Through the diverse range of his practice, cross-disciplinary contemporary artist Christopher Collier aims to create situations, facilitating experiential effects that acknowledge and examine the position of audience as co-author of a work's meaning. Seeking to deterritorialize his practice, Christopher Collier attempts to de-construct the contextual barriers between audience and artwork, process and product and is interested in infiltrating non-art specific spaces in order to enable potential unexpected relationships between work, audience and location. Working through installation, lens-based media, sound and language and fascinated by concepts of place, he explores ideas of psychological geography, relational space and liminality.

Through the appropriation of signs and contexts Christopher Collier is interested in the idea that creative interventions can undermine and disrupt assumed structures, narratives, relationships and hierarchies. His work frequently adopts the position that the artist's primary role must be to foster mistrust in reality, seeking to make work that invites the interruption of mundane experience in order to trigger new methods of perception and momentarily facilitate fresh assessments of a situation.

Open Exhibitions and the Actualisation of Selection:
A Conceptual Essay in Three Parts
Christopher Collier

Part I – A Philosophical Context: If Gilles Deleuze falls out of his window in a wood and nobody is there to see it, did it happen?
Part II – The Theoretical Proposal: “I, J.L. Austin, Declare This Exhibition Open”
Part III – The Open Ending: Open Essays, Open Endings, Open Becomings

Part I: If Gilles Deleuze falls out of his window in a wood and nobody is there to see it, did it happen?

A tree falls in a wood and if there is no one there to see it, did it happen? It is a question that has been short-hand for a particular philosophical problem for some time.  How can we know that which we do not see with our own eyes truly exists?  George Berkeley in 1710 argued that the ideas within our mind come from the outside world, but that ideas can only resemble other ideas.  He adopted a position therefore that the external world exists only in the form of ideas that require recourse to some realizing transcendent mind – for him this was God. 

When Nietzsche announced the death of God he proclaimed that this would remove any universal perspective or totalising objective truth, it would remove the need for a transcendent, external (or extensive) guarantor, rather we would be thrown into a sea of multiplicitous, myriad and fluid perspectives.  As Heidegger put it:   

If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding     power, then nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself (Heidegger, The Word of Nietzsche, 61).

This leaves our tree on shaky ground.  Such an idea would prove central to influential French philosopher Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy of immanence can be seen as owing a great deal to Nietzsche's ideas of the 'Wille zur Macht' or will to power.  Deleuze rejected concepts of universal transcendence in favour of an idea of rhizomatic entanglement, what he deemed the plain of immanence, summed up in his paradoxical formula: pluralism = monism.  Its not that the event of the tree falling in the wood didn't happen, it is not that its happening exists in all states of possibility, rather that it is virtual.  On this plain of immanence we discover the reconciliation of 'could be' and 'is': what Proust described as the 'real without being actual, ideal without being abstract' (Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé, ch. III).  For Deleuze 'The concept they [conditions] form is identical to its object' (Deleuze, Desert Islands, p. 36.) and thus Berkeley's belief that ideas could only resemble ideas and that this implied a transcendent, guaranteeing God is negated. 

The creative act of 'becoming' is the constant affirming of the flux and differentiation that constitutes the actual: the present moment that 'is always outside itself. It is not; but it acts' (Deleuze, Bergsonism, 55).  The virtual is the aion that divides past from future, the virtual is the condition of the actual.  This immanent becoming is akin to Nietzsche's Will to Power and for Deleuze, ultimately this line of flight took on a more immanent perspective when in 1995, seriously ill, he committed suicide by throwing himself from the window of his apartment.  For him this act of becoming, in what is ultimately such an unbecoming manner, transcended the will to life and in a curiously fitting fashion brought to life the power of the will to bring forth the actual from the virtual. 

In a series for French television shortly before his death Deleuze talked about one of his family's cats that had become very sick and simply sought out a corner, curled up and waited to die, it was aware of its immanent death and in an act of becoming, chose to actualise it.  The cat, he stated, found 'un bon coin pour mourir', a good corner to die.  He was largely mocking Heidegger's belief that animals perish as opposed to die (for naturally to 'die' is a very human conception according to Heidegger), however in his final ironic act of deterritorialization Deleuze was virtually becoming his cat, and refusing to play the possibility of Schrödinger's cat any longer. 

Schrödinger's cat was theoretical cat that was placed in a sealed box with a radioactive substance that had a fifty percent chance of decomposing, releasing a poison and thus killing the cat.  However, unobserved the cat is within a state of possibility and is both alive and dead until the box is opened and it becomes one or the other, it exists in a state of 'superposition',  being in all possible states at once.  In quantum mechanics this thought experiment illustrated the idea that if the outcome of an event has not been observed, it exists in a state of all possible outcomes.  If a tree falls in a wood and no one is there to see it did it happen? 

This virtual experiment is not to be taken literally however, most physicists now argue that the act of 'observation' should likewise be defined in quantum terms in order that the question make sense.  From this perspective there is no 'observer effect', rather an infinitely complex entangled quantum system, a plain of immanence if you will.  This is akin to Deleuze's central ideas on the virtual; for Deleuze there is no transcendental unity that guarantees reality, no unity of objective truth, only the rhizomatic multiplicity of the virtual that gives rise to an actuality. 

Deleuze rejected the concept of the possible for that of the virtual.  The virtual is not a pre-existing real awaiting realisation, rather it is the fully real that becomes actualized.  The virtual is Deleuze's attempt to think a transcendental that is differential (ie. immanent) and not unifying.  Traditional Kantian philosophy had held that the transcendental should follow the logic of the empirical (hence the paradox of the tree falling in the wood).  Following this therefore the traditional notion of the possible is judged empirically; is personal, identitarian and centripetal; is subjective.  All our experiences are seen as belonging to us as subject.  We judge the reality of the tree's fall through the subjective framework of observation.  Deleuze seeks to go beyond subjective and objective into a 'multijective' [my term] condition.  For Deleuze therefore the transcendental has to be non-personal and pre-individual.  The virtual is the real but without identity or subjectification, it is the wood with no one there to see it. 

It is not that observation closes down possibility per se, rather it selectively actualises the virtual.  In refusing to accept the principle of the extensive over the intensive, at all times it is our given position to resist the unifying forces that seek to introduce barriers or borders into this territory of the virtual, to spacialise and temporalise it, to subjectify or objectify, rather we should attempt to drift nomadically upon this virtuality, flowing rhizomatically.  Rejecting a transcendental, objectively and subjectively, ie. not just in terms of reality, but in terms of the individual subject, Deleuze rejects the mystical and the empirical and argues that we are constantly becoming as the virtual flows through us.  Hence, the irony is that in throwing himself from a window, whilst Deleuze was opening the box and refusing to be Schrödinger's cat any longer, he yet continues to be: he did not die for he did not exist as a transcendental subject, rather his ideas continue a process of becoming, with myriad potential deterritorialized applications and possibilities.  If Gilles Deleuze falls out of a window and nobody is there to see it, did it happen?  The answer, frustratingly, is that it both did and did not.  It could be argued that by opening Schrödinger's box, that by ironically embracing a reterritorialization, Deleuze enacted a becoming to end all becoming, the closing down of the virtual into what 'is' and what 'could be', by that ultimate act of selection – suicide.   Deleuze's act for us as observers was an occlusion of the virtual, whilst for him it was conversely an escape from the actual: a final deterritorialization of the subject into the non-spatial, non-temporal state of pure immanence.  For us, what was intensively virtual is extensively actual.  Without the act of subjective observation, the tree is still both fallen and intact, the cat, Deleuze, are still both alive and dead; the immanent is the transcendent.  By virtue of entanglement, conversely to be observed is not to close the possibility of the virtual, rather to define it upon selective terms.     

Part II: “I, J.L. Austin, Declare This Exhibition Open”

The central factor at play in the 'Open Exhibition' is their ostensible, often ostentatious profession of democracy, problematised frequently by their recourse to selection as a reconciliation of this inclusiveness with the essentially exclusive quality of quality itself.  But beyond the exclusive language, let us open up the issue: the assumption behind the open submission or salon exhibition seems to be that every one is, or at least could be, an artist.  There is however a large difference between 'is' and 'could be', between virtuality and possibility.  It is this discrepancy that is central to any appraisal of the open exhibition and its position within our wider culture.  The phase that has become a soundbite 'everyone is an artist' is (or could be) considered to be synonymous with the practice of Joseph Beuys, a central figure within the understanding of late 20th cent and early 21st cent.  art.  However Beuys' assertion is usually taken on a overly simplistic level and to fully comprehend it we need to appreciate that his understanding of art went far beyond the aesthetic.  His central position was rather that human beings should utilise their creativity across the entire spectrum of professional and everyday life and was not that everyone was given to the creation of artworks in the traditional sense.  He asserted that all people should have the opportunity to apply creative thinking, leading towards a broader definition of art that would deliver what Beuys termed 'social sculpture' and which would be cooperative, creative and cross-disciplinary.  In perceiving art within the broader realm of social relations this resonates to some extent with a Situationist critique of specialisation and professionalism and the sublimation of art into politics that derives ultimately from Marx's thinking on the division of labour. Following this trajectory, Beuys appears to give us the beginnings of an esthétique relationnelle that Bourriaud would come to codify some years later.

Such a model is not the only way in which everyone might be considered to be an artist however.  Jacques Rancière has argued that everyone is an artist in the sense that they constitute the artwork in the process of aesthetic perception, therefore their constituting input in terms of aesthetic engagement can be seen as a creative act.  This is an idea that seems to naturally derive from various post-structuralist theories on reader reception, most famously Roland Barthes 'Death of the Author', in which the 'reader' constitutes the text independently of the authorial or artistic intention.  They become therefore integral to the creative act, their input as essential as that of the 'originator' (in as much as this person can be described as such – for such a post-structuralist position would hold that all material is already recycled).  Whilst there are similarities to the conceptual tradition sketched above in the way in which the work is constituted outside of the creative mind of an individual author/artist, there is also a fundamental opposition between a position that gives primacy to the aesthetic and a position that (despite Bourriaud's protestations) privileges the discursive and ethical.

But where does all this leave open exhibitions? We are left with the two main strands of thought within contemporary art today privileging the agency of the individual as the essential constituting element of the work of art.  What we do not have however is a way of bringing together the two into a regime in which the aesthetic production and not just the responsive or relational may be seen to be the property of the masses.  From here then we must return to Beuys' implied critique of specialising professionalism in order to find a way forward.

Professionalism, constituted by deliberate exclusionary tactics, jargon and the manufacture of a discourse that you must speak within or have no voice, has been critiqued many times by cultural commentators.  Marx argued that

The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in     the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of the division of labour.
(Marx & Engels, Artistic Talent Under Communism, The German Ideology, 1845-46)

He goes on to argue that

with a communist organisation of society, there disappears... the subordination of the artist to some definite art, thanks to which he is exclusively a painter, sculptor etc.  The very name of his activity adequately expressing the narrowness of his professional development and his     dependence upon the division of labour.  In a communist society there are no painters but at     most people who engage in painting among other activities

 (Ibid.)

From these ideas we can trace a direct line through Dada and its rejection of art as a specialised activity of individual artistic control, and Surrealism with its refusal to privilege intentionality, training, convention or individual, professional conscious intent.  From these we might follow the thread through the Letterists to the Situationist International, Beuys, Conceptualism, Fluxus and ultimately much contemporary art.  Yet this transmission has been, as evinced within open exhibitions up and down the land, largely unsuccessful in its translation into the reality of generalised art production today.  The mass art that it facilitates remains inherently formally conservative and the radical gestures and cross-disciplinary potential remain the preserve of a specialised professional few.  There are several reasons for this but most obviously that as artists, or as creative human beings, we still labour under the system of capitalism and its specialised division of labour.  What is required is a critique of the real, not from the position of the possible but from a more Deleuzian position of the virtual.

The Romantic myth of artistic uniqueness and genius is one strongly encouraged by a capitalism and an art market that seeks to deny a universality of creativity and to promote artistic activity as a specialised and restricted phenomenon and hence to retain what Benjamin labelled the 'aura' of the work of art.  Art must be the work of the specialised genius, a sacrosanct calling, insists capitalism with the complicity of much of the art world. This is precisely for the purpose of restraining a generalised creative realisation that might threaten its hegemony and simultaneously to restrict the supply of art, ensuring its value as commodity and status indicator. The aura of the work, created by the myth of its specialised production as a result of a highly focused, single-minded individual (complete with style and signature) exists to maintain its position as a trade-worthy commodity and an entrenchment of social position. The idea of genius as force external to social conditions is reliant upon an implicit transcendence that is masculinist in its inherently patriarchal and logocentric conception. It is a myth constructed to enshrine the aura and an elitist separatism on behalf of the artist. The masses may look, be dazzled and disorientated by the spectacular display of art, but may not own and certainly not create 'serious' art. This is where we arrive at the heart of the problem, 'serious' art as defined by whom?  It is in my view the aristo-capitalist dominated discourse that demands and perpetuates the myth of specialisation and commodity.  Works that do not fit within the given parameters of this discourse are denied a voice, are quite literally invisible.

It could be argued that the works that constitute the majority of an open exhibition do not have a voice precisely because their position is considered too external or peripheral to the reality of a mainstream art discourse.  We must strive to consider whether the works in a non-selected exhibition have less of a voice than those that have been selected by a panel of professionals?  Is such a competition already self-editing, do professional artists enter regional open exhibitions? Do non-professional artists enter competitions with an entry fee? We are led into a discourse within a discourse.  Of course even a selective regional exhibition is still excluded from the discourse in which the real art world power speaks, within the metropolitan institutions and fairs and from the pockets of private collectors or the patronage of the well known critics.  To become well-known is to become powerful, is to gain a voice.  But where does such an assessment leave art in a regional context?  The postmodern was supposed to strip away those pretensions to centrality and unity that lie behind the urbancentric 'Enlightenment' attitudes of modernity but whilst it has fought this rear guard action, the totalitarian forces of globalisation and a capitalist monoculture have concentrated the real discourse in the hands of fewer and fewer.  Bourriaud has spoken of an alterglobalisation:  a globalisation but also a localisation, he identifies difference and hetrotemporal, hetrochronic factors as integral to what he terms the altermodern but it is a vision not borne out by the majority of the arts discourse globally.  We might rightfully demand to know, if we are not professional, if we are not metropolitan, do our voices not count? Do our audiences not count?  The modernist avant garde attempted to escape not just from the salon but from the public in general, however if art can be agreed to constitute a political space what does this say of politics if it can only exist within a specialised, professionalised, and usually metropolitan elite?  Whether this political art space is  relational or is a space for Rancièrian dissensus via the aesthetic free play of faculties, if art is squeezed out in a pincer movement of market forces and public cut backs then the art spectator/agent, particularly beyond the metropolitan focus, is no longer a participant in the polis but is rendered a passive subject, constituted only by a media spectacle.  The overwhelming geographical and temporal spreading mass of possible art production, through a selective discourse, becomes realised in the hands of a powerful few.  What we must ask at this juncture is whether it is possible to actualise the virtual art production that is neither spatially or temporally predetermined and activate this deterritorialized rhizome of art practice beyond a legitimising discourse.

Before we can think this however, the waters have been muddied over the last decade. Increasingly the the centre has been exposed as a modernist fiction: that goes for the capitalist ideology of the individual creative as much as for geographical location.  Surely it can be argued that if ideology is accepted to be ubiquitous, the spectacle omnipresent, then culture too is everywhere and so are the voices that constitute it as 'writers' or 'readers', or both.  In the era of web 2.0 a new phenomenon has been observed in which the individual everywhere collectively began to appropriate the creative imperative from professionals.  Bloggers could become critics, Youtube uses could set up their own television channel, marketing of events became free and simple, people became simultaneous producers and consumers, became a new cultural classification – 'prosumers' and not professionals.  This far-reaching cultural change could not fail to have an impact beyond the web (but to speak of such a realm within the West today seems increasingly anachronistic).  The ready availability of art materials combined with widening of ideas of what constitutes art (art with no aura is art that everyone can create), widening access to art education, an increase in leisure time, longer retirements, art as entertainment and the like gave us a upsurge in so called amateur artists such has probably never been seen before.  What I would seek to question however is how much this really constitutes a shift in power relations.

In light of the propositions of speech act theory and John L. Austin's ideas regarding the performative utterance, context is everything.   In his discussion of the conditions that constitute the effective 'performative utterance' Austin gives the example of the naming ceremony for a ship.   He explains that for judging the success and validity of the performative utterance, what matters is not whether or not it took place but what situational conditions need to be in place to constitute it a success or failure.  In the example of the ship naming ceremony,

When I say 'I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth' I do not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christening (Austin, Performative Utterances, 235)

It is only successful if the speech act corresponds to the pre-accepted situational conditions, ie. if I am the pre-appointed person to name the ship, it is the right place, the right time, in front of the right audience.  I still have to say all of the right words in the right order for the act to be performed successfully, 'Context, which proceeds utterance, conditions its success or failure' (Thomas Keenan, Grey Room #21, 96).  Austin gives the example that if some 'low type' bursts in on the christening ceremony, snatches the bottle out of the hands of the appointed dignitary, smashes the bottle over the bow and announces 'I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin' then the ship is not now named Generalissimo Stalin, the utterance, even in a legitimate and agreed format has no effect, no voice, as it comes from the wrong person, in the wrong situational context.   It is possible to link this with Foucault's ideas on the discourses of power.  If our intervention takes place outside of the legitimised situational context, outside of the dominant power discourse, it fails, it has no voice, it is invisible and is lost to us.  Applying this line of thought to the issue of the open exhibition is productive in so much as it exposes the fact that whilst the works are utterances in a legitimate and agreed format, they all too often have no effect and no voice as they are seen by mainstream discourse to come from the wrong person, in the wrong situational context.  In other words, the format of the work is largely irrelevant to its having a voice, what matters is the context in which it appears, the CV, the professionalism of its originator.

This entirely problematises the issue of professionalism and particularly in open exhibitions with a 'blind selection', ie. on the basis of work.  Such a set up would not, however solve the problem entirely.  The selection panel, comprised inevitably of professionals, will naturally select that work which fits their own world view, ie. that which fits within the discourse of professional, contemporary art practice.  Again, that which is external to the discourse is rendered impotent.  If an artwork may be, by the consensus of the selection panel, less successfully realised does this truly make its voice less valid? Does it not demand a space, a hearing?  This is what an unselected open to an extent attempts, and thus sits critically and curatorially uncomfortably within art discourse, its artworks will likely be adjudged as failures by those within this discourse.  The value of these works or not is not my point however, I simply wish to open the possibility that professional discourse may potentially exclude many valid voices for many reasons, politically, geographically and temporally and if contemporary art is said to be adrift on the surface of history and geography then how does this then fit with the professional model of production?  Works that have value to creators or audiences do not necessarily tally with those that are seen as successful for particular art specific discourses.  We arrive therefore at an impasse, the criteria for judging the value of artworks, beyond a power discourse.

Perhaps the field of pedagogy can provide us with a potential direction.  In assessment strategies within pedagogic practice, assessment can broadly be conceived of in two methods, the formative and the summative.   The summative is essentially a product of a cultural model that uses market logic as its methodology of deciding value (usually economic value).  In pedagogy, the summative is the test, the examination, the grade that codifies an individual as an economic index of value.  In the professional sphere it is a function performed by the CV as the economic abstract of an individual, singular experience.  Formative assessment on the other hand is an assessment that is longitudinal, that accounts for process and trajectory.    It is a nomadism in the Deleuzian sense:

The nomad is not the same as the migrant; for the migrant goes principally from one point to     another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity; in principal points for him are relays along a trajectory. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, 380)

It is not the positions or points on a journey that matter, rather the trajectory as a whole, as a singularity.  Creation is 'superpositional', the subjective becomes the virtual.  It is the rhizome, the virtual that provide us with the theoretical tools to understand this.  Franco Berardi, has stated that from his analysis of Baudrillard, the only criteria of value now within what he terms semio-capitalism, is violence.  Labour/time no longer produces value, only violence (including economic violence) does, in an idea that links with Foucault's conception of Biopower.  When there is no determinability/law, arbitary violence is the only determination.  This renders politics in the traditional sense impotent, we can not after all call a general semiotic strike.  It is therefore only within indeterminability that we can think and as the state of exception becomes the law we can not possibly envisage value or change in political terms but only through a process of singularisation.

The construction of a singular, non-teleological narrative is then the articulation of individual agency, of autonomous realisation and an authentic actualisation of desires.  The multiplicity becomes unity and potentiality in the event, the social space, the relational situation in an analogue of the digitisation of the social space. In the performative act, the deterritorialisation of public and private, the whole world can be an open exhibition within the DIY 'prosumer' culture of web 2.0 and therefore the value of the work exists only within its potential for singularisation. 

And yet we are not out of the woods, given the above analysis, even if the means of production are in the hands of the masses, is this seeming solution merely operating as an apparatus of capture? As a spectacle of false choices and pre conceived models of identity? As an ideology in which even rebellion is complicit?  We might pose the question 'does the internet need an editor?' or should we simply stumble through in a Deleuzian, nomadic way?  Again this brings us back to open exhibitions and the binary that we thought had been deconstructed between a 'democratic' accessibility of the discourse opposed to perceptions of quality and value.  Most people within the liberal Western context when posed the question as to whether or not the internet requires an editor would naturally adopt the position that it does not, that is until you remind them that they likely browse it by use of a search engine.  What is a search engine if not a curator or editor who's curatorial decisions are founded precisely upon the dominant power discourse within which it operates.

The web is the domain of semio-capitalism par excellence, concerned with the consumption and  production of signs.  It operates within a Derridan chain of signification, hyperlink to hyperlink, as signs slip into the other signs.  Likewise the salon is a successive stumbling upon signification, a dérive across a surface of semiotic gestures.  Thus the open exhibition opens up the virtuality of creative production, enabling us to become a nomad and be cast adrift upon the surface of the internet without a search engine.  And yet, again we must be on our guard against the encroachment of ideology upon our singularising adventures.

In the internet age the borders of the self are porous, the limits of the body are liminal and being embodied in space becomes a radically different experience.  As Katherine Hayles has argued, all manner of our functions of embodiment are outsourced, large and porous elements of our memory, our communication, our sense of direction and the like now reside within technological, prosthetic appendages that interface with our consciousness in ever more integrated ways.  We are becoming to an unprecedented extend cyborgs.  As our sense of self diffuses outwards across geographic and temporal space as does our creativity and creative agency, as the map that covers over the world becomes indistinguishable from the world itself, so our interventions can map new territories, new spatio-temporal realms, that do not require the modernist logic of the centralised, linear nation state.  We are, to borrow a couple of Bourriaud's metaphors from his altermodern essay, no longer passengers on a single, great locomotive, careering down a single set of rails towards some predetermined teleological point, we are instead shipwrecked, each adrift in our own open boat on a sea of signification.  This is, as argued above a potential way of negotiating semio-capitalism and its power discourse by means of the dérive, through a formative, nomadic singularisation.  The result is, or can be, a culture in which the unitary, centred, strictly delineated boundaries loose their importance and the cultural gesture of the amateur, the part-timer, the prosumer can sit alongside that of the professional.  With a grasp and understanding of the situation in which it finds itself, such a gesture may insinuate itself into the discourse, stand alongside any other gesture.  Like the bubbles in Peter Sloterdijk's foam, relations shift, one bubble may suddenly find itself floating alongside another totally unexpectedly.  It idealistic however to thing that these gestures or signs can currently achieve equivalence with the mainstream discourse, as we have examined, the situational context is the all important factor here, but that they can appear at all marks a radical shift.  The means of cultural production has been handed to us, my website or your youtube channel can sit alongside that of any other cultural producer on the internet, like the idealistic dream of the salon: that the retired shopkeeper from the rural village can hang her work alongside the internationally acclaimed artist.  It is no longer the field of play that is fixed, the cultural gesture in and of itself has achieved equivalence.  It is the editing discourse that remains, the search engine, the ideology that hails us, the curatorial selection panel and myriad other filtering, selecting devices that sieve down the infinite mass of the virtual, the amorphous sea of culture, and filter it into that which is seen, is heard, is made apparent. 

It is an essentially Foucaultian analysis that hegemonic power resides in the filtering systems, the networks that classify and codify what appears and what does not.  Foucault states that we can, if aware enough, undertake an archaeology to dive beneath this surface and look into the unconscious of power, the amorphous mass of culture that I spoke of, the ever-present virtual waiting to reveal itself if it can make it through the filtration system. 

It holds that our culture, knowledge, notions that we hold to be true in fact only constitute a discourse, the edited version of reality that at its base is founded on power relations.  If I type discourse in to google I can bring up 1-10 of 21,600,000 results, this analogous to what I mean.  Art history and contemporary art are another example, we can only scratch at its surface, we only perceive those cultural productions that legitimised or at least fitted into existing power relations, unless, as happens from time to time, some radical group or individual seizes the editing equipment for themselves.  However, even revolutions succeed not because of the agency of the individuals that lead them but because they happen to occur in a set of socio-economic circumstances that are conducive to their realisation.  Non-successful interventions are edited out of history, none sing of those who fail.  The chances are that even the most radical of gestures was based upon a myriad of other gestures, events, voices that we do not see.   It is the editor (or editing systems) and not the producer that holds the true power.  These means of selection, not the means of production is what we truly need to have our voices heard, our gestures liberated. 

Slavoj Žižek warned in a recent lecture of the dystopian dangers of a technological future without the means of editing within our hands.  As explored above, the seeming disconnect between the semiotic, hyerlink-reality of the web and our embodied experience is increasingly absent from our cultural experience.  The more closely and dependently ourselves as subjects become integrated into a machinic network, the more we are handing over editorial control of our own experience, our own memory and identity to the editorial hegemony that operates in the interests of those who's hands are on the controls.  If we don't want to end up on the cutting room floor, to not make it into the salon, if we want our voice to be heard, to have the right to name our own ship, then we each need to become acutely aware of the editing process, wherever it occurs and to consider therefore how this is inflecting our opinions and shaping our knowledge.

The recent media episode over the censorship of Google in China indeed fitted our accepted discourse, our media narrative, with regards to the communist state.  In fact however the UK has its internet traffic pass through a silent censorship service known as Cleanfeed which gives no information to users that content has been censored.  In line with many so called liberal democratic societies around the world the spectre of indecent imagery of children is used as a biopolitical tool for the monitoring and filtering of internet content by governments.  France and particularly Australia have recently adopted sweeping new powers.  We might all be producing, all speaking more than ever before but is anyone listening or have our voices been muted out. 

It is through the analogue of the open exhibition and its relation to the discourses of contemporary art that the inherent problems with singularisation are made apparent.  We have our attention drawn to both the edited and non-edited possibilities of the cultural gesture, its value, the methodologies within which that value is created and the contexts within which these processes take place.  We should be aware and made aware that those cultural gestures that make it to the museum, which appear within the polis, and the metropolis, are edited within the discourses that set the very parameters of our experience.  It is only through our intervention however, through acts of deterritorialisation, through a formative nomadism that we can find a way out of our seeming impasse.  Only through the dérive, through that trajectory of singularisation that an artwork can embody can we find a way in which the discourse can be disrupted and allow our performative act, our exemplary act to succeed.  It is in this way that we may ultimately attain a voice and can begin to speak and to be heard.

Part III: Open Essays, Open Endings, Open Becomings

A copy of the above essay can be found at http://tinyurl.com/yj4k7gq.  The editing privileges have been opened to anyone with access to this link and therefore the essay may be altered and shaped as its readers/authors (its prosumers) see fit.  It could be re-written, filled with hyperlinks, images or nonsense, it could be ignored.  In this way I hope to draw attention to my position as author within a discourse of power relations and to problematise the apparent paradox of calling for an openness of discourse within such necessarily exclusive discursive terms.  Is the only way to think a discourse from within?  It exposes the position of the web in creating new cultural models of production and editing through which I would therefore seek to make the essay not a unified entity of a centralised authorial voice, but a deterritorialized trajectory.  Lets open this up to the floor.