The Shared Condition of Individual Thought

Beside delving into the role of women writers in literature that extolled the creative genius of a single (id)entity, Virginia Woolf’s writerly gesture here is a deconstruction of the glorifying vision of individualistic creativity and highlights the importance of emulated collective thought emanating from “the body of the people.” However, collective thought and being aware of the multiple intellectual heritage of our reflections (which are not wholly our own) are two very different notions. It is a matter, then, of opening a debate on the distinction between shared thought and collective thought. Rafael Lozano-HemmerPulse Room, 2006, installation view, Arte Abierto, Mexico, 2020.© Rafael Lozano-Hemmer / SOCAN (2021) Photo : Mariana Yañez, courtesy of the artist Ian HeistersGestures #2–#4, 2018, installation view, Root Division, San Francisco, 2018.Photo : courtesy of the artist If we refer to Jacques Rancière’s The Emancipated Spectator, in which Rancière reflects on another way of thinking the public before/within a performance work, it is above all interactivity (defined as any type of “relationship of exchange, dissemination, or communication” in the social sphere, and not strictly limited to the digital fieldAs Catherine Guéneau notes in her article “L’interactivité : Une définition introuvable,” Communication et langages, no. 145 (3rd quarter, 2005): 117 — 29 (our translation).) that he foregrounds, as a privileged form of this exchange. In this book, he underlines the difference between community — “By that I mean the community as a way of occupying a place and a time” Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 6.— and the collective, which at first refers to a gathering of all the spectators and performers, who, brought together in the same place, form a “community.” However, he largely reconsiders this version by maintaining that it is especially through the intellectual power of the individual faced with an exchange, an interactivity (artistic or not), that communal force is created, and not through a mere collective gathering. In Rancière’s view, community value is situated by no means in the collectivity (bound by similar interactivity), or in a predefined space, but in the intellectual work undertaken by each individual and gathered around a single reflective action. The power that he speaks of issues from each spectator’s perceptual interpretation, as well as from their capacity to intellectualize this individual relationship within a community.Ibid., 16. According to Rancière, the act of breaking with the collective, from the point of view of spatiality (the same place), is then essential for reflecting on communal capacity as a collection of diverse experiences within a space freed of forced situations and far from a unified experience. Rafael Lozano-HemmerPulse Room, 2006, installation view, Manchester Art Gallery, 2010.© Rafael Lozano-Hemmer /SOCAN (2021) Photo : Peter Mallet, courtesy of the artist Interestingly, an artist such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who places special importance on an art said to be interactive, refutes this idea of the collective, as, in his view, the term instinctively refers to a universalization of thought. Preferring the word “connective,” Lozano-Hemmer conceptualizes these interactive spaces as “assemblages of disparate realities having neither prior intention nor homogenizing effect.” José Luis Barrios and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Subsculptures”: Un dialogue entre José Luis Barrios et Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, exhibition catalogue (Geneva: Art Bärtschi & Cie, 2005), 14 (our translation). This very Bakhtinian approach makes it possible to think of the work as a place in which individual thought, far from being universalized, preserves its individualization while still being part of a group. Here, his Pulse Room (2006) — an exhibition space lit exclusively by three hundred incandescent lightbulbs, each flickering individually at various speeds — is a particularly relevant example. The lightbulbs, hung at a height of three metres and adorning the space in rectilinear fashion, like myriad points of light, are all connected to a sensor placed at the edge of the installation. When touched by a member of the public, the sensor translates that person’s heartbeat directly into a single bulb. When the sensor is released, all the lights briefly go out. That precise moment, like a latent image, then allows the new pulse to be incorporated into the whole system. Then all the lightbulbs gradually light up again, the last pulse moving up to the first position in the queue. It seems obvious that the mechanism in Pulse Room maintains a kind of local “community” by generating an internal network that participants are invited to join. Is it, then, the collective or the individual experience connected with others that becomes a real form of exchange? On this point, it is the suppression of the collective that allows Rancière to reconsider the individual’s “emancipation” not as the establishment of a transcendent, all-powerful self, but as a way of discovering, of creating (even together): “Every spectator is already an actor in her story.”Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 17. It is thus the force of the individual, gathered with others, that makes for a powerful community, and not the group as such, as (id)entity. As the founder and curator of the Code/Art Research Program,Code/Art Research Program, accessible online. I wish to reprise this community-centred practice. As early as 2017, the idea that gave birth to this project was the establishment of an art-research community that aimed to challenge the individualistic perspective of the artist as lone genius creating in their studio. However, it was never a matter of creating one or several concrete works together, but of reflecting on issues related to pre-creative research. For if the final product is a privileged state in the creation of a “masterpiece,” as Woolf reminds us, she also invites us to consider that it is above all the research, the wealth of shared background, the fertile ground of pre-work reflection, and the interconnection of ideas that lie at the foundation of any product or end condition. The project, whose objective has always been to give a real place to art research, continues to strive to go beyond purely aesthetic and/or concrete aspects of art. An online platform was established in 2019 for bringing artist-researchers together, so that research might become a unifying source of connection, experimentation, and emulation around a common subject: society and its digitization. Finally, this sharing of reflections makes it possible to renegotiate place, so dear to reflections on the collective, in order to create a geographically limitless space. The Internet then becomes a choice response for conceptualizing pluralistic environments, so-termed by Frank Popper in his 1975 book Art — Action and Participation; spaces that enable — and have always enabled — non-hierarchical expression or manifestation. Frank Popper, Art — Action and Participation (New York: New York University Press, 1975). It is a non-hierarchization that is social and societal, but also spatial, for, if Rancière interrogates spatial stability as essence of collective power, he opens onto a liberation from the fixed structures in which this notion is imprisoned. This liberation is embodied here in a decentralized space in which both the community and its occupied space become digital. Creation always issues from a common source or field of reflection, but does this diversity really have a chance of surviving in a collective space in which identification with a group, a shared thought, prevails? Can we think communal heterogeneity, rather than collective homogeneity? To see in it not a single finalized work or a collective thought, but works, involvements, communal acts nourishing a common goal? To think creation and not identification? And why not broach these conditions of creative diversity as a force for the creation of a new form of reflection, far from any identification with some matrix of an all-powerful collectivity, but, above all, to maintain a singularity of thought within a common space (digital or not)? Translated from the French by Ron D. Ross Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix Ian Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie FélixIan Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie FélixIan Heisters, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Valérie Félix

The Shared Condition of Individual Thought

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