Google map pics of Grand Calumet River Headwaters and Environs

Google map pics of Grand Calumet headwaters in Gary, Indiana and Miller Beach Indiana





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Implementing Experimental Archaeology To Practice Cultural/Social Archaeo-Gemology

 
Project: 
 By: LaMar Gayles

By collaborating with a local steel worker and forklift driver in the Southland area of Chicago Heights who works with found metal in his everyday life, I hope to commission a piece of jewelry which examines process in "DIY" art practices while too exploring the cultural, historical, metaphysical, and social histories of the materials being used in the project. Specifically, the DIY artist was given a piece of "Nevada Purple" Chalcedony which he will use to produce a jewelry object which draws inspiration from his previous creative expression in metal. This practice of creative collaboration, critical interpretation of materiality, and attempts to create objects inspired by historical moments (historical reproduction) pulls from the field of Experimental Archeology which seeks to utilize such methodologies as a mode of experiential interpreting artifacts and their meaning. By doing this I hope to draw connections between the DIY movements in the twentieth centuries and their descendent traditions in the present day. Finally, this project aims to illustrate the Post-war appreciation and re-invested fascination with a metaphysical  consumption of gemstones. Through this project I hope to redevelop what is currently known as Archaeo-gemology to consider more experiential and interpretive methodologies as the field is stuck in a proclivity to only analyze gemstones through quantitative methods and stylistic taxonomies.

Images from creative consultation with local Southland Chicago Area Artist, Eric Suderow. His sculpture The Iron Man pulls from several 1990s Counterculture films including  Iron Giant.

Background Information On Chalcedony: 
Found throughout many parts of the world in different colors Chalcedony is a mineral and semi-precious gemstone, which has been implemented in the artistic, cultural, and sartorial practices of many different groups reaching back to at least the New Kingdom of Egypt and still today. This particular example of a purple Chalcedony (a variety common in parts of the Western United States specifically in California and Nevada) is a cabochon which is sizable in karat weight (around twenty-eight karats) and with a precisely defined shape and a well polished oval shape. Inside of this stone is an inclusion of a peculiarly large amount botryoidal, which is a natural juxtaposition anomalous to many researchers in the field of mineralogy. This particular specimen was found in the American Southwest (specifically a small mine in Nevada) and was crafted by lapidary (gemstone-carver or practitioner of glyptic art) C.P. The glyptic (carved gemstone or lapidary) artist chose to form the piece into a cabochon (a smoothed top carved stone with curving smooth bottom.)
This stone embodies centuries (perhaps even millenia) of varying cultural practices around the world from spiritual, religious, and metaphysical, scientific and commercial. Chalcedony has been utilized for artistic, expressive, and industrial products for centuries and is known to have a wide range of social associations.  In his text (the earliest historically documented treatise on gemstones) Natural History Book XXXVII, Pliny the Elder describes the properties, names, and characteristics of numerous gemstones that were known to persons in Ancient Greece. Pliny describes Chalcedony as a stone which provided itself to craftspersons in Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt as a precious material meant for jewelry and spiritually potent (powerful) enough to serve as amulets against powerful negative forces. Pliny also acknowledges that this material was commonly used for cameos (carved/relief tradition on gemstones) by these same groups. Archaeologists, have proven through mineralogical testing that these same stones were utilized to make spear tips during the Bronze Age in Rome.
The lapidary Christopher Peek carved this object with consideration for its metaphysical prowess as outlined by scholar Albertus Magnus in his text the The Book Of Minerals which outlined the majority of the current West’s epistemological frameworks (ways of being/embodying and using) gemstones in cultural practices.  Albertus referenced chalcedony as a stone which promotes winning and prosperity, while “preserving the powers of the body.” Understanding the way Chalcedony (like other gem-materials) was to be endowed fantastical or metaphysical powers to promote well-being.
  This specific stone (a dark lilac or lavender variant of Chalcedony) has an  aura that evokes an overwhelmingly calm energy as it is held in the hands of a viewer, which in turn produces a sense of serenity as well as a cold touch. The specimen is subtly cloudy, yet has a strong translucens which allows light to shine through the dark veil of botryoidal.
The stone was acquisitioned by gemstone collector and conceptual jeweler LaMar Gayles for an experimental project on metaphysical jewelry and its evolution during the “DIY” (Do It Yourself) counterculture era (circa 1940s-90s) in the United States of America.

Visual Research: (Images of Similar Artist's work) 

Rhonda Wheatley 

FULL TITLE: Empath Protector. Helps empaths create healthy energetic boundaries so that they may clearly distinguish their own emotions, needs, and desires from those of others.

MEDIA: Vintage mannequin hand, wooden beads, natural fluorite crystal octahedrons, and acrylic paint.

YEAR: 2017

(Borrowed from artist's website at https://www.rhondawheatley.com/new-page) 

INSTALLATION TITLE: Elixir Stills and Cure Bottles. Activate by gazing into jars and bottles. Gazing must be 100% voluntary. 

INDIVIDUAL BOTTLE TITLES:
Radical self-acceptance elixir (formulated for self-esteem issues)
Self Love and acceptance elixir (calibrated for the self-hating)
Discernment for empaths; cure for poor boundaries
Elixir for relinquishing the need to control situations and other people
Find your power; cure for those easily taken advantage of
Perceive inner beauty; cure for fixation on outer appearances of self and others

GENERAL MEDIA: Healing intent and energy, incantations, moss, flower petals, herbs, sea horses, cicadas, snake bones, snakeskin sheddings, sea shells, sand, wasp nests, succulent plants, various crystals, including amber, mica flakes, and pyrite, and more.

YEAR: 2017

(Borrowed from artist's website at https://www.rhondawheatley.com/new-page) 

These two artworks were made by Chicago artist Rhonda Wheatley who often utilizes natural materials like stones to reflect on their metaphysical prowess and abilities.


Daniel Pope 

Flower Crown (Borrowed from http://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/detail/UCHICAGO~6~6~630~1262864:Crowns-and-Medallions?sort=creator%2Cculture%2Cdate%2Cstyle_or_period&qvq=q:pope;sort:creator%2Cculture%2Cdate%2Cstyle_or_period&mi=87&trs=620)

Images of Daniel Pope
(Borrowed from https://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Daniel%20pope&sort=creator%2Cculture%2Cdate%2Cstyle_or_period&os=0)

Image of Cross-like Crown
(Borrowed from https://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Daniel%20pope&sort=creator%2Cculture%2Cdate%2Cstyle_or_period&os=0)

Daniel Pope also known as The Sandman, was a Chicago artist connected with the Black Arts Movement and made fantastic wearable regalia from found jewelry in Chicago's South and West sides. The jewelry he gathered was found through a practice he undertook of cleaning the streets of the neighborhoods he roamed.

Sources: 

 https://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?q=Daniel%20pope&sort=creator%2Cculture%2Cdate%2Cstyle_or_period&os=0

https://www.rhondawheatley.com/

Strand, Eva. (2010). Experimental Textile Archaeology.

Lüle, Çig
dem. 2011. "Non-destructive gemmological tests for the identification of ancient gems".
Gems of Heaven / Ed. by Chris Entwistle and Noël Adams. London : British Museum. 1-3.

Interview:
Lüle, Çig
dem (Archaegemology and the Field), LaMar Gayles via email, March 23, 2019.

 

Some definitions of cybernetics, when it resonates with me

“A science concerned with the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control."

— A.N. Kolmogorov

“Cybernetique – the art of growing.”
— A.M. Ampere (19th century)

“The science of control and communication in the animal and machine”
— Norbert Wiener

“The art and science of securing defensible metaphors.”
— Gordon Pask

“Should one name one central concept, a first principle, of cybernetics, it would be circularity”
— Heinz von Foerester

"Call me Trimtab."

— Buckminster Fuller

“A way of thinking.”
— Ernst von Glasersfeld

“The science and art of understanding.”
— Humberto Maturana

“The ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness.”
— Herbert Brun

“A way of thinking about ways of thinking, of which it is one”
— Larry Richards

All Watched Over By Love and Grace

Richard Brautigan's poem, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Here is the link on the Atlantic that I pulled it from: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/

And here is the first episode of Adam Curtis' documentary series by the same name:

https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353

Whole Earth Catalog French-Style

So Lucie, who y'all met at the Experimental Station last week turned me onto a Francophone analog to the WEC, something called Savoir Revivre (Knowledge to Live Again pretty much). https://savoir-revivre.coerrance.org/ It's gorgeously dense, with handwritten tutorials and funky illustrations covering everything from waste management https://savoir-revivre.coerrance.org/livre-les_ordures-12.php to insomnia https://savoir-revivre.coerrance.org/livre-insomnie_nervosite-143.php to protection from bug bites https://savoir-revivre.coerrance.org/livre-les_guepes-28.php

Tech-Hippies & Cyber-Punks Have Beef

Graham’s pushback against the utopian rhetoric of the early internet reminded me of a section of Adam Curtis’s sprawling mindfuck of a documentary, Hypernormalisation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM). 35:40 - 46:36 plays right into our discussion. 

On the one hand, you have the vision of cyberspace as a place of liberation - a borderless zone influenced by the radical politics and transcendent drug experiences of the 60s. This is exemplified in  “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” by John Perry Barlow. <Interesting wikipedia byline for that guy: American poet and essayist, a cattle rancher, and a cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.>

A relevant passage reads: 

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Barlow’s antagonists are some young punk hackers from a group called Masters of Deception. In a 1989 Harper’s Magazine forum on computers, information, privacy, and electronic intrusion, they mock Barlow’s vision as naive fantasy. And they try to prove their point by publishing Barlow’s credit history, which they’ve dredged from the banking networks- a bit of a shock for the tech-utopist. As Barlow puts it, “To a middle-class American, one's credit rating has become nearly identical to his freedom.”

Curtis sums up the exchange with a question: “..whether Barlowe’s utopian rhetoric about cyberspace might really be a convenient camouflage  hiding the emergence of a new and growing power, that was way beyond politics?”

As we swim around this sea of information, our trails, our data, can be a means of corporate and government control. It’s hard for me to shake Curtis’ more dystopian lens. At the same time, the internet is (banal statement forthcoming) a complicated place. There are countless examples of how open access to information and the organizing potential of social media have spawned or fueled liberatory movements. EuroMaidan/Black Lives Matter/current uprisings in Hong Kong- all harness the emancipatory powers of the net in ways that resonate with “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”.

Materials of note:

-A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace- https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

-This Tribune article detailing the misadventures of the Masters of Deception https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1992-07-24-9203060830-story.html

-Barlow’s account of the whole altercation: https://www.eff.org/pages/crime-and-puzzlement

Sabrina Huchthausen

Digital, Analogue, and Human Connection

I will be transparent and say that coming into this class, I had no prior knowledge of what The Whole Earth Catalogue was but found its relationship to counterculture and cyberculture very prevalent to some of the questions I am wrestling with in the studio. As some of you know, in my practice, I am interested in portraiture and the portrait's function in a time where because of technology, "likeness" is so quickly captured. 

Below I've included some writing/ research I've done for my thesis for those who are not familiar:

While the medium of portraiture may vary drastically, it is consistent in implying a usually human subject, and it also is a social practice. Historian Richard Brilliant writes, with the context of human portraiture in mind:

"The very fact of the portrait's allusion to an individual human being, actually existing

outside the work, defines the function of the artwork in the world and constitutes that

cause of it is coming into being. This meaningful relationship between the portrait and its

object of representation directly reflects the social dimension of human life as a field of action among persons, with its own repertoire of signals and messages." (Brilliant, 8)

A more current instance of the social nature of the portrait comes from visual anthropologist Edmund Carpenter, in an exposition on his contact with photographic portraits in New Guinea.

"One day at a marriage ceremony, we offered to photograph the bridal couple. The

groom immediately posed with a male friend. We re-posed him with his pregnant bride &

year-old child. It was instantly apparent from the behavior of everyone present that the picture

he had requested would have been routine, whereas the picture we took was anything but routine. It was as if we had photographed, in our society, the groom kissing the best man. Some weeks later, we visited their home and saw this photograph carefully pinned up. […]All

the power & prestige of the camera had been used in direct conflict with one of the most profound

cultural values of this society." (Carpenter, 145)

Carpenter's story is a fascinating instance of how the fundamental role that the portrait plays in the representation of individuals are intensely social. In this example, the two aspects of portraiture as both a form of observation and a culturally adapted kind of social practice are visible; so are the tensions that can exist between those two aspects and the real social weights those tensions can have. 

"In all of its definitions, the portrait is as much an image of a social and historical way of understanding its subject as it is of the subject itself."

 My method of constructing proxies for subjects outside of my physical proximity is heavily founded in the idea of agency embedded into art object as proposed by Alfred Gell. Like how some experience limitations of proximity to their deities, I try to construct a conduit, via a 3D model, in order have access to my subject. The bodily empowerment found within the devotee's gaze, care, belief, and a multitude of different rituals/tasks, turns the object into powerful deities. I also assert my agency and understanding that these proxies I construct are more than adequate to paint as a portrait. Then To simulate this sense of "exchange," as described by Carpenter, I decided to start embedding the last conversation between my subject in question, and myself into the code of the object file (3D Model of the likeness of the subject). It is our social exchange as an individual object file and a vehicle for abstraction by being embedded into the code of the model constructed in the subject's likeness.

And I guess this is where I was thinking about steering my research for this class...

I am interested in the relationship between the digital, the analog, and where they complicate and enforce each other. I watched this lecture over the summer and can't get, "digital file codes and DNA are instructions for reproduction" out of my head.

WJT Mitchell Lecture, March 20, 2012 from MoCP, Columbia College Chicago on Vimeo.
WJT Mitchell Lecture, March 20, 2012 from MoCP, Columbia College Chicago on Vimeo.

"W.J.T. Mitchell is a scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). This lecture argues against the view that digital photography does not have the firm grip on reality that was claimed by traditional photography. On the contrary, as Mitchell explains, digital photography offers a “double-entry bookkeeping” of reality that “expands the potential scope of photographic truth-claims along with the potential for lying.”

Eileen Mueller: Rural Old Lesbian

This semester I want to spend some time researching intentional communities with a close look at lesbian separatist communities. The first source I have come across is a magazine founded in 1983 called "Maize, A Lesbian Country Magazine." I have a PDF of issue number 49, printed in spring of 1996. This publication is dedicated to "lesbians of the land" or "landdykes." It prints reader submissions ranging from poetry, artwork, letters to the editor, marketplace listings, personal stories, advice for living on the land, and even a word puzzle.

Here is a poem I have excerpted called Rural Old Lesbian, by Emma Joy Crone of British Columbia:

R.O.L. has lived in a
Canyon
With many lesbias
in cabins,
Trillium, Star,
Rainbow.
Outdoor living
Clitoria
Outdoor beds
Under the stars.

[....]

R.O.L.
at 49
learned to chop wood
raised a tipi
Discovered her rural self
Had her first Dyke haircut
in a field
Cooked for 12 women
outside
one tap
No stove.
R.O.L.
ate a peyote
in a circle
shared visions
heard stories
Lesbian stories
women's pain
women's joy
singing songs, dusk to dawn.

[....]

R.O.L.
Lives on an island
is 68
Grows herbs, casts spells
Grows smaller gardens, harvests seeds
Dreams dreams of lesbian nation
Lesbian lands.

Found in the same issue of Maize,
this inset image is from the article "Rural Fire Fighting"
written by Dawn Susun of Taigh a'Gharaidh Scotland

Farming and deforestation:




This platform is totally new to me. My apologies in advance if something doesn't work properly. I'll work on my "blogging" skills. 

The recent Amazon rainforest fire was a global catastrophe. The main cause of it, however, was deforestation for cattle farming. I thought this article on NY Times was pretty relevant. 

It also touches on the topics of consumption and our food system. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/climate/what-if-we-all-ate-a-bit-less-meat.html?te=1&nl=climate-fwd:&emc=edit_clim_20190821?campaign_id=54&instance_id=11807&segment_id=16364&user_id=1428c5c77a1c4d2571e6a9effcd8e057&regi_id=84222215 

Sonya Bogdanova: The Working Man's Reward by Elaine Lewinnek

Hi all! This is an excerpt from the book I mentioned during the Experimental Station visit, The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. This should be a direct link. You can also search for this book through the UIC Library, it'll link you to the Oxford Scholarship Online page so you can read more online.

"Middle-class businesspeople and packinghouse managers lived in the part of Lake known as Englewood, south of Fifty-fifth Street (later Garfield Boulevard). Wealthy packinghouse owners lived in an elite “nook of sylvan quietness and verdant beauty” just east of Halsted, in villas on Emerald and Winter (later Union) Streets.¹³ By the 1890s the stench of packing and the disparities between Packingtown’s owners and workers drove the owners to more quiet, more verdant retreats elsewhere. This created a leapfrog effect. While Chicago’s workers moved out of the city, businessmen were also moving out, “to skip the intermediate areas partially filled with obsolete houses occupied by the poorer classes and seek homesites where the houses were new and the neighborhood had not acquired an adverse character.”¹⁴ That elite search for space untainted by workers competed with the workers’ own search for homes near peripheral factories, both influencing the dispersed nature of Chicago’s built environment."

Ad for homes by the Stockyards

LaMar Gayles: Gemology- A Commercialized Science With The Potential For Social Justice

 From the Whole Earth Gemologists- To An Understanding Of Our Gems 
 By: LaMar Gayles


      Within the Whole Earth Catalog series is a section titled Craft and Industry, which features numerous examples of articles, texts, and exploratory written pieces various aspects of emerging DIY practices in the "Expansive 60's" (broadly defined as the decades span encompassing the 1960s-80s). This allowed for everyday persons (with the means of purchasing the book then) to infiltrate (or pay into) the complex worlds of certain vocations or technical trades not made apparent to the public, for instance Gemology. In a copy of The Whole Earth Catalog from 1960s are a set of advertisements for jewelry-making books and gemology/lapidary equipment. The inclusion of these advertisements (an example pictured below) invites persons participating in 60's American Counterculture and more broadly persons interested in gemological concepts (but who might not have the access to the training) to begin the process of learning these fields on their own in a "DIY" or "Do It Yourself" framework.

Image from the Whole Earth Catalog
First Day of Art 520 with Dan Peterman
Lapidary Advertisement from the 1960s-70s

Lapidary Vs. Gemologist: Misconception or Purposeful Communication? 
In the Whole Earth Catalog "gemology" and "lapidary" are used as synonymous or interchangeable terms. Yet, in today's culture which often rewards/values credentialism has distinctly separated these two words. Gemology is literally defined as the study of gemstones, while lapidary is an adjective meaning in relation to stone/gems and the act of reshaping them, or as a person who does work of manipulating gemstones through polishing, engraving, or cutting. Though, these terms are VERY similar,  in today's culture and in the world of gemstones they hold separate meanings.

However, in the Whole Earth Catalog was the positioning of these terms (together or as synonymous entities) done on purpose? Currently, the field of gemology has been globally monopolized by the GIA (Gemological Institute of America as well as its partner organizations), whom are dedicated to developing the field (of gemology) by constructing credentialed programs for students to learn the skills. needed. This has caused gemology to become a commercialized field over the past five decades or so, which is a major epistemological shift from how gemology was posited before the 20th century. Before the commercialization of gemology as the field which "studies precious stones" scholars or practitioners poised in studying gemstones came from a plethora of backgrounds and were often also, lapidaries. This is seen in numerous earlier gemological treatise branching all the way back to the earliest known by Pliny The Elder in his Natural History Book 36-39. Yet, in today's globalized world credentialed gemologists are the only persons recognized as the "officials" who can study previous stones. This is most likely due to the global impetus to legitimize and "credentialize" the field as a means of commercializing it to the mass public. Now you too can become a gemologist by paying the GIA (or one of its partners) over 15,000.00 USD to obtain a diploma which says you can. Most of these programs only introduce students to gemstones and their forming processes, and has a stronger focus on understanding fiscal market value attached to a gemstone, based on taxonomy developed by the GIA. However, today persons who work with gemstones (at any capacity) without connections GIA (or connections with their affiliates) are professionally considered hobbyists and the art of lapidary has been reduced to that of a hobby with no official or credential granting programs. 

The impetus to globally resonate with gemology as the sole discipline that can study precious stones, has excluded persons who do the same practice (in other words also studying gemstones) but under the guise of lapidary or "self-taught" gemologist versus an "accredited gemologist". By socially embracing "accredited" gemologists we have left behind the benefits of those who come to the discipline from another field as well as their respective insights. In other words often persons who are "accredited" gemologists far too often focus on only understanding the financial value of gemstones versus producing critical, social, or even historical, scientific, and visual scholarship. Often, persons who "study" gemstones through the lens of another field outside of gemology (the field which stones are meant to be studied) focus on cultural, social, scientific, historical, and visual concepts en lieu economic/fiscal concerns.

The Whole Earth Catalog provides a unique countercultural view on gemology as it pairs the field with lapidary as if they were symbiotic in nature of intersecting in interests. By doing so the catalog provides an outlet for persons who purchase it, businesses to procure gemological equipment in order to practice in the field themselves. Since these publications were produced during the time (1960s) when gemology is gaining more notoriety to the American public view and social distinctions are being made between gemology and "lapidarism".



Urging*** For "Social Gemologists" -  Representatives of Cultural Knowledge and Radical Thought around Earth Materials
This is something I hope to make the focus of my research for the course and to produce a series of visual projects that explores this concept. 

Next Steps: 
Using gemstones (for example the chalcedony pictured below) I hope to construct visual installations, wearable sculptures, and performance objects based on the practices of gemologists and their colleagues lapidaries. This will allow me to understand and visually clarify their distinctions and the potential social power of the both disciplines. I argue gemology and lapidary are two sides of the same coin or in other words truly one discipline which has been separated by the interests of specific practitioners and institutions. I will urge persons to understand that a "social" gemology (that also encompasses lapidary and other forms of gemstone research) deals with a multivalent stream of information namely cultural, economic, historical, social, and visual. 

Image of Botryoidal Chalcedony which will be used in one of the visual projects for this study. 

Landscape Alteration: Art vs Industry

It's not a research yet, just an observation. While The Whole Earth Catalog promotes "back to nature" approach, the contemporary to that era art, even being called land art or environmental art, took a different turn. Monumental projects, such as Spiral Jetty, were huge interventions, demonstrating human power over the nature. The scale of some art works was comparable to the scale of big industrial developments, also contributing to the landscape change. I'm curious what motivated the artists to perform those ambitious projects, how did it match the "back to nature" trend, how those ideas developed into the contemporary art practice, and how it was similar or different to the industrial landscape projects of that time.

Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, 1970

Lightning Field by Walter De Maria, 1977

Surrounded Islands by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 1983

Roden Crater by James Turrell, work in process since 1977

Graham Livingston

Just a few things I've been thinking about. What does the construction of solidarity from the network look like? How can the aesthetic / cultural realignment from be acted upon to change the benign connection of inherent networks to agency from the connection? 

*Frequencymind Mission statement and link.

https://www.frequencymind.com

FREQUENCY was founded by Vivian Rosenthal, Meg Poe M.D. and Gio Israel. We are a group of people who feel called upon to create a space for individuals to come together and connect. To slow down and turn the gaze inward. To just be. To remember ourselves. We come from many different backgrounds - medicine, tech, art, music, architecture, community building - and we now find ourselves together in a singular mission:  to spread love and joy, in the hope that it will allow each of us to tune ourselves to our own inner music, to become more of who we are, to be better listeners, and with that, help ourselves and others rise together.

Frequency is an exploration into consciousness, through collective healing.  

Frequency will offer immersive experiences with many of the great visionaries, healers, artists, musicians and wisdom teachers on the planet. The experiences help shift participants’ energies and educate through the body to create a curriculum for the spirit. Each journey will invite participants to access a more embodied and connected state of being, letting go of the anxiety, stress and overwhelm of modern life. Artistic, aesthetic and spiritual traditions will provide pathways to access a grounding connectivity with ourselves and each other through inquiries into what it means to be alive today. 

*Building Acid Communism Essay from Issue 1 of Transmediale festival's extension journal and link.

https://transmediale.de

Building Acid Communism

Plan C

The term "Acid Communism" was coined by author and cultural theorist Mark Fisher as part of his attempts to envision a Left capable of breaking the "no alternative" ideology of Capitalist Realism by unleashing post-capitalist desires. Fisher was writing a book titled Acid Communism before his sudden death in 2017. With the aim of exploring Fisher's concept further and embed it into their practice, the group Plan C, of which he was also a member, designed a thematically related workshop. Building Acid Communism was hosted at transmediale 2018 and involved consciousness-raising techniques and group discussions: How can we talk about collective experiences based on collective action and joy today? How can we turn anew to a politics of care? In this article, Plan C members Nadia Idle and Keir Milburn discuss the background, aims and outcomes of the workshop. 

Over the last 18 months, the UK has seen an explosion of writing, discussion and even practices taking the concept of Acid Communism as departure point. These have included extensive discussions of Acid Corbynism which have linked topics as diverse as club culture, the use of psychedelic drugs, the production of memes, and the role of electoral politics in a rejuvenated UK Left. More recently, there have been attempts to communize meditation and create a more politicized form of mindfulness. In addition, a regular Acid Communism/ Corbynism podcast, #ACFM, is due for launch in September this year.

The phrase Acid Communism comes from the name of an unfinished book project that writer and social theorist Mark Fisher was working on before he took his own life in January 2017. Mark was a friend of ours and like us a member of the political group Plan C. Indeed, some of the inspiration for the Acid Communism project lay in Plan C’s experimental attemptsto reinvent consciousness-raising groups for contemporary conditions. Building on these experiments and driven by a desire to embed Mark’s ideas into our ongoing political practice, we designed a workshop called Building Acid Communism to run at the 2018 transmediale festival held in Berlin. This article describes the workshop, the ideas behind it, and our initial findings.

We derived our approach from the proposed subtitle for Mark’s Acid Communism book, “On Post-Capitalist Desire”. Mark’s most influential book, Capitalist Realism, presents a world in which post-capitalist desires have been massively constrained.1 "Capitalist Realism" refers to the neoliberal project of constricting what seems socially and politically possible, and even conceivable, to a single “reality”, one entirely dominated by capitalist social relations. Post-capitalist desires don’t disappear in the world of Capitalist Realism, but they are made unrealizable by “a pragmatic adjustment”. “Capitalist realism” Mark says, “isn’t the direct endorsement of neoliberal doctrine; it’s the idea that, whether we like it or not, the world is governed by neoliberal ideas, and that won’t change. There’s no point fighting the inevitable.”2 At first, that sense of inevitability appeared to survive the 2008 financial crisis but the slow, tepid nature of the recovery, particularly in terms of living standards, has gradually cemented the conviction that our economic model is broken. Following the unprecedented political events of 2016, with Brexit and Trump on the Right and the breakthrough of Sanders and Corbyn on the Left, it is evident that the political model that went along with the neoliberal economic model is also defunct. Capitalist Realism has cracked. Neoliberalism no longer looks immortal. Yet it is far from clear what could replace it. 

It is within this problem that we situate Mark Fisher’s shift in focus: Away from a concern with outlining Capitalist Realism, a project of critique, towards an engagement with Acid Communism, a project of construction. Acid Communism was, an attempt to think through what the Left should look like once it escapes Capitalist Realism. It is an incredibly difficult task because over the last thirty years most Left activism, and nearly all critical theory has operated with semi-conscious assumption that change is not possible. It has been caught within what Wendy Brown calls "Left Melancholy", “a Left that has become more attached to its impossibility than to its potential fruitfulness”.3 One strategy for breaking with this attachment to impotence is to return to the question of post-capitalist desire. For us, this means an active project of identifying those desires which are produced within contemporary society but whose fulfillment cannot be achieved within a world dominated by capitalist social relations. It is from here that we can discover the most potent areas for anti-capitalist politics.

Mark’s Acid Communist project began with a reassessment of the Western counter-culture of the 1960s and seventies in particular, based on the understanding that “neoliberalism is best understood as a project aimed at destroying—to the point of making them unthinkable—the experiments in Democratic Socialism and Libertarian Communism that were efflorescing at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies.”4 In fact, in recent years, Mark had begun to redefine Capitalist Realism as the outcome of a project of consciousness deflation. A project aimed at eliminating the kinds of raised and expanded consciousness that had taken root and begun to flourish in the 1970s. He was particularly interested in thinking through the connections and potentials of the various forms through which people’s consciousness of the structural constraints of society and their ability to change them were raised and expanded.

Mark identifies three modes of raised consciousness prevalent in the 1970s. The first is the heightened level of class consciousness at that time. The idea that there were different classes with different, and in principal antagonistic, interests was widely accepted during the post-war era. Indeed, it was a presupposition incorporated into the economic and political structures of the time. With hindsight we can see the social movements and counter-culture of the seventies as, in part, efforts to develop a much more expansive conception of the working class and of working-class culture. In fact, the control exercised by working-class youth over popular culture during the post-war period, with subcultures pioneering new ways of living, can be seen as a huge project to complexify the working class while also warding off the confidence-sapping effects of class subjugation. The neoliberal era saw class consciousness pushed into a fugitive state. Despite our lives being ever more determined by the material and psychological effects of class, it is only recently that the idea of class has returned as a legitimate category of discussion. As a result of this forced exile the conceptions of class we usually operate with are based on a past reality. They are divorced from our everyday experience.

The second area of investigation for Mark was the consciousness-raising practices that formed the bedrock of second-wave feminism. The practice of consciousness-raising groups consisted of small groups of women meeting regularly to discuss their lives and their problems. In doing so, people quickly came to realize they had similar problems and difficulties. In fact, the commonality of problems led quite naturally to the conclusion that they must have structural causes and couldn’t, as might have previously been thought, be the result of individual failings. This in turn led to collectivized action to change the structures causing the oppression in question. Given current conditions we can see the vital role such practices could play in reviving not just feminist consciousness but class consciousness as well. The feminist movement of the 1970s saw consciousness raising groups as a means of creating “women as a class” by overcoming the isolation of women who, lacking a shared workplace, had found themselves and their problems relegated to the private sphere. Today, as those conditions have become common far beyond a particular gender, consciousness raising practices have become a vital opening moment in class formation. Lacking the straightforwardly similar experiences that came with the age of mass workplaces we need common tools to work through personal experience and come to shared understandings of the forces conditioning that experience. 

The final arena of consciousness raising, or in this case consciousness expansion, examined by Mark Fisher leads us down a less obvious path for Leftist discourse. Mark points to psychedelic consciousness as an important component of the potential for a new form of politics that was barely beginning to emerge in the 1970s. This is what the “acid” in Acid Communism refers to but it is not just a reference to the direct effects that taking LSD had upon members of the New Left and the counter-culture. Just as important were the more diffuse effects of psychedelia that worked through pop culture to embed a notion of a plastic and changeable reality. The Beatles’ experiments with acid, for example, led to a burst of sonic, graphic, and lyrical inventiveness that helped spread a mediated experience of psychedelia into wider society. We can think of psychedelia as containing the potential to expand social and political possibility because it undermines those elements of life that are presented as necessary and inevitable by revealing them as merely contingent and therefore, at least in principle, as changeable. Consciousness raising then encompasses a series of functions. It involves identifying the structural causes of the social constraints that are placed on your life. It includes the increased confidence and capacity that comes with seeing yourself as part of a powerful collective actor rather than an isolated individual. And it also includes that expansion of social and political possibility that comes when something that has been presented as eternal and inevitable is revealed as merely contingent and plastic.

For us, the Acid Communism project involves the reinvention of consciousness-raising techniques for the purpose of identifying where post-capitalist desires are being produced by contemporary life. We think this can help with one of the key tasks of the present moment, which is unveiling and exploring the precise idea of freedom that is motivating the contemporary Left and, as age is currently such a key line of political division, the concept and practices of freedom that will motivate the young. Our workshop at transmediale 2018 was an attempt to do just that. The structure was simple. After introducing the idea of Acid Communism, we asked a series of questions—introduced one at a time—which participants were asked to discuss in small groups. We then wrote up each group’s thoughts and answers on a flip chart for all to see. The questions chosen were intended to test what had changed since the heightened consciousness of the 1970s. Each one was linked to the kind of experiences from which post-capitalist desires were produced in that era. 

Firstly, we asked when participants last had time that was truly free from work. In the 1960s and 1970s the “refusal of work” was a prominent political strategy linked to the idea that freedom started when work ended. Judging by the responses in our workshop, it is clear this distinction has broken down. In fact, there was much discussion about what counted as work and non-work. Undesirable, alienating work was, of course, identified by many people, but for others, there were aspects of work with which they identified much more closely. On the other hand, some leisure activities, going to the gym for instance, felt the same as being at work, while others, such as cooking and gardening, were mainly experienced as non-alienated activity. By the end of the workshop it became obvious that the question of work’s relationship to freedom devolved into questions about the level of control you could exercise over your activities. But the mechanisms through which our lives are controlled and constricted have, on the whole, become less direct. If we think about debt, for instance, it acts at more of a distance than managerial command. Its collective effects can therefore be harder to identify.

Secondly, we asked the participants about boredom; when were they last bored and what did it feel like? We had in mind the kind of empty boredom that comes from having nothing to do. The boredom that spurred creativity in the counter-culture and punk rock movements of the seventies and eighties. People found the question of what boredom felt like difficult to address but it gradually became obvious that boredom was attached to very different feelings now. People reported the anxiety of needing to “be seen to be doing something” and the frustration that comes from loneliness. Boredom today comes not from a lack of activity but from over-stimulation. We all know the ennui that comes from compulsive swiping, caught in the gamified algorithms of social media platforms which dole out unsatisfying dopamine hits to keep us engaged. Boredom in the sense of having nothing to do would be a luxury, one participant reported.

Our third question took a less obvious route. We asked about using style as a weapon. There was a direct inspiration for this question. Ian Penman once described the mod subculture as using style as armour against the inequities of class.5 What the mods wore today their managers would wear next year. It was an attitude that saw working-class kids claim the right to pioneer new ways of living outside the then-new consumer society. This claim on the future would lead towards revolutionary politics just a few more subcultural turns down the road. From our workshop, it appears that style is still being used as weapon but now more to claim an identity or assert fluidity around sexuality than make a collective claim on the future. 

Our last question then returned to the familiar: When did you last experience collective joy? From music concerts, through political demonstrations, to collective yoga, most participants were able to conjure up an image of collective joy from their life. It was the question we asked that retained the most relevance. Yet, for some this most corporeal of questions provoked the most intellectualized response. An air of suspicion was raised on those experiences. Euphoria is not always good, you know! Nazis can feel joy too! 

The exercise done, we revealed the reasoning behind each question, their rootedness in the movements of the seventies and asked what we should have asked if we were to find post-capitalist desires being produced today. The responses revolved around themes familiar to us from our own lives; anxiety, care and community: When did you last feel fear and how did you overcome it? How much of your life is meaningful? Do you feel you have a community and if so, where is it? When was the last time you exchanged something for free? When was the last time you imagined something new? When was the last time you felt cared for or cared for someone else?

Interestingly, the final suggestion comes very close to the central question of Plan C’s previous experiments, which placed the practice of consciousness-raising groups within a wider politics of care. As Mark Fisher explained as he riffed off Plan C’s activities: “Consciousness raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective perspective. It can give us the resources to behave, think and act differently… The roots of any successful struggle will come from people sharing their feelings, especially their feelings of misery and desperation, and together attributing the sources of these feelings to impersonal structures.”6 In this way consciousness raising can be seen as a practice of care and repair, having what Jeremy Gilbert has called a “super-therapeutic” function. By which he means “something more than just fixing people up, repairing some of the damage done by daily life under advanced capitalism so that they can get on with their lives. I mean something which might have those effects but also go beyond them, enabling people to become extraordinarily empowered precisely by enhancing their capacity for productive relationships with others.”7

Our transmediale workshop certainly appeared to have functioned this way. As the event ended, participants were very keen to work out how to take the experience forward. They were enthusiastic about keeping the conversation going. Participants exchanged email addresses and phone numbers and continued the discussion in the foyer and bar for hours afterward. This simple act of collectively discussing our personal experiences while trying to link them to structural forces that condition us seemed powerfully effective. Was this reaction caused by the specific mix of participants? Can the practice be made reproducible? Could it go viral? We are still not sure but it seems to us that something akin to this will be a likely first move in creating what Mark Fisher called, “a movement that abolishes the present state of things, a movement that offers unconditional care without community (it doesn’t matter where you come from or who you are, we will care for you anyway)."8

• 1.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009).
• 2.Mark Fisher and Jeremy Gilbert, (2013), “Capitalist Realism and Neoliberal Hegemony: A Dialogue,” in New Formations 80/81 (Autumn/Winter 2013), p. 90.
• 3.Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 226 (1999), Duke University Press, p. 19.
• 4.Mark Fisher, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) (London Repeater, 2018).
• 5.Ian Penman  “Even If You Have to Starve” in London Review of Books 35 (16) (August 2013), pp. 25-27.
• 6.Mark Fisher, “Abandon hope (summer is coming),” k-Punk, last modified 11.5.2015, http://www.k-punk.org/abandon-hope-summer-is-coming/.
• 7.Jeremy Gilbert, “Psychedelic Socialism” on openDemocracy, last modified 22.9.2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/jeremy-gilbert/psychedelic-socialism/.
• 8.Mark Fisher, “Abandon hope (summer is coming)”