Cities shelter, support, and define the life of over half of the world’s population. Beyond providing a home, they inspire us through their capacity to delight and entertain. SENSE Culture was founded in Chicago during the fall of 2012 in order to ask how cities support culture today and how these cultures can be richer, more broadly accessible, and inspiring.
At one point, Chicago had thousands of theaters, amusements parks, beachfront resorts, racetracks, ballrooms, movie houses, restaurants, and clubs of both a reputable and illicit nature. For thousands who relocated to cities around the world, experiencing the wide array of options available was an extraordinary opportunity. Existence was defined by a new capacity to meet friends, encounter novel objects, and find different spaces with new functions. Driven by a quest to find fresh and stimulating sources of entertainment within a particular budget, a vast range of individuals constructed a world for themselves and their families. Constructing and sharing an image of these new worlds provided inspiration and motivation to live life fully. A collective imagination arose that encouraged productivity across a wide range of commercial, industrial, social, and cultural realms.
This collective imagination was distinct from the wandering thoughts of individual daydreaming. It was defined by actively questioning through a rational framework how individuals are related, how their perspectives are aligned, and how groups might work towards a goal that would be impossible if attempted alone. Unfortunately, we have fallen into a nightmarish dream. For careful readers of the past and attentive participants of the present, little of what follows is particularly novel or new. It is a reminder that the support for imagination that the following argues for is requisite for life and cannot be taken as a given. This support is a consequence of forces derived from material realities that will at a certain point end or be diverted towards less imaginative goals. It is this productivity supported by imagination that the following goes in search of.
Understanding the relationship between art and technology, corporations and utopias is a prerequisite for undertaking this search for images, imagination, and the productive urban environment that they inspire. To find and provide this support requires a series of considerations. Each will deal with specific limits and opportunities wherein art can play an active role in how the relationships between these terms are defined rather than merely serving as a mirror of the situation. To begin with, it is important to understand generally and in the context of recent history where such an imagination derived from
images came from and why it has disappeared. This understanding will in turn support a conception of what this disappearance looks like and why this disappearance can be understood as a general crisis effecting cities in particular. Asking what solutions are currently being tested will follow. This brief summary of fragmented activities will lead to the possibility of offering an integrated approach as a solution to this crisis of imagination.
The ability to put such an option on the table will be contingent on collecting support from a diverse group of individuals working in a variety of fields. It will require general agreement around a theory to guide action. This “theory” is intended to provide orientation and coordination. It is grounded in the following three tenants: 1) that theoretical structures are a guide providing safety in situations when the meaning and use of terms and the agents who employ them is ambiguous and show signs of a potential to be co- opted in a manner that might subvert the initial goal; 2) a shift from an analysis of culture based on a dialectical interaction of forces to one that uses fields, meshes, graphs, and algorithms to understand the interaction / non-interaction of forces on different planes of representation as well as the poly-vocal nature of cultural creation and experience; and 3) that this theory providing orientation and coordination can render visible the individual perspectives and objects that ultimately sit within the traditional cultural sphere beyond which this essay intends to take us.
Such a theory will be expressed explicitly in what follows as text linked symbolically through references made to points and activities in the world. The ability to make these
links will be largely contingent on the people who support such a theory. It will be here that a portrait of early supporters of this theory will be painted. These supporters indicate those who are committed to the future of individual imagination over corporate influence. As a result, considering the constitution of the community that might enact some of the ideas contained here will consider the constitution of the “art world” as such by asking who will step forward in a moment of crisis.
The specific steps that have been taken will follow from this clear conception of who is involved and who might step forward. A general introduction to SENSE Culture as the organization formed to address these questions will be provided. The following four steps are considered: 1) offering a new relationship between culture and business; 2) introducing a meshwork of objects, places, and people that reorganize the relationship between art and technology; 3) overlaying an Experience Timeline as Platform for presenting the points within this meshwork; and 4) offering Guests an ability to render a “movie” of their timeline.
In considering the manner in which the experiment has already begun, it will be essential to pause in order to consider the particular traps that might lie along the path. Focus will be drawn to the ability of the underlying meshwork to support a non-dialectical
and open understanding of culture and its relationship to rendering specific perspectives. At the same time, the theory of multiple planes of presentation / re-presentation will be considered as a means of isolating and understanding the incommensurability of various languages and objects that might otherwise lead to poisonous results if combined.
The final consideration will ask whether having drawn together a community, attempted experiments, and set up a theoretical framework to avoid pitfalls, we will be able to imagine again. This will not only be to ask about general imagination, but about the most
extreme states of individual and collective imagination that support the formation of utopian images that drive entire epochs of history through the goals they render visible, the people they glorify, and the transcendence of the former world that ultimately results. These situations under the sway of utopia support rich atmospheres fulfilling intimate human desires. The ability of such atmospheres to promise the end of suffering is often so strong that they quickly lose their hopeful nature as they are co-opted by groups interested in the allure and force they hold. Utopia becomes entangled with the forces its leaders once critiqued. They become vehicles of subjugation. It is for this reason that we must continually return to our theoretical grounding in order to ensure that the equation holding utopia remains functional and balanced through definition and operation by communities defined by trust and aided by common communication, presentation, and re-presentation technologies.
The notion that life could be motivated and defined by an individual’s imagination arose from enlightenment notions of an evolved human capacity for insight and progress beyond a deterministic understanding of the universe guided by divine teleologies. In America, this notion was driven by manifest destiny, a profound relationship with nature and the landscape, a libertarian spirit, a pragmatic attitude, an extreme faith in the power of the individual, exceptionalism, mass entertainment, and, ultimately, the culture industry. This world stimulated various groups through encounters with novel images and ideas that led to new mind states supporting new ways of seeing and behaving in the world. The open question of how these images of utopia touched down in reality defined broad educational trends. These trends provided guidance for how the image of the world and its material reality should relate. Keeping entertaining images of hypothetical worlds after which one might become captivated and intoxicated at bay was essential.
Images of these hypothetical worlds flowed continuously for over a century. In America, the source was the growing nation coupled with its history, land, and people. These images were collected and reproduced as new works of art and entertainment in places like New York, Nashville, Chicago, New Orleans, Rochester, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Disney, Warner Brothers, MGM, Paramount, the Music Corporation of America, Universal, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Hearst Corporation, Time, Life, Conde Nast, Vogue, Women’s Wear Daily, Esquire, Playboy, RCA, to name a few, were focal points within these centers and quickly began competing for monopolies within different sectors of the culture industry. These images landed in local markets overflowing with creativity. Theaters, galleries, museums, nightclubs, and arcades supported a fun loving and affordable culture. This situation was predicated on the novelty of the entertainment that was introduced, a growing amount of leisure time as a result of automated services, a group of men and women who recently returned from Europe eager to begin living life again after the atrocities they witnessed, the density of the housing situation, and a diverse set of affordable housing options in rapidly changing urban situations that set radically different groups in direct relation to one another. It was also a function of the incredible cultural exchange that was taking place between the United States and Europe. This exchange was characterized by a specific moment in art history as defined by the radical destruction of European culture, the catastrophe of the Holocaust, and the void of Hiroshima. This crisis of representation afforded a significant amount of room to new artists interested in experimenting with various types, styles, and media through which an image might occur. Nowhere was this more evident than in Greenwich Village in New York, Bughouse Square in Chicago, and North Beach in San Francisco.
At a certain point, these conditions no longer applied. The energy and optimism of the Late-Forties and Early-Fifties drifted into the Cold War. A new set of utopian images was proposed. While the Late-Forties and Early-Fifties were about confronting reality through hard work and innovation, attempting to construct an integrated civil society, and a cultural renaissance of music, art, and literature. The Late-Fifties and Early-Sixties were increasingly about illusion, the allure of mass culture, denial, fear, and ultimately protest against these conditions. The utopia that extended over more than half of American Society from the Mid-Sixties through the end of the Cold War in 1989 was not one that grew organically out of existing communities. Instead, its image erased those neighborhoods and communities that stood in the way while simultaneously engaging in an extreme conquest of land for the purpose of suburban subdivisions. Although there could hardly be said to have been a single “author”, this plan was collectively conceived by the upper echelon of power in
America to support a specific set of goals that would make those wielding the power richer and increasingly in a position of absolute control. This utopia was defined by a newly built interstate system that not only would save Americans from being victims of an atomic attack on a dense urban center, but would allow Americans, at least those with white skin, to flee increasingly crowded and dangerous cities. Violence stemming from a history of appropriation, subjugation, and systematic destruction of infrastructures facilitating collective organization and bargaining began driving people from the city. The result of all these forces was a new lack of urban density that caused communities, along with their businesses and institutions, to collapse. The roads aiding this void were integral in creating an image of a world defined by mobility, consumerism, tourism, and leisure. Absent from this image was both the urban situations from which the image provided an escape and acknowledgment of the need to consolidate businesses, farms, and producers of art and entertainment in order to render an increasingly luxurious high- resolution image and in order to produce the products and services such as jets, telecommunications networks, ultra-sophisticated cars, computers, and food products to a growing number of people at a price-point that they could afford.
This shift in the character of utopia was not entirely detrimental to culture. The collapse of urban property values and the ability for artists to squat at will in Hell’s Hundred Acres (rebranded as SoHo in the Eighties) left huge sections of the city available to artists. They could experiment and form a community while remaining relatively close to the establishment art world that remained strong after the war as artists who fled Europe continued their lives as expatriates. It was not long, however, before the safety and value these artists helped create caused neighborhoods to revive. Landowners were poised to take advantage. Municipalities, real estate owners, and developers bought and appropriated land in order to create monopolies that facilitated charging higher rents. These forces gobbled up land left uninhabited by white flight at unimaginably low prices. As the country evolved in the Mid-Eighties, the stage was set for a new appropriation of the city from the creative class who saved it. It became increasingly expensive for artists to live in the city and, by the Late- Nineties, even the most established artists had fled Upstate.
As the United States became a less desirable place for young artists and intellectuals, the general influx of European immigrants waned. At the same time, the dominant galleries and critics were less interested in art made at home and more so in collecting as many diverse perspectives from around the world across gender, racial and ethnic boundaries. American cities were no longer the ideal place to express a new position, take a risk, or live on the edge. They were no longer open fields of potential where artists could offer a new and stimulating idea and image. They were no longer entertaining sites for assimilation and education. They were increasingly expensive and subject to the corporatization of culture. They were no longer centers of creativity or imagination. Unless one was a professional artist, member of the cultural elite, content with institutional patronage, or immersed in the nightclub scene, cities were culturally rather boring.
This crisis has left many urban dwellers without hope. The privileged are no better off. They look to the suburbs, pills, vacations, television, mountains, food, and islands for the inspiration that makes life bearable. American cities are defined and limited by wealthy landlords, bureaucratic municipalities, decaying infrastructures, control by media corporations, a culture of surveillance and recording, and online networking that makes genuine contact with art and entertainment a near impossibility. What appears in place of a cultural sphere supporting genuine and broad inquisitiveness, meaning, and value across
genres, demographics, and perspective are institutions endowed by barons and their monopolies. These institutions reflect their patron’s values and support their legacy. What they do not do is pay homage to the emptiness that they have left in their wake. They do not offer an alternative for those who cannot afford to pay, learn, and agree to the cultural paradigm that they define and support. Although outreach occurs, it fails to go beneath the surface in order to create the conditions for new culture rather than merely offering new routes to support old media. The result is a city with increasingly few portals to culture, portals that are defined by increasing passivity, and growing monopolies that monetize these portals. In this context, inhabitants are left with diminishing sources of inspiration that might provide a reason to even exist at all.
An alternative to such a situation exists. A growing group of citizens, activists, organizers, planners, architects, teachers, engineers, social workers, doctors, lawyers, and even politicians see and share the world in a new light. They fight inequality, violence, poverty, ineffective use of vast portions of cities, corruption and waste in government, lack of access to insurance, and unacceptable access to food and medical care. Far rarer, and in part due to an inability to quantify the cultural sphere, are those who fight for access to affordable art supplies, music lessons, information about cultural heritage, and a genuine common space integrated with the broader business, design, publishing and social spheres where creativity arises and novel experiences occur. Sanctioned institutions, community art centers, restaurants, and clubs have come into increasing alignment with a singular and homogenous vision that is supported by international media and tastemakers. They do not have to be the only option for the American City. The experiences, education, and insights that result do not have to define the limits of what a patron can discover and come to know.
An absence of diverse entertainment and lack of opportunities for direct participation in culture can be avoided. Since this crisis began years ago, a growing number of people have recognized this alternative. Biennials, fairs, entrepreneurs, poets, abandoned piers, gallerists, artists, event producers, lofts, filmmakers, chefs, dancers, nightclubs, choreographers, architects, warehouses, musicians, and composers offer alternatives. They provide continuity with past efforts until a time when forces are able to come together in order to offer a genuine alternative at a sufficient scale to make a real impact on the fabric of the city. Fortunately for us all, this moment is now. The conditions for these forces to come together are present in Chicago. They define a unique collaborative space that supports a new form of participatory culture in a temporary and autonomous zone.
The best approximation of this form or format still in the process of becoming is a “networked participatory movie” supported by a web and mobile application that aids the filming, editing, and sharing of such a “movie.” These “movies” are derived from “temporary autonomous zones” created by collaboration between a multiplicity of producers guided by a director. The creation and habitation of these zones currently lacks the support of a centralized marketing strategy, a common business plan, unified artist management, collective curatorial direction, shared administration, and overall stylistic cohesion. Each effort is a strained attempt to push past the limitations that have resulted from the previously mentioned voiding of the cultural space of American Cities by speculative tactics. Nevertheless, each offers the possibility that a largely missing cultural discourse might exist for a period of time in order to inspire innovation and life. As a result of this clear potential to educate and open new channels of value concurrently with new spaces and perspectives, it is imperative that we care about such a space and SENSE Culture’s mission to create it.
The construction of this zone, however, requires a considerable amount of energy. As a result, what follows is a plea to a community for its support so that together we might ask the fundamental question of what it means to share wealth and constitute an “art world.” Nikolas Lund and myself founded SENSE Culture to make such a plea. SENSE Culture’s mission is to solve the crisis of imagination as unpacked here in a sustainable and ultimately profitable manner. We have chosen to make a considerable investment in addressing this broad problem from a non-institutional perspective that is requisite for seeing the question clearly and taking the steps to provide a sustainable solution that is accessible to a wide range of people.
We have done so with the help of our co-founders Kahil Elzabar and Lucy Slivinski. Kahil and Lucy have spent their lives as witness to exactly this crisis. They have struggled to save the cultural life of cities by providing meaningful contexts of collaboration. As artists, they have climbed to the top of the musical and visual art worlds respectively. They bring years of commitment to addressing these questions and are the first members of the International Art Community to put their considerable talents and connections behind SENSE Culture.
We are joined by Beckett Sterner (computer scientist and philosopher), Daniel Dietzel (web developer and graphic designer), Margo Ruter (former dancer and marketing director), Sarah Paup (marketing specialist), Gregory Frezados (lawyer), James Carr (investment banker), Vincent Naples (musician, DJ, and producer), Patrick Boblin (artist, videographer, and curator), Jennifer Sydel (jeweler and advisor), and George Lepauw (musician, producer, and advisor). We have garnered the support of a group of private investors coming from esteemed backgrounds in business who are committed to supporting such a new possibility for life in the city. These men and women join an extensive local, national, and international network of artists, investors, curators, producers, and patrons who are deeply excited by the mission of SENSE Culture.
This group is committed to creating a theoretical framework that guides a practical solution to the crisis at hand. Moreover, they are committed to doing so as a group rather than as individuals. As a result, we are actively engaged in asking who else and how many others will be required to test the theoretical positions outlined in this essay and expressed via a surrounding culture of thought and mind. Who will heed the call to SENSE Culture through collaboration between art and business, directors and participants, such that a mutually informative, educational, memorable, and valuable experience at multiple levels of perception and insight arises? The capacity for joy and the ability to sustain a standard and positive outlook on life are directly tied to being able to exercise such freedom. Exercising such freedom drove the creation of our National Parks as “temporary autonomous zones.” A lack of this freedom derived from our physical surroundings drives our flight into entertaining devices that compensate for a lack of real stimulation.
This situation is deeply frustrating and demands that a community be brought together as an exemplary convergence that inspires a broader community to form. This is to ask whether interest, either literal or figurative, could be shared between a multiplicity of people in order to construct a common space that has no responsibilities to existing institutions. It is also to ask what force is required to bring this community together. On one hand, this essay is an instrumental element of this force. The theory contained herein provides one half of the abstract ground on which the figure will form. The other half of the abstraction is the money that will allow this new entity to conduct commerce with established entities in order to spark a new economy entirely. Together, theory and money will allow SENSE Culture to construct a “commons” that supports the freedom and play necessary for sustained innovation. The logic behind SENSE Culture’s half-million dollar funding goal, the details of our considerable progress in achieving this goal, the specifics of our business plan, and the projections that have been made for a return on an initial investment are outlined in the SENSE Culture Prospectus.
Such theoretical and financial support will provide a common orientation in a specific language that sufficiently frames temporary spaces in order to support broader meaning and interpretation by an outside observer. This common orientation is derived from the following goals: 1) providing a centralized marketing apparatus; 2) providing production support; 3) providing administrative support; 4) supporting integration with businesses and products; and 5) creating atmospheres of the highest quality, safety, and profitability. The consequence of this collective coordination will not be a permanent physical “commons” but a loose mesh of artists, locations, ideas, products, and situations that define a sensual experience wherein artists and patrons alike participate in the creation of a story as a “networked movie” that probes everything that is at stake for art and culture today.
Now more than ever, the “force of art” can construct such a commons. Art, artists, curators, producers, patrons, critics, fairs, biennials, and collectors have the power to protest forces that threaten the creative life of people and cities. The increasing prominence of the fields of film, design, architecture, fashion, photography, music, concerts, news media, social media, event production, and online professional and amateur art sharing have revolutionized the reach of images. Aesthetic experiences have become increasingly dominant in our lives. They have the power to connect and heal the soul. These sensations can relate to and account for a variety of populations, experiences, and foundations of being. Beyond the experiential, the simultaneously derivative and integrative, qualitative and quantitative economy of art has resulted not only in the direct valuation of artworks, but also the valuation of entire neighborhoods of cities. The revitalization of such neighborhoods through the support of artwork has often occurred at the hands of those who resist dominant trends in order to offer new perspectives that make the problematic nature of precisely this authority visible. It is this extreme potential of art and its propensity to hold value between epochs just as other instruments crumble and fade that causes such an intense debate to rage as various factions battle for how art is supported and what it supports.
This extraordinary potential is available to us. At the same time, groups with huge production apparatuses hope to continue producing the images that they have been producing for years. These institutions are not interested in constructing a shared commons. They want to sell common images to individuals who are left only with their isolated opinions, photographs, and souvenirs after the fact. They receive little lasting
benefit or inspiration. Although the extent to which a movie or exhibit is held in common is measure through ticket sales and attendance, little is done to ask what creates movies and space that can be shared, how to move beyond conclusions that pander to the lowest common denominator, and how to move beyond business interests that want to keep us defined as separate individuals who can be made subject of campaigns, can be accounted for, and can be analyzed. Such vestiges of the institutions that once made the American City so entertaining now threaten to strangle cultural vibrancy by favoring singularly owned private institutional culture over collectively shared non-institutional and post-national culture.
Such an attempt by corporations to co-opt art through collecting and sponsorship are, however, in vain as they fail both to understand the true potential of a collaboration between corporation and art as well as the underlying force that art can manifest. SENSE Culture sees an alternative to this unhealthy and parasitic relationship between institutions and culture. In order to use the “force of art” to create an alternative, SENSE Culture proposes the following:
1) Create a new relationship between art and business in order to create a new relationship between art and technology.
First and foremost, SENSE Culture will operate as a for-profit business subject to the same limitations and possibilities as others operating in the new 21st Century Economy. As a business, we will support the interaction between a network of cultural producers and a network of cultural consumers. This interaction will occur in the context of streamlining the production and consumption of culture through a centralized platform that de-fragments the culture industry while focusing the investigation on what it means for this interaction to take place in a given city. This alternative moves beyond a state defined by critique of institutions in order to ask how a business might provide support for independent critics and directors to emerge without the support itself becoming an institution equally subject to the forces that the artists and critics it supports attempted to dismantle. Towards this end, we have offered Curated Experiences delivered via web and mobile applications. These 10 experimental adventures took place between August and December of 2012. They were organized by a curator and administered by SENSE Culture. They collected a series of places, events, people, and art around a unifying theme. They were marketed and delivered via a centralized technological platform at www.senseculture.com.
The conclusion of these experiments was a shift towards providing a mobile exhibition apparatus supporting exceptional and highly desirable settings and atmospheres. In addition, we decided to offer a platform for directors rather than curators in order to focus attention on one concept deployed over a given space and time. This shift pointed us towards the creation of non-linear “participatory movies” that give Guests greater flexibility than a linear Curated Experience. These “movies” are fueled by a desire for a Guest to be seen, support an organic inquisition into the object, people, and places included as part of the scene, and offer a concrete and consumable object to Guests as a “rendered movie.” These “movies” will allow us to define the web and mobile platform as a non-linear digital arcade of experience that strings together products, scenes, people, and places in order to provide a unified point of departure and collection for culture in a given city.
This desire to produce such a total art is not new. Attempts to integrate the most cutting edge business, real estate, and digital practices at the beginning of the 21st century in the context of a recession in America and a rather uncertain international stage are less common. It is exactly for this reason that this attempt to instantiate the force of art in the world cannot be taken lightly. Practitioners in Chicago see a sentient city as an open framework of points of particular interest that support sensation and define a mobile collection of curiosity. This new technology is similar to new technologies defined by the introduction of the easel, the phonograph, the still camera, the moving image camera and projector, and the television. Each defined new communities of artists and provided freedom to express ideas in a new media. These communities inspire widely diverse groups that sense and care for the environment where this inspiration arises. This possibility of concentric communities of inspiration arises through investing in the new interaction of art, technology, and discourse that is emerging here in this essay and through experiments in Chicago.
2) Support the new experience resulting from a new relationship between art and business, as well as art and technology, via an underlying meshwork that relates “points” defining these experiences.
Creating a meshwork defining potential relationships that allow Guests to participate in the emergence of a hierarchy from this state of potential will allow SENSE Culture to create “participatory movies.” These “movies” will operate beyond a dialectical understanding of either history or the present in order to see multiple and sometimes irreconcilable perspectives as simultaneously constituting a situation and equally essential in defining the values that are at stake and that can be capitalized upon in order to support the existence of a world and its image. This open meshwork of interest is the logical conclusion at the end of an institutional critique. Such a meshwork moves beyond a framework supported by the walls, labels, people, and ideas of an institution that define why an image of a work of art is important and to the ability to define a work through a wider and more sensual set of data that is associated as a result of its location and relation within and to an open and changing world. If this meshwork is created using the most avant-garde programming languages and powered by computation, it become a technology that is able to account for an unprecedented density of information and allow for its communication and modification in real time. Such a meshwork would allow art to “live” beyond discrete works, times, and places through a reliance on collective vision, shared data, and analysis and understanding that might result. The collision of artists and technology has historically been effective at accomplishing similar goals of subverting dominant conceptions of time and causing a newly entertaining space to open as a result. In order to cultivate this tenant in a world that remains subject to a dialectical understanding of time as supported by the institutions that have been alluded to, SENSE Culture enlists the support of artists and technologies that challenge time. Our wager is that by investing in the intersection of artists who challenge linear conceptions of time as well as web and mobile applications that do the same, a new more meaningful, interested, and fun zone will be supported. We believe that it will allow Guests to experience a greater capacity to remember events supported by this emerging technology than would have been possible if such a technology was running on a fixed and linear timeline. Such a zone would be defined by moments that have more information associated with them and, as a result, support a greater depth and density of sensation.
3) Offer a web and mobile application that can present the underlying meshwork, guide Guests’ interactions with it, and offer a gateway to a rendered result.
In order to make such presentation possible, SENSE Culture has created an Experience Timeline that will allow Guests to see places, people, events, and products that are featured as part of a “participatory movie” to which a Guest might purchase a ticket via the SENSE Culture platform. Although the Timeline includes a graphic element that represents the 24 Hour Day and the 7 Day Week, it is populated by people, places, art, objects, photo opportunities, special offers, and ideas that do not have a fixed location in the future. They are offered to Guests as elements that are important for defining a given Director’s “movie.” These elements can be experienced and assembled based on a Guest’s desire. They can be experienced, shared, repeated, scaled, and used as points of departure that together define an individual Guest’s unique experience as arising out of a common meshwork. The Experience Timeline is divided between a common area and personal area where a Guest can keep track of past movies, the items that they have collected as a result, and what they might like to do in the future. This space is one where Guests can see friends that they met while participating, network and socialize, comment on experiences and objects, collect items, plan the future, and reflect on the past. The common zone will be a place where Guests can come to learn about new cultural events in the city and discover the most compelling atmosphere where they might encounter culture in the flesh. As such, it will be a virtual version of the “commons” that is manifested in the world as a series of realities that are organized by a particular director during a “participatory movie.” Through this function as space and gateway, it will be a site of sustained focus around planning, participation, socializing, collecting, and reflecting.
4) Create the most compelling recording of a “participatory movie” and offer Guests the ability to render their particular perspective.
In the end, SENSE Culture offers Guests the ability to reflect on their experience through a “rendered movie” that defines their particular perspective. Such a rendering of the present will be the ultimate “must-have” product for Guests. It will drive a sustained interaction between Guests, artists, directors, and SENSE Culture. It will cement a particular Guest’s relationship with the cultural scene of a city and provide a record of the exceptional atmosphere that they participated in the creation of. This record will support future interactions by reminding Guests of the elements encountered during an evening that was particularly significant. This interaction between an investment in technology and communities of artists and patrons opens the possibility of collecting a total sensual impression mapped through time. An entire space can be encoded around all variables of art rather than just its image. In this sense, the rendering of the mesh through a Guest’s specific interaction with the Experience Timeline will define a collective image of an archive constantly in a state of becoming through shared investment and collective ownership at a variety of interest levels. From this shared image and common right of access as a function of being a Guest of SENSE Culture, a new source of inspiration will be found that will ultimately support creativity driving the culture of whatever city SENSE Culture saves.
A broader theory is essential in undertaking these considerations beyond the limits of the page. Such theory keeps us safe in the event that dangerous “entities” must be used in order to solve the problem of the crisis of imagination. In the present case, these “entities” are “utopia” and its derivative “images” formed around experiences of singular events. In addition, they are the “corporate financing structures” that are required in order to make such a utopia a physical entity. Here, we should understand the meshwork and its openness to a variety of planes of representation defined by these entities as the core of such a theory. The infinite ways that pressure can be applied allow us to understand how the planes relate and whether activity on one plane affects activity on another. It allows us to see that each plane runs at a different speed and is subject to different events and worlds. Understanding this relationship between planes ensures that no one entity and its plane dominates. Moreover, it allows us to understand how these planes and the entities that anchor them are each responsible for defining the objects, artists, Guests, and places that are brought together as a meshwork presented as a “open scenes” and rendered as a concrete configuration in a Guest’s personal “movie.
The relationship between planes, the entities that define them, and the objects, people, and places that surround is defined by the “force” of the singular and rare situation when an “open scene” becomes an Event in which Guests can invest. This possibility of becoming an Event drives the desire of Guests to attend. An “open scene” becoming an Event means that a coincidence of elements that were not necessary for the “open scene” to exist has occurred. The coincidence has resulted in the redefinition of the space and time of the “open scene” such that it is now characterized by a new attractiveness that draws Guests to it as the Event unfolds and as an anchor of memory. Becoming an Event means that the “open scene” no longer plays a supporting role in a Director’s vision, but has become the star and “point of it all.” Being present for this “moment of revelation” is highly desirable because it defines a Guest’s cultural capital, is fun, and lives on in the mind and on the Platform. This collection and intersection of planes of representation through the support of a technological and theoretical framework renders the sudden and fleeting Event as tangible, memorable, and exchange-able through various types of media marketed to all senses. The Event as presented via the Timeline will Guests to collectively edit an Event. The Event as represented in a “rendered movie” will allow Guests to create individual perspectives. These individual perspectives can in turn be summarized as a collectively generated movie around the Event and ultimately general epoch of a given city or broader culture.
The cumulative result is an open gateway. Investing in such a technology, community, and the company that facilitates this process through an overarching vision and methodology will allow Guests to engage the city with a new level of theatricality that provides momentum, energy, and comfort in penetrating the situation in order to uncover a new depth of meaning, both imagined and real. In doing so, Guests will understand the potential of each configuration of elements to constitute a world and define a logic of revelation. This logic of revelation, a teleology defining the end of a particular world, becomes the driving force that mobilizes a Guest such that they begin moving with sufficient velocity to not just be a voyeur of a digital museum, but an entity that can communicate with the force of art itself.
The co-incidence and balance of “the force of the Guest” with “the force of art” is the pay-off or return that SENSE Culture offers. It is the moment when a particular shared experience of the Event pulls together an unexpected co-incidence of both art and humans. This sudden existence of energy coming together in the Evental Moment causes tremendous energy to be passed on to those who have invested. The energy that is returned, however, is not the same as what was invested. The meshwork, commons, and manifestation as Event transform it. It has passed from the type of energy that drives cars to the type that fuels minds towards imaging the future. The effect leaves everything and everyone overwhelmed. When such alignment occurs in a moment called an Event, the difference between planes of representation, entities, people, objects, and places is felt ever more. It is for this reason that we are investing in technology to de-laminate the collision of forces in order to provide a record that is more – accessible, personalized, and relatable to others. As a result, we should understand that text itself is at the core of the solution to the lack of sustainable collective imagination beyond the dream into which we have fallen. Through text, we can anticipate danger on paper so that we are ready when we apply the theory in the world. It will be this safety that makes it possible for us to record and render the nuances of the Event.
The utopia of SENSE Culture involves understanding the revolutionary potential of sensing “all variables of art” through a “language of new media” as traced in the materiality of a “networked movie” that is an “arcade integrating essential elements of the networked movie as products for sale.” Such a relationship suggests the possibility of having different planes of representation working parallel to each other in service of the same goal. Although each plane does not intersect directly with the others outside of the rare Event, the elements that characterize them are all drawn from the same set of potential elements. These potential elements are the wealth and resources that define the Event and from which it is “made.” The meshwork is intended to hold this set as an economy. In this sense, the meshwork is a meta-plane of representation that sets up the potential relationships of all elements of art and their broader set of data defining their sensual impression in the world across communities, time, and space.
The meshwork, however, is not the only meta-plane of representation or economy of resources from which new products can be produced for consumption. The General Economy and the SENSE Culture Economy are also such meta-planes. Unlike planes of representation that are only brought into alignment during an Event, meta-planes of representation such as number, word, particle, letter, or invisible flow can hold elements that are included in radically different planes of representation. They are beyond or before these planes. They are outside of the world that we “exist in” and, as such, are entirely abstract, subject to pure potential, open, and resistant to conclusions and confrontations. These meta-planes always are and are not directly continuous with each other. In this sense, it is to meta-planes of representation and the meshwork in particular that we must look if we are to understand how the activities of SENSE Culture within “temporary autonomous zones” figure more broadly in the world.
To do so is to investigate the relationship between the meshwork and the General Economy and the meshwork and the SENSE Culture Economy. The meshwork as mediator between the General Economy and SENSE Culture Economy is most tangible when used for quantitative and qualitative analysis. Quantitatively, the meshwork can become subject to algorithmic analysis that allows us to understand how different planes, products, places, and people relate, the monetary value of the relationship, the factors that drive high value, the elements that are scarcest, and the possibility of customizing the platform based on how much a Guest spends, the amount of time spent online and in the world, the number of friends a Guest has, the rate at which they acquire new friends, the distances that they travel, the energy that they consume, and the overall rating of their experience. Qualitatively, the meshwork can use algorithmic analysis to extend beyond frequencies of occurrence, numbers in a database, and graphed connections in order to see how points in the meshwork can hold “tags” and “genes” that inform a conceptual understanding of why relationships emerge and define events that exert greater force and are more popular than others. Carrying out quantitative and qualitative algorithmic analysis of Guests’ and Artists’ interactions with the meshwork would define a metric of value for “open scenes” and ultimately motivate how SENSE Culture behaves fiscally and interacts with the General Economy.
Artists are eager to begin working and stop compromising their utopia because they are forced to align their efforts with existing institutions or brands. We have developed teams across generation and race, created and managed budgets, produced novel events, brought together communities and viewpoints, investigated how best to provoke change in the city, have become beacons within the community, have undertaken appraisals of entire histories and discourses that might inform content, gathered actors and directors to guide experiences, provoked new relationships between art and technology, have networked spaces, objects, and people, have rendered these occurrences, and have imagined the radiant atmosphere that such culturally driven, networked, and commercially viable “temporary autonomous zones” will be characterized by.
We need everyone who reads this to seriously consider what they can do to help utilize a tremendous surplus of cultural, intellectual, and human capital. We need everyone to seriously consider the specific opportunities offered by the current state of art, technology, and discourse. We need everyone to consider how they can help us make the investment that will change Chicago and eventually the world.
We need you! Please visit blog.senseculture.com and post a comment. Better still, elaborate on a particular concept that sparks your interest. Please write to walker {at} senseculture.com and lend your theoretical, experiential, or financial support.
This investment of financial, cultural, and intellectual capital will make Chicago and other cities around the country and world more entertaining and less subject to the void that institutions have left as a result of their decline. It will support the conditions that are essential for the return of collective imagination as well as the interest and innovation it supports in the cities where imagination takes hold.
Walker Thisted and Nikolas Lund
Chicago
December, 2012
