My research is centered around the development of histories in relation to an ephemeral notion of presentness. The notion of art making or art practice can be used as a metaphor for the act of building or creating structures within the present. An ambiguous present is accelerated by the mediation of the internet between the subject and the event of an object or situation; a polymorphic community where collectivism and individualism are virtualised, hyperrealised – geographically and contextually folded/displaced.  

If it is possible for radical creativity to function within the present, what is this creativity, and who/what is its audience? Seth Price, one of the many artists working within the architectures of the internet, in his essay Dispersions suggests that within contemporary forms of cultural production the “market mechanisms of circulation, distribution and dissemination become a crucial part of the work…one must use not simply the delivery mechanisms of popular culture, but also its generic forms.”  So if a piece of pop music or a magazine is used as the medium for an artwork to take place, the art world acknowledge the art gesture whilst simultaneously the product functions like any other object in the consumer market place. Price suggests within this “the difference lies within these products. Embodied in their embrace of the codes of the culture industry, they contain a utopian moment that points towards future transformation.”  The development of a universal access within this type of practice solves issues developed by the potential hierarchies between an artwork and its audience as a public. Within this above statement, it is the utopian moment that points towards future transformation that interests me the most. In relation to public art, Price writes that situating the work as a singular point in space and time turns it a priori into a monument – if it is dispersed and reproduced its accessibility rises. So how would a monument of the present function? What collective or individual form would it take? He then states; “We should recognise that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing debate, publicity, promotion and discussion.”  Work in the present is developed through the distribution mechanisms of free market capitalism and by using these mechanisms an artwork can act as a dye within the vessels of these systems – to understand how they function and react to cultural production.

Within capitalism and consumer culture, we seem trapped between two poles of an enactment of modernity – quivering somewhere between an anachro-futurist science fiction and the sublime terror of an implied and mythologized ecological devastation. It is a combination of these two poles that interest my research – the idea that they are one and the same. I am trying to produce an art practice that questions the current nostalgic return to utopian futures of the past; how these are developed as histories – fictions, myths, revolutionary models received in the present – distanced yet reified through contemporary culture as aesthetic voyages of discovery for potential futures. Through its reification as a model, utopia becomes an aesthetic surface stripped of its socio-political potential as a consciousness (a tool in the present) – and seems to be used to distance the contemporary subject from its revolutionary potential. In a western society mediated by images and simulation, it becomes very difficult to separate the notion of revolutionary potential or radicalism from the historical model it conjures. For example; in the recent large scale UK Trade Unions march against the government cuts on 26^th March 2011 in London it was reported in a newspaper a protester saying they are protesting in Tahir Square (Egypt) and we are protesting with them here in Trafalgar Square (London). There was the suggestion that the sit-in in Trafalgar Square as part of the march was in response/relation to the revolutionary uprising in Tahir Square. The protesters comments seemed to be sympathetic with reference to a domino theory of events/working class uprisings. But what was apparently disparate with this situation is that although we live in a globalised community of networks – we don’t actually live there, we don’t live in the networks that exist we communicate through them. What is happening in Egypt we can never understand, because we are not present, we have not lived through it, we have only communicated through it and been communicated to by it. This is how history, language and mediation functions in a spectacular sense. What does it mean for a person living in the UK to see images of the revolting masses gathered in Tahir Square in Egypt? When we use that form of protest we only enact it through the mediation of history and images, stripped of its lived context. For Egypt the form of a revolting people on mass occupying a central part of the city has radical potential because they are attacking a completely different political construct than the UK. But In the UK, an over developed capitalist democracy, these forms of protest have no possible function beyond the theatricalisation of the event of their image. The practice of mass protest in all its spectacular form is sympathetic toward capitalism in that it allows a situation to go unchanged whilst enacting a unification of the masses encouraging people to associate change (in the present) with a historically repeated physical action – producing a response inherently and retroactively rehearsed.

So how then can we use history in the production of the present? Do we critique a retro-futurist idea of utopia? Walter Benjamin has written in his essay On The Concept Of History of a notion of “now-time”. Now-time suggests that one can leap into the past to discover secrets about the future. If now-time has a role in developing the future, it is a question of what past we leap into. Because it seems that a theatrically enacted return through form and perfunctory use develops an ideological barricade from any radical potential. Benjamin’s Now-time, a “temporal force in the past that would hit the present as if it were coming from the future” is interesting considered in relation to Bruno Latour’s essay; We Have Never Been Modern. Latour suggests that modernity has never begun, and the Modern project, or constitution as he refers to it as, developed as a model that was encircled by hybrids that the constitution rejects and allows to proliferate. A Nonmodern (or amodern) takes into account a Modern’s constitution and these hybrids. In this sense, Latour develops a Modernity that exists only as a historical sentiment – assembled by the hybrid constitutions that it was not as a tool (when we look at Modernity historically) to describe a perhaps ephemeral vessel around which more individual or local hybrids existed. Baudrillard develops in his writings for Utopie that within modern development, the privileged class have the durable and want the ephemeral (the ephemeral they want is the developing model of modernity), and the lower classes aspire to the durable model and are given the ephemeral (but this ephemeral is one in which the model has already changed – a simulacra monument to an unrealised Modern). So a potential reason for the modern project to go unfinished (or as Latour suggests; not begun) is that the physical development of the project and the conceptual models are two separate paths of inquiry and have no intention of being realised as a single project.

So what is the relationship between Benjamin’s force in the past and Latour’s undeveloped Modern? Does the past hit the present as if it were coming from the future because it is a moment of unrealised future potential from the “modern” project - acting like air pockets trapped in the past that rupture in the present?  Or is it a form of passive inebriation? If so, where does our agency lie; in the search or in the rupture? Do we assimilate vertically or horizontally? Are the air pockets objects in the present – monuments? Or are they ideas from the past – models? And who gets to use them?