5 min read 🤓

Berlin: Zero Cohesion (2 = ©)

july 24, 2022

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[ navigate among ø-coh uP episodes: ø-coh 1 | ø-coh 2 = © | ø-coh 3 ]

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"And the evening and the morning were the second day..."

...

On Saturday afternoon we = Jeff+Chester+me took the UBahn to Wedding, to meet up with Rébus for a second 'Zero Cohesion' unPublic, this one at Margarete Huber's new work-space, in the Schwedenstraße project space of COPYRIGHTberlin, a Berlin art platform initiated in 1999 by Patrick Huber and Ute Lindner.

All of this somehow kept ringing bells—Berlin, Copyright, Patrick, Ute... But it was only at the end of our fine unPublic sessions that this ringing brought up Patrick's voice on the other end of Margarete's cell phone line, and my wayback machine crystallised an image, better defined and in more steady lines, emanating from the early days of Diktat's history, almost sixteen years ago, when, in the fall of 2006, in Paris we performed at the art space Immanence on the occasion of an exposition there by Patrick and Ute, who had at the time had gotten to know Rinus in Berlin. So, our unPublic performing on Saturday June 25th 2022, the 83rd unPublic, at this COPYRIGHTberlin space sort of glued up the ends of some among our timelines, into closed curves on a timefold.

But first things first: we moved Margarete's hybrid acoustic/digital piano-keyboard (or whatchamacallit) from the artspace's backroom to the front.

We hauled the very heavy instrument onto a small trolley with wheels, got it pass Margarete's harpsichord (you can hear her play that one during the unPublic that we did in Berlin six years ago, uP #33 🤓) and managed to make the tricky right turn to our left, ...

... then pushed & and wheeled the thingy all the way through a long narrow corridor lined with all sorts of fragments of works of art, art paraphernalia, tools, materials and other stuff...

... into the large and brightly white street side galery space.

It was there and then that we set up and performed the 83rd of our unPublics.

French theory and dead flies

And wouldn't here be as good a space and time as any other to note in passing how much indeed the unPublic(s) bloomed into a non-arborescent network of multiplicities, very much like that what is the essence of the rhizome (introduced by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their post-structuralist writings, and specifically in Mille Plateaux (Capitalism et schizophrénie, t. II - 1980 ))? ... That's what sprang to mind while handling my little machines in the COPYRIGHTberlin Projektraum ...

unPublic(s) are typically rhizomatic, socially as well as historically as well as culturally. Any element in the evolving multiplicity may and will influence any other element, regardless of its position (space) and/or time. The unPublics indeed are polycephalous, many-headed—rhizome-like—without centre, a distributed network à la Paul Baran, like the utopian cyberspace that our internet and world wide web never came to be: the direction of each subsequent unPublic step is always unfixed and the network's progression chaotic; unPublics develop randomly.

Each element in the emerging structure makes for an evolution of the whole. But it does so in what is subtly more that a mere fractal way. Though every uP (83 by now, and counting) is in the image of the whole, the whole is far more than merely in the image of the sum of its parts. It rather is what one might call a supra-sum, a more-than-sum, from which an image of ever higher resolution continues to emerge.

And then—multiplicity among multiplicities—there are the music and the musical form, that in all of its speculative ruptures and proliferations never ceases to pass its lines and paths of flight.

Music is like weeds.

(« Vous la plantez dans un certain terreau, et tout d'un coup, elle se met à proli­férer comme de la mauvaise herbe, » says Pierre Boulez in 'Par volonté et par hasard' from 1975): weeds are a rhizome, and music is.

In our break between the two parts that we played that afternoon we found a dead fly, killed unpublicly. That obviously ties up with the killable flies on K7 (cassette) that attentive listeners will hear me buzz (prick up your ears when you listen to uP 439!) on one among the tapes that I manipulated here in Wedding on a dictaphone (as I did already before in several other editions), a tape and recordings that go back to my À demain!, from 2008, and even further back, to an interactive Flash animation that I made sometime in the early noughties and that allowed you to kill randomly erring flies on your computer screen. Each of such stretches of sound picked from my 'library' (similar ánd different in each of its occurrences) acts not unlike a 'plateau', as do the ones that are part of Rébus' sonic palette, and, indeed, as also do several recurring elements in contributions by some of the less frequent uP participants.

Thus the unPublics are both the map and the territory. As a map, unPublic does not reproduce an 'unconscious', an assemblage of assemblages (the territory) closed upon itself. It constructs that territory. The map is a performance area. (« La carte est ouverte, elle est connec­table dans toutes ses dimensions, démontable, renversable, sus­ceptible de recevoir constamment des modications, » Deleuze and Guattari observe in Mille Plateaux. « Elle peut être déchirée, renversée, s'adapter à des montages de toute nature, être mise en chantier par un individu, un groupe, une formation sociale. On peut la dessiner sur un mur, la concevoir comme une œuvre d'art, la construire comme une action politique ou comme une méditation...»)

Go!

(These are a couple of stills from the video that Jeff made with his iPhone of the part that is documented as uP 439.)

(In the stills, you see Rébus reading from a book by Bernard Charbonneau, "Le Feu Vert. Autocritique du mouvement écologique". You can hear what he reads in uP 439)

...

The slightly edited recordings of the two sessions we did that afternoon, divided into three individual 'zero cohesion @COPYRIGHTberlin chapters', together make up the 83rd documentary unPublic album at Bandcamp's. Here it is, embedded and linked. For your pleasure.

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tags: unPublic, Berlin, zero-cohesion, COPYRIGHTberlin

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