OAS Imaginary Movie: #TITMOTA 1 & 2

BY PAUL McLEAN

The Occupational Art School commences its program auspiciously with "Time in the Mind of the Anarchive," a conversation-starter in two [2X∞] parts, #TITMOTA 1+2. The opening festivities slated for Thursday, August 9 at 7PM at Bat Haus in Bushwick include a presentation by Bold Jez, a/k/a Jez Bold, a/k/a Jeremy, a/k/a Jez3PREZ, etc., entitled "Recording Future History: Activist archivism in Occupy Wall Street." The actuality of our expo is N+1-oriented, so come prepared. It's a hot summer in Brooklyn, and 11 months after the first interventions in and around Wall Street popped up, the promise of occupation is a multi-faceted proposition, if not an outright seduction, to be fulfilled. #TITMOTA is therefore a beginning that looks behind us, over our shoulders. The movement, if that's what it is and was, or will be, has never been subject to the embedded command of prediction. Although OWS has exclaimed its advocacy for the 99%, no 99% has embraced it. In America, at least, popular change is a spectator sport. For the vast silent masses of Americans, quasi-citizens, Occupy could have as well been the Olympics. OWS has been much more real for the 1%, who are so close to complete victory, their sphincters clang shut at the first sign of popular dissent.

Even though Jez, founder of OAS Node #0, is the lead artist/anarchivist for our bi-partheid festival this week, the collective[s] to which he subscribes are in various states of collaboration on our humble eruption. Here's a note that arrives this morning from Brazil:

Camaradas;

Would like to introduce to the movement on a large scale the Direct Action Flaneurs. They are an amazing group of artists i met last year that make use of Contemporary Dance and Typewriters to create microfractures in the biopolitical tissue of society. in a non-violent way, they cut deep necrofilic tissues of Empire and create pluripotential spaces - temporary autonomous zones (TAZs) where bloom emerges.

Still am surprised how little we talk in this anarchist spirited movement about Hakim Bey and TAZs. it is a extremely dangerous political weapon against the neoliberal state and its hegemonic culture. it drives me nuts to see so much organizing done to get a shit ton of people on the streets on particular dates, and forget that direct action without #poiesis is like masturbation: a release of a load with no pregnancy. Again, we must think Nietzsche here; be ´´pregnant with the future´´ - and this is done not with arid #theory; it is done with #poiesis.

we are winning when we are political literature.

And here is where the Direct Action Flaneurs come strong: creating pluripotential spaces where bloom happens, where #poiesis happens. I invite the movement to know they work and inspire their organizing with them, and like anaything else in #OWS, anybody can be a DAF!

http://physicalinteractions.blogspot.com

They might be present this Thursday at BatHaus for the event ´´Time in the Mind of the Anarchives``, which again you are all invited. http://www.facebook.com/events/370272566379787/

fire and love,
Ale

Photo by Alexandre CarvalhoWe are still sorting the role of DAF in #TITMOTA, as indicated by the email thread of yesterday:

Hey Jez,

We are looking forward to your #Anarchives event on Thursday.

But we need to ask: what does it mean to you to have a Direct Action Flaneurs (DAF) presence at your Anarchive evening?

Here's why the question's important. We see DAF not as a space but as an Activity, a politico/artistic/poetic effort in we which invite our ourselves into public social fabrics to create pluripotential temporary autonomous zones. We try to challenge public in-between space in a non-aggressive way. We don't see the typewriters as functional or decorative tools. The typewriters have to become bridges, weapons, pathways toward building a community in the moment. And they have to leave a residue of energy for possible change. DAF is about the thinking body and dancing mind in a public social fabric—this is what worked so well for Ale in Rio (you can find his action and others at this temporary link: http://physicalinteractions.blogspot.com
Each DAF event had a different set-up, and these differences allowed new communities to grow spontaneously--and this is the kind of stuff that we hope to be able to share at Occupy Art School.

Of course, if you would like to use typewriters to write on at the Anarchives event, that's great. But we wouldn't see that as a Direction Action Flaneurs activity.

Thanks for sharing how you see it.
Onward!
Andrea+ Rob

P.S. From a purely archival standpoint, you might be interested for your anarchive evening to include the 40 pages of sense collection writing that was generated at the 6-month anniversary of the occupation of Zucotti Park during a DAF activity.

Andrea recently sent this transmission from Switzerland:

Photo by Andrea HaenggiI guess, in the interests of provisioning context for content, or on-tent, as the case may be (since our curriculum is occupational), I should also supply you, dear reader, with another facet in our burgeoning Krystaleidoscope (Jez's invention, I'm positive). Our spiritual leader, Ambrose Curry, surf guru, has been busy in his studio building boards, but he took the time to add to our inspirations-set a photo of a lovely and gentle Kauai wave, for the record.

Photo by Ambrose CurryIf you were occupied with the massive LIBOR crime syndicate story - & it would be hard to be, given the levels of global censorship being applied to that unfolding scandal - you might not have noticed that our world is really an amazing place, and this is a stupendously terrific time to be alive, in many respects. Which gets to the heart of #TITMOTA, & the profound vision of Bold Jez, who is coming into his own, as I write.

∞

I've been sketching press releases for #TITMOTA 1+2 for a couple of weeks, now, but every time I get halfway done, I see that Jez has built another one, himself. Each imaginary iteration, forecasting what will happen Thursday and Saturday is different from the last one. I have given up trying to keep track of the progression, because its manifestations are appearing across a spectrum of media, and some of these exist outside my range.

This is the blurb I was composing for the show last night before I crashed, sometime after midnight.

My first encounter with Jez Bold was virtual, if I recall correctly. The vehicle was a YouTube video. He was performing what appeared to be an impromptu improvisational dance at one of the Occupy Museums interventions. A couple of days later Occupy photographer Paul Talbot arrived with Jez at the Williamsburg office of Hyperallergic, with a set of OWS signs for installation during the Spatial Occupation @Hyperallergic residency. The signs were shared on loan from the OWS archives that Jez was maintaining. Over the next few weeks, I got to know Jez better, when our Tuesday evening screening sessions for SO@H emerged as a retrospective on the origins of OWS Arts & Culture. Over the past six months, I've come to appreciate Jez, Alex Carvalho and others in the orbits of Revolutionary Games and the Novads to be the true heart and soul of Occupy. Their stunts, their persistence, their visionary daring, romanticism, their comedy, outlandishness, fearlessness, goofiness, tactical effectiveness... Okay, none of this is right. It's not right, because to reduce what these young men and women are doing to broad-brush adjectives in a superlative list can't get it. A poem might work better, and I've tried that. We talked about translating "it" or "them" into a movie, in the vein of Cassavetes early films, but when I saw what these people started to make with phone cams it became immediately clear that anyone trying to direct the situation was going to crash into the same kind of bad, weird scene Dian Fossey created with her mountain gorillas and poachers. It seems better to approach this anarchive-producing Magic Mountain-spawning eruption obliquely, through a Krystaleidoscopic dimensional lens, and appreciate that the pre-figurative scenario this motley crew is manifesting is the syntehsys (misspelled intentionally) of the times. But more, of course. I met with Jez on several occasions one-on-one to talk about dimensional time at his request. He took copious notes, being a trained archivist and all, and sometimes recorded our conversations. Which means that the transmission bled into the novadic network leading to unexpected exchanges and revelations, encounters and plans. Games were conceived and abandoned. Salons were held. Glitter bombings, bed-ins, body painting, erotic poems, brutal arrests, tantrums, emails, Google Groups and diagnostics, Tumblrs, reports in all the major news media, crazy stoned songs, hilarious rants... I stopped at some point trying to discern borders round this thing, these people, this tribe, and that's when the light flickered to life. I began to advocate for them. Then came the recognition that advocacy is a form of appreciation, of affection, of love. Beyond 60 Wall Street, under Liberty Square, over the Brooklyn Bridge and after the drummers returned to the subway stations. In one way #TITMOTA 1 & 2 are backward-peering devices, and in another, a platform for the sling-shot-like launch of OWS original A&C stunts 2.0. Whatever these sessions turn out to be, and as of yesterday, it appears that they won't be all fun and games or projections and reflections... they will be authentic, real and progressive, even generative, and impossible to predict or encode. There will be an event, and it will involve the use of wireless headphones, QR codes, transparencies, some artifacts, a big ana-artwork. The collective will assemble, as such, even if no one is there in person. We can Skype. The Occupational Art School, properly enough, will embark on our first Bushwick course through the medium of the memorable, or memorial, meaning OWS, and this is correct, given the approach of September 17.

Another failure, right? Oh, well. Come or don't come, artsies. Reblog or don't, Tumblrs. Critique or don't, critics. It doesn't really even matter if this historical episode happens. It already has, and #TITMOTA 1+2 have been an astonishing success. The concentricitous net has already dispersed the news across the lines connecting millions of us, occupational artists, art lovers, nodal anarchivists. We've found an antidote for Baudrillard's shadowy, silent majority. We've forgotten and outperformed Foucault, too. The signs on view at Bat Haus are better than the Continental Theorists'. The New Aesthetic is already long-dead on our ana-timeline. Art in America's New Realism was bogus from the get-go, and that's obvious, now. You can't buy this, you 1%er. Your Apocalypse came and went and you hardly noticed. Like a strange breeze. All the histrionics of desperation you've enacted to hold on to your evil tyrannies are impotent, and doomed. You are cursed by your own doing, and undoing. As you dissolve, another monster is arising, and it is beautiful and young and sure of nothing. It is a poem performed in synchronicity in many spaces and places. These children, born free into your matrix of extraction and exploitation, know exactly how to descend into the hells you create in your disease-born fevers, to rescue their memories, even if it means being defined as a "thief." They reject your definition, anyway, because that is what it means to be "free," or in terms for art, "fine."

In the footsteps of the theatrical scenography of the agora, forum, and church square as traditional places of urban history there now follows cinescenography, the sequenced mutation of a community, region, or monument in which the participating population momentarily changes into actors of a history intended to be revived. [Paul Virilio, "The Last Vehicle"]

So, we will not be establishing a chronology, although we may suggest an objective chronos. We will not demand Cartesian rationality. Many of our equations are insoluble, and happily so. The component elements in our exhibit are not meant to promote a Hegelian concept-to-object through-put. We are not ideological executioners, and nor are we chained by signals or pantomimes of any kind. To put it bluntly, the "we" we are consists of "I"s [eyes] + the other senses, or the OTHER census.

Will #TITMOTA 1+2 end the endless "War on Terror?" Or destroy the surveillance/police/prison state? Crush the media monopoly? Kill artificial infinite personhood? I don't know. For now, we will assemble and share our gifts, some food, some stories. Let's close with more transmissions from Brazil, to set our table, our mesa, our stage:

Hello my beloved comrades;

its been now a week. forced to leave the USA due to an expired VISA, and not even bothering to apply for a renewal with 5 on the record, i´m back in Rio de Janeiro. missing every face, every laughter, every corner, even missing the fucking G train at 3am in the morning. my thoughts are there and my body is in the sea of Ipanema. despite being in a city that is paradise made earth, NYC and Zuccotti Park is where we found friends that i bet we were looking for our entire lives. i keep repeating: we have found each other, and now there is nothing to be scared of. it is like tuning a guitar: you spend an entire life out of tune, and then when you get it right, from now on its music! songs of change, autonomy and a bit of insanity pushing back against commodified life... an existence prepacked to you by #Capittylism for only $56.99

we all crossed a threshold of no return; pushing the entire game of Empire to its deathbed by playing with kaleidoscopes, we made squares communes. and still continue to do so, because to occupy is to live life in literature. and for fuck sake, we are doing this alright! to drop everything for everything requires all one has inside. the plunge is dance that must be done solo, but it is your friends who lead you through the labyrinths. amazing mazes. sometimes awful ones. and together we teach each other choreographies of revolt.

we are changing roles. it is clear. at least for us who saw this movement go from less than a hundred people with nothing else better to do on a Saturday afternoon to a global whirlwind. an orgasm in pluripotential spaces, a experiment in communality. fuck the Paris commune, dear comrades; we got our own game going. fuck Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite - the old social contract has been irreparably broken. now its time for Humanization, Emancipation, Solidarity on a planetary scale. temporary autonomous zones where freedom and invitations are the rule - pluripotential spaces! an open-source party zone where challenging the status quo is addictive because its so fucking fun. we are winning when we are political literature.

we all loved intensely, kissed the democratic body voluptuously... took the very best and worse of ourselves... threw it on the streets. damn, we blew a load on the squares. had babies. radical babies. ideas. what came out (no puns intended) was the birth of a new order, in embrionic form that is developing each passing day. as Nietzsche said, we are ´´pregnant with the future´´. things are absolutely different, forever. and this not only for Zuccotti, but for hundreds of occupations from North to South Hemisphere, from Americas to Europe and even as far as New Zealand...

let´s go again. we are not neutered like Empire; we are not stale; we are a poetic insurrection, and we are not for sale. from rizome to dandelions and now phoenix, ´´occuash`` is collecting back to centers of gravity and becoming ready to explode once more. Zuccotti is a pluripotential space.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=501584076523596&set=a.451828154832522.127988.100000160252434&type=1&theater

let´s make it a space where supernovas go off! colors, art, freedom! poetry! the event, for fuck sake! the anti-text, typewriters, anachronism that expose the Spectacle. to paint oppression! to paint the white shirts ´´accidentaly´´ with Indian Holi festival colored powder! to use washable paint as a weapon of resistance against the police state! hell yeah baby. we are in for supernovas.

all squares, bloom with supernovas
pluripotential spaces where kaleidoscopes live
to occupy is to live life in literature

miss you all already.

Ale

And this:

Dear comrades:

Come to see a history that is often not told! the origins of #OWS, from archived registries of our very own #OWS collection! the crucial role of the arts and culture group, the innovations of the media team, the antecedents in Bloombergville - all are invited!

here is the event description: 

http://www.facebook.com/events/370272566379787/ 

and a little provokation, as always, from atchu:

´´Arts and Culture actually did the first Direct Action(s) on Wall Street and made the movement more than just a pamphlet on the web and endless GAs at Tompkins Square that were filled with strife and crazy personalities. 

by organizing the ´´Test-Run`` on Sept 1st 2011 (and getting caged for it, 1st arrests of the movement), then escalating artistic-political actions leading to Sep 17th at the pit of Nassau, Exchange and Broad, A&C embodied the role that historically the arts always had: to speak our world and, at the same time, smash it rebuild it. by raising the cultural temperature, artists performed what complexity scientists call a ´´phase transition´´. Things would never be the same again. 

Actions at the pit included Nihilist Puppetry, artists inside giant plastic ´´speculative´

´ bubbles, Political Yoga (ft. Yoga Dog), recitation of anarchist poetry, music, wild activists dressed as pandas to confuse the police, and finally organizing the New York Fun Exchange (NYFE) on Sep 17th to rendevouz activated bodies to seize Zuccoti Park. A work that set the ground for the supernova of life that was about to come and shake the world. 

In collaboration with the media group, A&C unleashed the first viral materials of the movement (Sep 1st ´´Test Run´´, 40k views), helped Tweet2Streets and more. 

yes. 

maybe we can remember that legacy and understand that Culture and the Arts in revolution are NOT made to ´´decorate´´ actions but rather to spark the new possible world that we talk about. In #OWS mainstream culture, what we see is people inviting the artists later to fill in the meat rather than first, from the get-go. The result is a boring and stale movement that is ruled by ´´efficient´´ people (ugh), whom usually suck at inspiring anybody or having any new fresh ideas...

the participation of artists was crucial to the foundation of our movement, and keeps its role as such - everytime #OWS needs freshness and a break from mindless autopilots, it is to creatives that we must turn our attentions to. 

a new axis mundi... starts with artists, NOT decorators!

to the turning of the tide, and for less Quixotism!´´