codes

The readings for this week brings to mind the Dutch artist Aernout Mik who uses photographic and videographic installations to present group behavior in a disconcerting interplay between individual and multitudes, thereby allowing events to become fully unconstrained situations. Cause, time and place can never be exactly determined and the stage like settings generally testify clearly to an exemplary artificiality.




Such an interplay of space can be very powerful in the post 911 (cliched I know) world where the so-called societies of control have the greatest functionality. Within the chaos of a terrorist attack, or the sheer notion of the possibility of such an attack. Critic Naomi Klein calls this "shock treatment", where the powers that be shock (using torture or terror) detesters or "insurgents" into a child like state, apt for manipulation. This is further amplified by the coded economic disphoria that we find ourselves in today, where numbers where created from pure imagination of a mass of greed.


Mik's work is interesting, because the disfunctional cadre of his interest loose all their individuality, becoming nothing more than "dividuals", elements of a code that can be turned on or off.

Deleuze even calls these codes "banks" with floating rates of exchange, no longer bound by the tenable moleculs of a gold standard, free to be manipulated by societies of control.