusion in the international exhibition Documenta 13, through their AND AND AND platform.

If you would like to vote on your favorite idea, visit this page after September 3, and send an email with the title of your selection in the subject line of an empty email to: vote@twintowersgoglobal.org

View Gallery

Open Call Rules

Submit responses to:
Jessye McDowell
open.call@twintowersgoglobal.org

Exhibition: Informality: Art, economics, precarity

Informality
Art, economics, precarity
14 August–2 October 2011

Stedelijk Museum Bureau
Amsterdam
Rozenstraat 59
1016 NN Amsterdam
The Netherlands
http://www.smba.nl

Open: Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m.–5 p.m.
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The exhibition ‘Informality’ arises from the increasing attention being given to the role of banks in our economy, and the interest in alternatives to their role. It is also a first reflection on the role of art and artists in an atmosphere of crisis and cuts in cultural funding.

‘Informality’ focuses specifically on the concept of the informal economy. The informal economy is that part of commercial and the service sector that operates outside of the circuit of formal financial transactions—and thus is hidden from the sight of the Revenue Service and other governmental institutions that control business and economic affairs, and the banks themselves. In the West the informal economy makes up about 11% of the total economy. On other continents, such as Africa and Latin America, but also in former East Bloc countries, the informal economy often makes up the largest part of the total economy.

‘Informality’ examines the phenomenon from the perspective of art, involving certain informal aspects of the art world itself in doing so, including the precarious position of the artist in society.

The Domestic Workers Union (a section of the Dutch Trade Union Congress) is one of the parties responsible for the creation of the Trash Museum, which was unveiled earlier this year, to commemorate the great cleaner’s strike of 2010. The artist Matthijs de Bruijne and the designers at Detour were called in to assist in its realization. The project is an example of a campaign that was an outcome of what is called the organizer’s model: a labor union campaign built from the bottom up, rather than directed from the top down. For ‘Informality’ the cleansers were asked to supply notes about their work—analogous to the domestic memos on refrigerators and kitchen counters that are often the only form of communication between them and their bosses.

The informal economy is in a certain sense related to the concept of ‘informal art’, as is the case with sculptures made of discarded or reused objects and thus connected with the visible recycling strategies in informal economies. The contribution by Kaleb de Groot consists of recycling his own work and the contents of a small, neglected storage room at SMBA. Among the things De Groot includes are the publications which were lying there, discarded exhibition materials, and even the remains of what must once have been art objects.

The Spanish artist Marc Roig Blesa bases his Werker series on the representation of the worker, and the history of the representation of workers. With the aid of the designer Rogier Delfos this has led to a variety of publications and other graphic expressions. For ‘Informality’ Roig Blesa focuses on several artists and their kaleidoscopic blend of sidelines in fields outside the art world. Roig Blesa and Delfos appropriate this material for an idiosyncratic series of posters.

In the video It’s not you, it’s me by the British/American artist Doug Fishbone we see the artist speaking, trying to convince the viewer to make a financial contribution toward bankrolling a new project, a film. An artist will do anything to be able to realize his work.

The Mexican Jose Antonio Vega Macotela worked a total of 365 days on an exchange with the inmates of the Santa Martha Acatitla Prison in Mexico City. The prisoners could make their wishes known to the artist regarding tasks they wanted to have done outside the prison, which he then performed. In exchange Macotela asked the prisoners to perform a specific assignment for him, which resulted in a work which then became his property.

Senam Okudzeto presents a part of her installation Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The work is based on the contents of a Swiss apartment that was abandoned when its resident fled from Interpol. His lodgings proved to contain a vast archive of not only of his own notes but also of hundreds of self-help books of the ‘how I got rich’ variety, written by respected representatives of high finance. Among the things found there were documents pointing to a scam, in the form of a protracted e-mail correspondence from the criminal with a victim/collaborator in a fraud case, the owner of a Dutch lumber business.

SMBA Newsletter
SMBA Newsletter nr. 123 has appeared to accompany ‘Informality’. It contains a brief introduction to the exhibition in Dutch and English. It is available at the exhibition and can be downloaded at http://www.smba.nl

Collectivity
In addition, SMBA together with the artist Matthijs de Bruijne is organizing an evening with presentations by artists and groups for whom this quest for greater social solidarity is central.

The precise date of this presentation will be announced later.

Suggested other exhibitions and projects
-Stroom Den Haag: Time/Bank and Time/Store, http://www.stroom.nl
-Casco, Utrecht: Grand Domestic Revolution, http://www.cascoprojects.org
-De Appel, Amsterdam: Genius without Talent, http://www.deappel.nl

‘Informality’ has been organized as part of Project ‘1975’ and made possible by the Mondriaan Foundation and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts

Exhibition: DYSTOPIA

After 4000 years of sci-fi
DYSTOPIA
Until 28 August 2011
A show written by Mark von Schlegell
& curated by Alexis Vaillant

CAPC
musée d’art contemporain
Entrepôt Lainé. 7, rue Ferrère
F-33000 Bordeaux
France

http://www.capc-bordeaux.fr

Opening hours :
Tue, Thur to Sun 11 a.m.–7 p.m., Wed 11a.m.–8 p.m.

Amid global crisis, contemporary art finds itself confronted by its own theoretical and practical dissolution within a thoroughly debunked reality. As the Tao te Ching advises the mysterious protagonist of Dystopia, the exhibition, the point is to “neither beat the pot and sing, nor loudly bewail the approach of death.” Between nihilism and hedonism lie pathways to failure, resistance and survival.

The exhibition Dystopia is the offshoot of a fiction written by the American science fiction novelist and theoretician Mark von Schlegell. Curated by Alexis Vaillant of the CAPC, the art-works of 46 international artists are presented within a world turned horror film. Utopia’s wretched flipside is presented not as subject matter but as setting, not as end but as point of beginning.

According to von Schlegell and Vaillant the enlightenment tradition of Dystopia—”the imaginary place or condition in which everything is as bad as possible”*—offers contemporary art specific pathways (of re-mix, collaboration and radical tradition) into present-tense science fictional struggles with the disintegrating real past and imaginary future. Immersed in the present, dystopian art presumes a weakest-possible point of view within an unresolved fictional narrative presumed to be worsening. As with the theory of black holes birthing new universes within them, it is within concentrated dystopia that the actual utopias appear.(*Oxford English Dictionary)

With all the museum’s windows covered by blood-red cellophane the visible outside world is rendered fictional, casting its glow deep into the museum’s nave. Even so, the art works find idiosyncratic function, adapting with surprising ease to the covering fiction.

Mark von Schlegell’s new novel New Dystopia, featuring work by all participating artists, will be published in English and French by Sternberg Press as catalog for the exhibition.

Featuring works by:
Wallace Berman, Cosima von Bonin, Brian Calvin, Tony Carter, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Peter Coffin, Simon Denny, Andreas Dobler, Roe Ethridge, Keith Farquhar, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Aurelien Froment, Cyprien Gaillard, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Roger Hiorns, Ull Hohn, Des Hughes, Peter Hutchinson, Sergej Jensen, On Kawara, Michael Krebber, Jesús Mari Lazkano, Rita Mcbride, John Miller, Pathetic Sympathy Seekers, Manfred Pernice, Stephen G. Rhodes, Glen Rubsamen, Sterling Ruby, Julia Scher, Frances Scholz, Michael Scott, Markus Selg, Reena Spaulings, Michael Stevenson, Tommy Støckel, Josef Strau, Blair Thurman, Mathieu Tonetti, Oscar Tuazon, Franz West, Jordan Wolfson
and a catastrophe by Eugene Isabey

Corporate sponsors
Air France, Seg Fayat, Lacoste, Lyonnaise des Eaux, 20 Minutes, Mouvement, Château Chasse-Spleen

Event: Beyond the Crisis. For the Practice of the Commons

BEYOND THE CRISIS. FOR THE PRACTICE OF THE COMMONS

54th International Art Exhibition –
la Biennale di Venezia

S.a.L.E-Docks and Institut Ramon Llull
Catalonia and Balearic Islands
Magazzino del Sale N.2
Dorsoduro 265, Venice

9 June–30 October 2011

Project website
http://www.saledocks.org
Venezia.llull.cat
Info:
saledocks@gmail.com

S.a.L.E.-Docks in partnership with the Institut Ramon Llull is organizing a round of meetings parallel to 180º the personal exhibition of Mabel Palacín.

From June to October, the meetings will focus on issues such as: the Commons, piracy, metropolitan conflicts, China and the Euro-Mediterranean Zone and the status of the image today.

This is a transdisciplinary program where artists, historians, architects, sociologists, philosophers, curators and economists will be invited to discuss.

These are the first two sessions planned on June 2011.

In collaboration with Centro Studi Alternativa Comune.

Mabel Palacín: 180º
The Catalonia and Balearic Islands project for the 54th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia presents a solo project by the artist Mabel Palacín that has been specifically conceived for the occasion in the city of Venice.

The 180º project alludes to the so-called 180º rule in film that establishes the relationship between the position of the camera and that of the viewer. Mabel Palacín refers to this principle to show that the relationship between the viewer and the image has been altered in the contemporary world by its multiplication and democratic use.

June 10
3pm
The Commons. A new Paradigm Beyond the Private and the Public.
– Joan Fontcuberta
– Christian Marazzi
– Ugo Mattei
– Francesco Raparelli
– Raquel Xalabarder

June 25–26 (timetable to be confirmed)
The practice of the Commonwealth in the metropolis of the crisis
Gentrification, Colonialisms, Conflicts, Arts and Architectures.
– Decholonizing Architecture (Eyal Weizman, Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal)
– Josephine Berry Slater
– Anthony Iles
– Martí Peran
*All the participants to be confirmed, please check the website

Free admission.
Info: saledocks@gmail.com
Language: Italian–English

Exhibition: Speculative

Exhibition: June 16 – August 28
OPENING: JUNE 16
Performance Art Event: June 30
Panel Discussion: July 28
6522 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles 90028

CURATED BY:
Christopher O’Leary &
Zach Blas

SPECULATIVE features work by:
Casey Alt
Zach Blas
Jeff Cain
Micha Cardenas
Xarene Eskandar
Michael Kontopoulos
Elle Merhmand
Christopher O’Leary
Claudia Salamanca
Pinar Yoldas

CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Today, we see the world we live in as an inviable world, and yet a world poised for radical reconfiguration.

From global economic crises to pandemic panics to burgeoning forms of hatred and control to the ravaging of our earth, new borders and quarantines haunt and terrorize the world at stochastic levels of the global, nation-state, informatics, and the biological. Indeed, our world presents to us the seemingly complete commodification of life, culture, the body, earth.

Yet, we find within these very inviabilities the kernels of potential to enact and push forward new ways, worlds, and lives.

In fact, we see many up-risings emerging everywhere: from the calls to action of militant groups like The Invisible Committee to the UC student protests to the insurrections of the Middle East to the digital activisims of WikiLeaks and Anonymous.

These all point toward living and existing in the world another way.

We see the SPECULATIVE as the uniting force in our artwork that conjures forth the potential of the world we want, in political, cultural, social, sexual, technological, biological, economic, and ecological dimensions.

The SPECULATIVE is that imaginative, aesthetic work done by the artist to create new possibilities, inspire change, gesture toward a livable future, and generate new tactics and methodologies.

The SPECULATIVE asks us to use our imagination politically.

The SPECULATIVE allows us to subvert reality; practice new types of activism; work with the impossible as a political framework; rediscover the magic of our materials; question what a body and collective is capable of; locate new sexualities and perversities; reconfigure capitalism, design, and branding; create new worlds, peoples, species, and ecologies; find embodiments and other productive actions that emerge from war, apocalypses, disasters, and death; and build our dream utopias.

Exhibition and Event Description

As an exhibition The SPECULATIVE will focus on new modes of art making and new modes of presentation with a emphasis on the experiential, subversive, and tactical potentials for art in the 21st century. The projects included in this exhibition engage wildly diverse mediums from critical software, art-science, social practices, experimental video, wearable architecture, performance works and much more. The practices represented here deal with speculative notions of design, science, business, sex, gender, death, politics, environmentalism and most of all the future.

Exhibition: Primitive Accumulation

Friday May 27th-June 30th, 2011

Curated by Arne De Boever and Dan Davis

FOLD Gallery London is pleased to present a group show celebrating the first two years of http://www.PRIMITIVEACCUMULATION.com, an online collaboration between artist Dan Davis and literary critic and critical theorist Arne De Boever. Although the project initially recorded only work by its founders, it gradually began to include works by other artists as well, leading the process of accumulation to intensify until the point of its destruction. In the midst of an emergency situation that is both political and economic, Primitive Accumulation aims to stage a dialogue between artworks and texts that would empower audiences to not simply face up to the challenges of their times, but to generate works in response.

Primitive Accumulation was launched some time in the Fall of 2009 as a means to record the creative collaborations between artist Dan Davis and critic Arne De Boever, as well as a few of their friends. In the midst of an emergency situation that is both political and economic, the blog aims to stage a dialogue between images and texts that would empower viewers and readers to not simply face up to the challenges of their times, but to generate new works in response to them. Our philosophy is that crisis is not a problem, but should be embraced as the source of new aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities. So far, the images on the site have ranged from scratchboard drawings, to pencil and India ink on paper, to digital images; the texts have addressed key questions in ethical and political thought from Ancient Greece to the present. Although initially, the blog will only record work by its founders, our aim is to include, little by little, works by other artists and writers so as to intensify the process of creative accumulation until the point of its destruction, when the blog will burst out of its frame and the virtual accumulation it has staged will take over reality. After this break has occurred, the works featured on Primitive Accumulation will be gathered for a show at a gallery in London, where a self-published book with images and texts from the site will be launched.

http://www.primitiveaccumulation.com/

Project: European School of Social Imagination

SCEPSI – European School of Social Imagination
Conference 20-22 May 2011, Republic of San Marino

PRELIMINARY PROGRAM: http://scepsi.eu/en/program
PRACTICAL INFORMATION: http://scepsi.eu/en/info

Reinventing the autonomy of knowledge is the task of our time. It’s not only a political task. The epistemic foundation of research and learning as autonomous activities is at stake, when dogmas of profit, growth, competition take the lead in the old institutions of production and transmission of knowledge. This is why we are calling students and researchers, artists and scientists and social activists to gather in the first conference of SCEPSI that will take place in San Marino, on 20-22 May 2011.

Protests against the financial aggression and the destruction of the public school in the European continent are spreading, but we have to create new institutions, aimed to self organization of cognitive workers and to the reactivation of social sensibility and imagination. The conference will be the first act of the activity of the European School of Social Imagination, that in the next year will organize seminars in San Marino, and in European cities like Helsinki, London, and Oslo.

The activity of the School starts from four question: 1. How can we think the consequences to every day life in the face of a possible economic failure of the European Union? 2. How can art and poetry arouse new energies and revitalize the social field weakened by precarization and the alienation of (digital) labour? 3.How can emergent scientific imagination
reconstitute the social body? 4. How can we open up spaces for the autonomy of knowledge within the process of the marketisation and capitalisation of the education system?

These questions will be foundational for the emergent curriculum of the first year of seminars and engagements of the European School of Social Imagination. The following is the program of the conference, that may change slightly during the next weeks.

Exhibition: The End of Money

Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam
The Netherlands
http://www.wdw.nl

Witte de With is pleased to present two events in May: The opening of the group exhibition The End of Money and the first two lectures in the series To Tell The Truth.

THE END OF MONEY
Group exhibition
22 May–7 August 2011

Opening
Saturday 21 May 2011 (6 to 9 pm)
Performance by Goldin+Senneby at 7 pm

Film Screening
Sunday 26 June 2011 (12 to 6 pm)

The End of Money is a group exhibition about time and value. Bringing together works by a host of international artists, this exhibition reflects upon the fears, hopes, and expectations associated with the end of money and its ominous consequence: the dissolution of an absolute standard of value.

What limits does the economy impose on our collective imagination, and how is the collective imagination responsible for the current economy? The End of Money focuses on the multiple relationships that could and those that should exist between culture and economy. Informing this curatorial project is the utopian notion that, in a world without money—a world where money has been factored out of the collective memory, other suppressed forms of value may emerge, leading to another social bond and a different relationship to time.

The works included in The End of Money range from reflections on the arbitrary ways in which value is ascribed to things to explorations of the absolute loss of representative value. Some of the featured works highlight time, which is a persistent corollary of money in our efficiency-obsessed culture.

Artists
Alexander Apostol; Pierre Bismuth; Peter Fischli & David Weiss; Zachary Formwalt; Goldin+Senneby; Hadley+Maxwell; Toril Johannessen; Vishal Jugdeo; Agnieszka Kurant; Matts Leiderstam; Maha Maamoun; Christodoulos Panayiotou; Lili Reynaud-Dewar; Tomas Saraceno; Tonel; Vangelis Vlahos; and Lawrence Weiner.

Curated by
Juan A. Gaitán; assisted by Amira Gad.

Publication
To accompany the exhibition, a digital publication will be made available for free download via http://www.wdw.nl in July 2011 and will feature texts by: Dessislava Dimova, Donatien Grau, Dieter Roelstraete, and Carolina Sanin.

Tours
• Every Wednesday and Sunday, 3 pm: tours for individuals in English or Dutch. Free excluding exhibition entry price. No reservation necessary.
• Tours are available for groups of 10 to 15 people. reservations@wdw.nl

Education
Witte de With Education offers ‘art confrontations,’ interactive tours for schools and universities. reservations@wdw.nl

Supported by
OCA, Pro Helvetia: Swiss Arts Council, Cypriot Ministry of Education & Culture. With thanks to the Fonds BKVB.

Project: Time/Bank

Time/Bank at Portikus
7 May–26 June 2011

Opening:
6 May 2011, 8 pm

Press preview:
6 May 2011, 11 am

Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main
http://www.portikus.de
e-flux.com/timebank

On May 6, 2011, Portikus will become a bank. Initiated by artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle in 2009, Time/Bank is a platform that enables people to trade goods and services without using money. With a growing pool of more than a thousand participants around the world, Time/Bank allows groups and individuals to collectively exchange their time and skills through the use of credits earned through the bank, as an intermediary and guarantor. Time/Bank aims to create an immaterial currency and a parallel micro-economy for the cultural community, one that will create a sense of worth for many of the exchanges that already take place within the art field.

At Portikus, the Time/Bank will be comprised of four main components: an exhibition of artist-designed prototypes for a time-based currency; a currency mint that will print and circulate four hundred Hour Notes—one for each hour of the exhibition; an archive of notgeld notes—the legendary German alternative currency popular during the hyperinflation of the 1920s; a branch of Time/Store offering a range of commodities, groceries, and articles of daily use, as well as a selection of artist’s editions and books produced by Portikus.

Time/Bank at Portikus will host a series of public seminars and talks by the theorist and activist Franco Berardi (Bifo); Paul Glover, founder of Ithaca Hours local currency system; anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli, professor at Columbia University; and artists Raqs Media Collective.

The Frankfurt branch of Time/Bank will include a network of local art institutions and organizations, such as the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Jewish Museum, amongst others, where the currency of the Time/Bank—Hour Notes, designed by the American artist Lawrence Weiner—can be used for admission, and to make purchases in cafeterias and books stores.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Portikus will publish a book dealing with qualities of time, gift economies, alternative currencies, and other related topics. The book will include commissioned essays and illustrations, as well as contributions by members of Time/Bank.

TIme/Bank Frankfurt Lecture:

Franco Berardi (Bifo)
Tuesday, 10. May 2011, 19:00, Portikus

The main cultural transformation of modern capitalism has been the creation of refrains of temporal perception that pervade and discipline society: the refrain of factory work, the refrain of the salary, the refrain of production line. The digital transition has brought along with it new refrains: electronic fragmentation, information overload, acceleration of the semiotic exchange. Fractalization of time, competition. The essential feature of refrain is the rhythm. Rhythm is the relation of a subjective flow of signs (musical, poetic, gestual signs) with the environment: cosmic environment, earthly environment, social environment. Rhythm is singular and collective. It is singularizing the sound of the world in a special modeling of the environmental sound. But it is able to trigger a process of agglutination, of sensitive and sensible communality. Sometime people start to sing the same song, and to dance the same dance. It can be dangerous, and on this kind of homogeneous subjectivation is based fascism, and modern totalitarianism in general. But it can happen in ironic and nomadic ways. People start to create a new song, and they do it together. That’s a movement.

Franco Berardi, aka “Bifo,” founder of the famous “Radio Alice” in Bologna and an important figure of the Italian Autonomia Movement, is a writer, media theorist, and media activist. He currently teaches Social History of the Media at the Accademia di Brera, Milan.