Dennis Hollingsworth

Flash Mobs

'And what is, for now, a "raw capability" as Shirky describes it, could easily become a political tool: "All of the organizers of public action who are looking at this stuff now, from the Moral Majority to the Sierra Club, are thinking, 'OK, is this something I can use to accomplish my goal X?'"'

http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0804/p01s02-ussc.html

I'm not sure about this swarming phenomenon as a potentiall tool for political or other purposes. This "raw capability" is essential, and it appears to me that the rawness is intrinsic to the capability. What seems amazing to me is the kismet factor... anonymous emails sent out and the marvel is how many and who would appear.

The model for public action (as this article seems to call for) should instead be the military "swarm" battlefield-computer-communications concept. Or a combination of the two: where an highly organized group would, with each member, orchestrate a less oarganized but sub orchestrated swarm... kind of a cellularization of swarms, focused on one event-site. This way, you can have the scale necessary for effect.

Another interesting point of the article is the issue of pointlessness.

What's the problem with pointlessness? The article appears to want to correct the apparent lack of purpose by supplanting it with his own agenda... or as he asserts, any agenda (but I bet he has his pets ready to go). But this begs the question: what's the purpose of art?

I've had a recurring daydream of curating a group show called "Pointless". This is the boogiebear of the artworld... especially the artworld I came from, grad schooled in the very late 80's where teh conceptual was king, a despotic king.. "What's the point?" Once you answer the question, the show as a physical fact begins to disappear.

"Pointless" would be a show about things in and of themselves... without a moral to the story, without the happy ending, without an appeal to a disembodied intellectual authority. Without singularity. What could have been a swarm of ideas, a fountain of associations, a sideswipe of imagination... becomes a totalitarian dictator of one thought, a single idea and it's tribe. It would not be a tease, a withholding of a punchline. It would be a succession of punches, so we can get punch drunk... with luck.

"What's the point?" Once you answer that, the audience can leave, and go to the next exhibit-as-node-as-conceptual nugget. Now, maybe there are indeed a manifold vacuousness out there in the galleries, art that is just a physical operation made by small minds. But art that is made by curious, smarter(?) or engaged minds should be bigger than the abstract (as the abstract for a academic paper). The difference is the quality of the curiousity of the artist, and a dedication to the work as a physical fact combined with the appreciation for the train of thoughts it compels.

Just don't stop the train.

Or maybe this is like the nature of abstraction for me, as in abstract painting. I've been thinking of abstraction as a representation of image whose lynch pin has just been pulled... and the I think of my work as that collapsing image caught sometimes before it hits the floor. This is paint as material for its' own sake, and the flooding associations of images it compels from the humans who behold it.