4th Derrida Today Conference Roberta Colavecchio

Fordham University – New York, (USA) PhD Researcher in Postcolonial and Cultural Studies

28th

-31st

May, 2014 Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Deconstructive Re-Cycling in New Media Art The intra-action of Tantalum Memorial and Composting the City|Composting the Net

Abstract

The theoretical reflections and the cultural challenges the paper intends to propose come

directly from my PhD research project. Based on postcolonial and cultural studies stance on

complex cultural processes and expressions, my PhD research approaches the question of ‘nature’

from a double perspective, that attempts to put the complex debate about ecology (for which I

especially draw on the transversal and networked vision theorized by Félix Guattari and then

further elaborated by Bruno Latour) in intra-action with the feminist theoretical contribution to

the recent controversial debate on New Materialism, and particularly with the evocations inspired

by Karen Barad’s intra-disciplinary, intra-acting, and diffractive approach to complex cultural

issues.

Given this premise, the paper will depict a contact-zone where disciplinary boundaries among

philosophy, art, ecology, technology and science fall down to allow for new hybrid cultural

challenges to arise. In the frame of contemporary ecological debate and starting from Derridean

concept of difference the paper will be an attempt to connect the issues of Deconstruction to

those of New Materialism, and make them intra-acting.

The intra-action of Deconstruction and feminist neo-materialist thought will be specifically

examined through a diffractive analysis of two new media art installations/performances, that

actually enact and perform this complex practice: Tantalum Memorial (Mongrel, 2008) and

Composting the City| Composting the Net (Shu Lea Cheang, 2012). The former an installation

centered on telephone communication, re-cycling human voices in recorded bits of information

performed by electric switches, the latter a performance composting organic residues with data

debris of archival nets, both the performances enact a process of the de-construction and re-

construction, unfolding as re-cycling processes of human as well as non-human matter. This post-

human entangled matter arises to challenge established, fixated conceptions of being and make

them ceaselessly become in the unfolding of complex networks of relations between matter and

culture.

In the light of the contemporary cultural debate about the relationship between art and the

politics of ecology; in the light of the cultural perspective the paper attempts to suggest by

registering the intra-action of deconstructive theoretical practices and neo-materialist ones,

traceable in both the performances mentioned above, how can we address the question of

ecology and re-think a real as well as a virtual ecosystem that ensures residues, debris, remains

not only to survive but also to creatively re-cycle into new, unprecedented subjectivities? The

cultural challenge the paper will pose is whether it is possible or not for Deconstruction to open up

to a chaosmotic vision of culture, as it has been theorized by Félix Guattari.

Deconstructive Re-Cycling in New Media Art

The intra-action of Tantalum Memorial and Composting the City|Composting the Net

The topics, issues and textualities I’m going to introduce here are part of my PhD research,

titled Residual Aesthetics. Posthuman Matter and Re-Cycling Technologies in the Landscape of

Contemporary Art. Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, new media art and

postcolonial theory, my research attempts to approach the issue of nature at the intersection of

ecology, neomaterialism and deconstruction in order to question the paradoxical and

schizophrenic dynamics of contemporary bio-genetic and digital capitalism, which are traceable in

everyday cultural practices: think about over-consumption coexisting with the depletion of world’s

reserves of biodiversity, the epidemic of anorexia/bulimia in one part of the world contrasting

with the poverty-induced starvation in the other, and neo-colonial experiments responding to the

global economy demand of geophysical resources, just to name a few examples. As a practice that

is embedded in the complexities of contemporary political and cultural scenario, art seems to

reflect its schizophrenias, so that it stretches the boundaries of its practices by defining its

contexts and strategies in paradoxes. Slogans such as ‘Museums Without Walls’, ‘Cities as

Laboratories’, ‘Living Archives’, ‘Walking Narratives’, have consequently become so common in the

art world, and yet, as Nikos Papastergiadis remarks, these slogans

reveal a recurrent desire: to stretch the parameters of art by incorporating new technologies, sites and perspectives. As they introduce foreign tools, places and subjects they also expand the category of the contemporary.

1

In the attempt to orient the maps of such a chaotically expanded category of the

contemporary, my research turns to Deconstruction. For the attention it pays towards the

différance, for its capacity of relocating the aporetic dissemination of meanings within “the game

of the world”, within an ‘intertext’ that is more than linguistic, Deconstruction allows to locate art

exactly on the edge of the paradoxes of the capitalistic machine of differentiation, so that the

exceptions, the excesses, the residues conjuncturally produced along its borders, can be re-cycled

(rather than captured) into new physical arrangements, performative assemblages that, as

1 Nikos Papastergiadis, “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity,

Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, (ed. by) T. Smith, O. Enwezor, N. Condee, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), p.363

Deleuze and Guattari would say, could “bring forth a version that illuminates [chaos] for an instant,

a Sensation […] a chaosmos, a composed chaos, neither foreseen nor preconceived.”2

So, by putting Derridean philosophy of Deconstruction in dialogue with Karen Barad’s posthuman

and neomaterialist account of naturecultural phenomena, I would like to propose you a diffractive

path through and across an artwork (Tantalum Memorial, 2008) and a performance (Composting

the City | Composting the Net, 2013) respectively by the London art collective Mongrel and its

spin-off YoHa (an artistic duo composed by Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji), and the

Taiwanese-American net artist Shu Lea Cheang. The former a memorial enliven by recorded voices

recycled into bits of information, the latter a performance composting organic residues with data

debris of archival nets, both the apparatuses call into question the so much discussed issue of the

archive, which I attempt to approach through the lens of Deconstruction.

So, before going deeply into a diffractive analysis of the two textualities, I want to show you them.

Mongrel’s Tantalum Memorial, as you can see in these pictures, is an artwork embodying a

network of conversations recorded for a previous project by the art collectives: Telephone

Trottoire (2006), a ‘social telephony’ network designed by Mongrel in collaboration with the

London radio programme Nostalgie Ya Mboka and processed by the London Congolese

community. Inspired by the practice of ‘radio trottoire’ or ‘pavement radio’ through which, during

colonialism, news were passed around on street corners to avoid state censorship, Telephone

Trottoire calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message on a topical subject and invites

them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their telephone number.

As an assemblage of electromagnetic Strowger telephony switches activated by the records of

Congolese’s telephone conversations, a computer on which screen one can monitor the dialling

progress of the calls, and headphones through which hearing the messages passed around in

spoken Lingala, Tantalum Memorial stands out as a towering rack of cables and switches showing

and performing the hidden cost of our mobile phones: 600.000 humans dying each year because

of coltan wars in Congo, and half of the local gorilla population exterminated by miners and rebels

induced to hunt them for food by consequent poverty and starvation.3

2 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson, G. Burchell, (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1994), pp.204-205

3 “In order to mine for coltan, rebels have overrun Congo's national parks, clearing out large chunks of the area's lush

forests. In addition, the poverty and starvation caused by the war have driven some miners and rebels to hunt the parks' endangered elephants and gorillas for food. In Kahuzi Biega National Park, for example, the gorilla population has been cut nearly in half, from 258 to 130.” I. Delawala, “What is Coltan?”

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128631, 20/01/2014

Tantalum Memorial – Reconstruction

ZERO1 Biennal “Global Festival of the Art on the Edge” San Jose Museum of Art May 10 – August 31, 2008

Tantalum Memorial – Residue

Manifesta7, The European Biennal of Contemporary Art Bolzano, Italy

19th July to 2nd November, 2008

Coltan is a mineral mined in Congo (home to 80% of world’s coltan reserves) for the production of

metal tantalum, an essential component of mobile phones and other technological devices. In

order to face the high demand of them coming from the so called First World countries, local

militias force Congolese population mining coltan, coveted by dozens of international mining

companies. That which comes up as a civil war, is actually one of the multiple ways of dying woven

in the twisted network of neo-colonial relations of power.

As for the other textuality, Shu Lea Cheang’s performance Composting the city | Composting

the Net, here is a video that introduces the work. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-

53AC8kfXg)

As remarked by Papastergiadis, under the process of dematerialization and dissemination

informing contemporary cultural context, and reflected in art practices and production, “the coda

for the contemporary artist is now defined by the desire to be in the contemporary, rather than to

produce a belated or elevated response to the everyday.”4

Being narratives of place and displacement, the relationship between the local and the global, the

discourse about difference and so on, now very common, maybe also trendy, in contemporary art

production as well as in academic discourse, the focus has shifted from the kind of theme treated

to the modalities and perspectives, both ethic and aesthetic, adopted and put forth by art. That

means not only to account for the political engagement and the consequences of artistic gestures,

but also and especially to see how the interconnections of artistic actions and gestures are part of

an ongoing attempt to grasp the complex forms of cultural relations that occur in everyday life.

That is all the more important considering that, as Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey remark, in

“the move from regulation of markets to the regulation and shaping of individuals, groups and

societies in order to stabilize the free operations of markets”, the activation of a myriad of sub-

legal entities has determined the penetration of the power of governance into the objects of

everyday life. 5

Food, computers, mobile phones: objects of everyday life at the core of the artistic

practices just shown before. For Mongrel, the way back to the genealogy of technological devices

structuring contemporary social interactions becomes a way to explore and weave together the

ambiguities of globalization, migration and contemporary addiction to constant communication.

4 Ibid.

5 Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, “Pallet of Greys” in K. Gansing, T. Go, S. Weier, L. Zuppke (eds. by), transmediale

2013 BWPWAP, (medialis Berlin, Germany, 2013), p.54

Shu Lea Cheang, Composting the City | Composting the Net (2013) transmediale BWPWAP, Berlin

Shu Lea Cheang, Composting the City | Composting the Net (2013) transmediale BWPWAP, Berlin

For Shu Lea Cheang, putting food and data net consumption close to each other expresses her

social engagement in exploring the almost trendy practice of re-cycling consumed by

contemporary cultural industry. As she declares when interviewed by Matthew Fuller:

I want to do something with direct recycling, if there is a recycling loop, let me see how this is wound up; same thing with the e-trash business. Why are we shipping it to developing countries like Africa and China for the workers to go through the shit and pick out what they can sell, and then just burn the rest and pollute the air? I am interested in how this cycle could work locally.

6

It is precisely a cycle the process one experiences when facing the two artworks. Being it

the one materialized by the rhythmic flow of electricity, recorded human voices, and coltan

running through the veins of wires and cables of a switching cyborg body, or a collection of waste,

worms, human matter and digital commons transversally interconnecting in a movement that

recalls, and actually re-enacts, the periodicity of bodies and nature, the artistic gesture unfolds as

an act of territorialization, a temporal delimitation of a region: the rhythmic movements of the

switches resonating in the recorded immigrant voices echoing those of their colonized ancestors

(as for Tantalum Memorial), the intra-action of organic and digital matter composted into a noise

reverberating through the room and the audience’s body (as for Composting the City | Composting

the Net). By continuously re-drawing the spatio-temporal dimension of an Umwelt, an

environment, that is inextricably connected to, and, as Elizabeth Grosz remarks, precisely as

complex as the organisms and matter inhabiting it, the act of territorialization unfolds as an artistic

movement, the creation of a mark, a boundary that “is not self-protective but erotico-

proprietorial: it defines a stage of performance, an arena of enchantment, a mise-en-scène for

seduction that brings together heterogeneous and otherwise unrelated elements.”7

Refigured as acts of consigning, as the gathering together of signs, the two artworks pose

both an ethic and aesthetic question: if consignation, as noticed by Derrida in his critical study of

the Freudian archive fever, “aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in

which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration”, how to avoid for this process

to be reduced to a futile re-conduction of multiplicity to a fixed unity?8 In 1995, wondering about

6

Shu Lea Cheang in Matthew Fuller, “Compost Your Orgasm Trash”, in Mute Magazine (29/02/2012) http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/compost-your-orgasm-trash , 23/04/2014

7 Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, (New York: Columbia University Press,

2008), p.48

8 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1996), p.10

the destiny of psychoanalytic archive if Freud had known “all the technical mechanisms for

archivization and for reproduction […] more refined, complicated, powerful than the ‘mystic pad’”,

the French philosopher found an answer in the spatio-temporal transformations accompanying

the progress of the techno-science.9 This is all the more evident today. What does it happen to the

archive (to the one composted by Shu Lea Cheang at the cyclic intersection of real as well as

virtual space, or to the Mongrel’s one triggered by the Congolese’s voices recycled into bits of

information), when the very technical prostheses, or supplements, are re-located into a spatio-

temporal paradigm and a nature-cultural aesthetics so that they cannot be distinguished from the

vegetable, animal, human, organic and inorganic matter they relate to? As noticed by Derrida, “it

would no longer be a question of simple continuous progress in representation, in the

representative value of the model, but rather of an entirely different logic.”10 Despite this

performative logic is not guarded against the archontic power that establishes the archival event

and regulates the very structure of archivization, it does not even exclude the possibility of an

intervention. The performance of the archive, the act of impression, the inscription of a mark is

always also a “movement of the promise and of the future no less than of recording the past.”11

Then, from a deconstructive perspective, both the installation and the performance appear as

archival impressions: the gathering together of posthuman signs, traces, residues in a continuous

movement of self-differentiation. Together with Karen Barad, one can look at them as “specific

material phenomena (relations rather than things), […] specific physical arrangements,”12 material

configurations of the apparatuses of observation: mobile phones assembled from tantalum, a rack

of cables and switches reconfiguring human voices, a sink of waste composting transpecies matter,

a computer mixing scattered words, letters, and sounds up and together.

Those material re(con)figurations do not exist outside relation. As Niels Bohr and Karen Barad

agree, apparatuses cannot be understood as observational devices or mere laboratory

instruments. “[They] are not inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the

action happens, or machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation. They

are neither neutral probes of the natural world nor structures that deterministically impose some

particular outcome. […] apparatuses are not mere static arrangements in the world, but rather

9 Ibid., p.15

10 Idib.

11 Idib., p.24

12 Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Come sto Matter”, in Signs,

Spring 2003, p.814

[they] are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-

actions/performances” 13 with no inherent outside boundary but through which specific

exclusionary boundaries, local resolutions, exteriorities-within-interiorities are enacted.

Apparatuses are open-ended practices.

By exceeding the language of representation, traces do not need to exist elsewhere than in

duration, in a re-thought process of archivization, in a continuous movement of self-differentiation.

Here, the Congolese’s voices and their dead bodies re-member the histories of their colonial

ancestors into the body of technological devices and cultural texts evoking landscapes, ecologies

and peoples that are other, an yet part of our quotidian scene. Here, the hybrid archival

materiality made up of compost, of organic matter and net data, enacts the impression of a desire

that is both an inscription and a cut: to expand the cycle of the contemporary while making it

tighter to the times and spaces of everyday practices, to transgress the enclosures of art fields, to

re-turn to its collective dimension, to open its archives up and onto the space of anticipation of

memory, so that it can be “an aspiration, rather than a recollection.”14

As performative archives, Tantalum Memorial and Composting the City | Composting the Net

unfold as material movements of différance: their residual traces coexisting as the in-between

conditions for any other future landscape to inhabit.

As Derrida reminds, “there is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of

repetition, and without a certain exteriority.”15 Initially houses, domiciles, addresses the archives

of différance by Mongrel and Shu Lea Cheang reverberate as memoranda, promises, evocations of

chaosmotic landscapes for the sustainable co-habitation of new unprecedented subjectivities.

While acting as intra-active re-cycling apparatuses re-articulating the nature/culture divide into a

posthuman continuum, Mongrel’s and Cheang’s artworks also call into question the urgent

concern, registered by Tolia-Kelly, of “thinking about [citizenship] ecologically […] through

geographies of landscape, nature and coordinates of everyday lived experience.”16

13

Ibid., p.816

14 Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration”, in Information Is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data,

edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Susan Charlton, (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003), p.16

15 Derrida, Archive Fever, p.14

16 D.P. Tolia-Kelly, Landscape, Race and Memory. Material Ecologies of Citizenship, (Farnham, Surrey UK: Ashgate,

2010), p.4

It’s in the nature-cultural, collective, residual, material archives of différance that one can try to

prefigure “the process of becoming a citizen; of becoming [nature-culturally] in place.”17

_______________________________________

References

Appadurai A., “Archive and Aspiration”, in Information Is Alive: Art and Theory on Archiving and Retrieving Data, edited by Joke Brouwer, Arjen Mulder and Susan Charlton, (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing/NAi Publishers, 2003)

Barad K., “Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, in Signs, (Spring 2003)

Deleuze G., Guattari F., What is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson, G. Burchell, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)

Derrida J., Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans. by Eric Prenowitz, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Fuller M., “Compost Your Orgasm Trash”, in Mute Magazine (29/02/2012) http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/compost-your-orgasm-trash

Fuller M., Goffey A., “Pallet of Greys” in K. Gansing, T. Go, S. Weier, L. Zuppke (eds. by), transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, (medialis Berlin, Germany, 2013)

Grosz E., Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)

Papastergiadis N., “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary” in Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, (ed. by) T. Smith, O. Enwezor, N. Condee, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008)

Tolia-Kelly D. P., Landscape, Race and Memory. Material Ecologies of Citizenship, (Farnham, Surrey UK: Ashgate, 2010)

17

Ibid., p.2