From Banglab

[edit] How to TURN*ON an Insurrection? A Post-Curatorial Statement

[Please edit this version towards submission to Vague Terrain issue due mid-May 2010]

• add here: Why TURN*ON? How came up with topics?
• develop more the idea of "insurrection"

Our main drive in selecting the work/play (revise "work/play"?) to be included in this edition of Artivistic had been a deep desire to TURN*ON ourselves, the participants, the audience, the city, the world(s). We are mostly interested in _unleashing energy_ that might be used for creating new worlds. We are less interested in critique that closes off avenues of thinking and more interested in connections that destroy limits. As Jack Waters and Peter Cramer state, their event is an "OVERLOAD of sensory mayhem in their collaborative performance" aimed at "the release of unknown realms and indulgences." We desired a situated, embodied, sweaty exchange where the participants at the table are all equally implicated and stimulated. We can't waste the opportunity provided by economic collapse. Faced with a crumbling neoliberal system, we want to make out with possibility and find new spaces of creation in-between realities.

• quote more participants?
• develop crisis point or remove?

TURN*ON has been driven by a desire to engage, to create engagements and to expand participation beyond acceptable proportions. The projects selected by the Artivistic collective were selected primarily on how well they might spur action and create unexpected explosions. Beyond asking for artwork, we have called for and tried to organize events which include multiple dimensions of activity and multiple registers of engagement, resonating on political, aesthetic and erotic dimensions at once.

• make above more concrete and specific

Throughout the organizing and promotion of the event, we have striven to emphasize that artivistic is an _event_, not a festival, not a conference. We have attempted to decentralize the decision making and organizing of this event as much as possible through infraCrews which volunteers may join to deal with different aspects of the working of the event, and have tried to make our financial work transparent with our p2p funding efforts. Our hope is to foster new configurations of exchange outside of the traditional formats of panels and exhibitions, in order to release new trajectories by breaking with old habits.

• too technical, make above more compelling

More than anything, the event has been inspired by the artists and communities who are participating in Artivistic (too general?). Our hope, as organizers, is that the intense energies present in the movements around gender and sexuality may be modulated, brought together and amplified through our event. Both the political struggles and the personal passions over these issues are so strong. We have tried to create a roving, expansive network of activities, online and offline, which we hope will reach beyond the confines of the dates of the event. It could be thought of as a war machine, but perhaps we've had enough war and we want something more like a love machine, that breaks down by binding and reconfigures relationality along new configurations. Or perhaps we've had enough of machines and want a love organism with many arms, an erotic squid. In Pornopticon's mole tunnels, we can see the kind of rhizomatic burrows we strive for. One can also think of the comfortable den of an animal as a warm safe space, and we realize that people need to feel supported and safe before they can open up to be turned on, and we are striving towards that as well.

• elaborate quoting of Pornopticon...

The kind of politics you will find at Artivistic is perhaps a less traditional one of social movements, mass gatherings and lobbying publics and politicians. It is more a politics of daily life, a biopolitics that starts with where our bodies are now and what our bodies want. Again, it is a politics concerned less with the static defense of oppositional positions than with creating and opening possibilities, connections, spaces. Our hope is that we might find a magical configuration of energies that will unleash an overflow of fluid genders and sexualities into the city, turning on an insurrection, joining with bodies in rebellion throughout the intergalactic.

The world to come is so sexy and the month to come is so sexy. Thank you for inspiring us already. We are so excited to get started. See you in October.

• in general, must update, from what actually happened
• more focus on collaboration (Vague Terrain theme): 1) within own collective; 2) via infraCrews, etc.; 3) between/within participants (eg. Dyke Rivers bringing together works from their communities)

[edit] How to TURN*ON an Insurrection?

Our main drive in selecting the work/play to be included in this edition of Artivistic has been a deep desire to TURN*ON everyone, ourselves, the participants, the audience, the city, the world(s). We are mostly interested in _unleashing energy_ that might be used for creating new worlds. We are less interested in critique that closes off avenues of thinking and more interested in connections which destroy limits. As Jack Waters and Peter Cramer state, their event is an "OVERLOAD of sensory mayhem in their collaborative performance" aimed at "the release of unknown realms and indulgences." We are less interested in a pure democratic space of dialog than in a situated, embodied, sweaty exchange where the participants at the table are all equally implicated and stimulated. We can't waste the opportunity provided by economic collapse. Faced with a crumbling neoliberal system, we want to make out with possibility and find new spaces of creation in-between realities.

TURN*ON has been driven by a desire to engage, to create engagements and to expand participation beyond acceptable proportions. The projects selected by the Artivistic collective were selected primarily on how well they might spur action and create unexpected explosions. Beyond asking for artwork, we have called for and tried to organize events which include multiple dimensions of activity and multiple registers of engagement, resonating on political, aesthetic and erotic dimensions at once.

Throughout the organizing and promotion of the event, we have striven to emphasize that artivistic is an _event_, not a festival, not a conference. We have attempted to decentralize the decision making and organizing of this event as much as possible through infraCrews which volunteers may join to deal with different aspects of the working of the event, and have tried to make our financial work transparent with our p2p funding efforts. Our hope is to foster new configurations of exchange outside of the traditional formats of panels and exhibitions, in order to release new trajectories by breaking with old habits.

More than anything, the event has been inspired by the artists and communities who are participating in Artivistic. Our hope, as organizers, is that the intense energies present in the movements around gender and sexuality may be modulated, brought together and amplified through our event. Both the political struggles and the personal passions over these issues are so strong. We have tried to create a roving, expansive network of activities, online and offline, which we hope will reach beyond the confines of the dates of the event. It could be thought of as a war machine, but perhaps we've had enough war and we want something more like a love machine, that breaks down by binding and reconfigures relationality along new configurations. Or perhaps we've had enough of machines and want a love organism with many arms, an erotic squid. In Pornopticon's mole tunnels, we can see the kind of rhizomatic burrows we strive for. One can also think of the comfortable den of an animal as a warm safe space, and we realize that people need to feel supported and safe before they can open up to be turned on, and we are striving towards that as well.

The kind of politics you will find at Artivistic is perhaps a less traditional one of social movements, mass gatherings and lobbying publics and politicians. It is more a politics of daily life, a biopolitics that starts with where our bodies are now and what our bodies want. Again, it is a politics concerned less with the static defense of oppositional positions than with creating and opening possibilities, connections, spaces. Our hope is that we might find a magical configuration of energies, perhaps with the help of the H3X3N computer witchcraft club, that will unleash an overflow of fluid genders and sexualities into the city, turning on an insurrection, joining with bodies in rebellion throughout the intergalactic.

The world to come is so sexy and the month to come is so sexy. Thank you for inspiring us already. We are so excited to get started. See you in October.

[edit] What is Turn*On

Artivistic organisers and those whom they infect call "turn-on" anything that gives them the impression of being in proximity of a portal into desirable possible worlds. "That place is turn-on"; "his relationship to the computer is so turn-on"; "today's meeting was strangely turn on". Turn on is like a fragile bridge extending, over a valley of which the depth you cannot see, to life centered on pleasure, consciousness, togetherness, understanding, and joy. Often, as, we see it, turn-on phenomena tend to engage relatively truthful artifact, goings-on, and "information", or, as we attempt to engage them: art, activism, and creative criticism. And often they tend to speak to us, quite obsessively in our civilisation perhaps more than any other, through sex. So much of what is meant to turn us on works to alienate us, and so much of it, we often believe, turns us on. For instance, a game or movie may be turn-off despite arousing us and perhaps bringing us to desire sex. This sex all too often implies and perpetuates apparently inescapable social relations in terms of gender and sexual identity, as well as social class, race, physical and intellectual merit, and especially, of approach to the potential of social existence, or, "attitude". People, mostly dreamers, are being screwed left and right, and, despite what we are told, we are expected to be turned on by this. Well let it be heard far and wide: fuck*it! Let us ask ourselves: what is turn-on? what should be? or, what should it (turn-on) be? or should it be at all?

This is no banal issue. It speaks to our manner of thinking and acting on various issues and aspects of life. Artivistic is a perfect example, because events or stages where turn-on stories and interactions are enacted are also in themselves turn on. Turn*On is ostensibly turn-on. In this sense there is nothing new here. In fact, we are turned-on by a long history of turn-on endeavours. We share much of our language with these, even though many do not understand us or each other any more than we in fact do them: self-organisation, solidarity, decentralization, difference, a sort of principled though idiosyncratic anarchism, conviviality, participation, infrastructure, "spectactorship" (critique of spectacle/spectatorship) or agency, and reflections on work, play, precarity, immaterial/affective labour, peer-to-peer funding, etc etc.

Nevertheless, we struggle with our desires and succumb to fear of being exploited by our fantasies' twisted relationship to realities. Like many other revolutionary nodes, we are faced in our organising with overwhelming eurocentricity and classism in the language we adopt, struggling to adapt with time and place in our communication. We fail in our dialogue with a number of potential partners. The sexual discourses we speak to affect a large portion of our social surroundings, much of which is laden with a rich fora of valid interpretation. Yet there is so little we manage to engage in our inspired responses. We cry so much to deaf ears and fears of wolves. As part of our strategy to deal with this problem of communication, so crucial in promoting more dynamic interpretations of sex and politics there implied, we aim to make alliances with community groups and the like. Meanwhile, the politics of sex continue to unfold before our eyes in a proliferation of images at a rate that sometimes feels disheartening. What is left to say when faced with the products and images of entertainment, body care, leisure, knowledge and work industries after all these years? And practically speaking, the difficulties of properly resolving the problems of interpretation and communication have direct effect on the dynamics of organising Artivistic: too little support, too much workload, insufficient money and escalating necessities. The way there gets longer and shortcuts are less and less admissible.

But it seems to us that there is a sufficient though too often believed to be unnecessary condition to turning on Turn*On: irresistibility. Letting go and allowing ourselves to come together, one by one.

Tell your friends and let it be known everywhere you go, let you be challenged, and in doubt of direction turn away from turn-offs. Don't look back, knowing that as you get passed they had followed you. Do so in every way and you will notice more than anything else the manner in which sex changes first and foremost in your mind.

When sex preoccupies you thoroughly, like anything else, everything else will have changed, your politics will make you seem mad and you may be feared and made into an object of violent desire by those who will be last to crack when there is no turning back. You will recognise love and return it more boldly than ever before. And living will be more difficult and necessary. How is up to you, but somehow it must be so. Means and ends will match in delightful love making.

If you need inspiration, there is no lack of it in the long tradition leading up to endless political remixing of sex, gender bending, sex work (and play), media activism, text audio and video net-porn, body hacking, gender relations reflexivities, sexual identity, queering, morphology of desire in the globalised identity-scape, and everything else that can be named or at least identified as potentially turn-on (all at Turn*On, Octobre 15th to 17th across the city here in Montreal!). Meanwhile, consider some questions we keep asking ourselves:

• What kind of world is worth fantasizing about? How do you use your

imagination beyond the body and how does it use you? Fantasy always plays a role in political projects when we imagine the "world we want", but how does that fantasy become reality? What feedback loops are created between what we desire and the lives we live everyday?

• What actually makes resistance irresistible? The different notions of

sex, gender and sexuality draw our attention to the task of naming. That task can be appropriated in liberating ways. How do we move away from tired and troublesome terminology in order to create different relationships that unleash new ways of thinking (and relating) and new strategies for political action? How can reimagining sex contribute to a process of decolonization in every sense of the word?

• What are the alternative infrastructures of sex? How we address sex

might get us somewhere more, say... stimulating, by welcoming the critical analysis of the production and consumption of sex, and an exploration of self-organized, even intimate, initiatives.

If you or anyone knows of the whereabouts of the meaning in these questions please contact infra at artivistic d()+ org. Note that they may be wearing fake mustaches in the captions above.

More information about Artivistic is at http://artivistic.org .