CFCF - Music For Objects Process

This past spring we were asked to create the artwork for the companion EP to CFCF's Exercises (released in 2012). Music For Objects was inspired by a short film Wim Wenders put together for Yohji Yamamoto in 1989 titled Notebook on Cities and Clothes. Here's an excerpt from the film to give you a sense of its significance. 

The music in the film certainly also seemed to influence the sound of the EP so we began to take a look at the artwork associated with Japanese releases by composers in the mid-late 80s as well as some contemporary Japanese design via the always excellent IDEA Magazine Japan.

At first we focused on representing all of the objects in some equal fashion, but soon found that any one could symbolize the whole idea. Therefore, we chose to isolate the perfume as it stood out as the  most loaded object in the group as well as having the most potential for exploration. As we did more research into the meaning behind each object, across cultures, we discovered they all had unique stories that could be brought out into the artwork. A bowl, for instance, could mean the everyday cereal bowl or a ceremonial tea bowl.

The following typographic pieces were designed for the perfume bottle concept.

 

Two different vector sketches of the initial perfume bottle concept.

Presented here are the final concepts we mocked up for the cover.

HUO to AC

HUO: What do you think of someone like James Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia Hypothesis?

AC: Well, he’s the absolute opposite. He was a NASA engineer, and his dark vision is an engineer’s vision. It’s a machine vision of the world. It’s not about biology. It’s a self-correcting machine that doesn’t care for us mere humans. It’s actually a piece of science fiction for a generation of middle-class liberals who know that their project failed. I mean, this is the other thing we haven’t talked about, which I’ve never really made a film about, because I don’t know how to do it. By the early ‘70s, the postwar middle classes and the early hippies in this country who had originally thought that you really could change the world for the better, become totally pessimistic, almost apocalyptic. Looking at all this, it’s always puzzled me that one of the most privileged, pampered generations in the history of the world can go from optimism to pessimism so quickly. And I still haven’t worked out quite why they’ve done it. Someone like Lovelock produces beautiful pieces of science fiction that both express and seem to scientifically justify that shift towards a dark pessimism that says we don’t even matter as human beings. We’re nothing. It’s as if they became depressed. I think there is some truth in the argument that they’re a generation of total narcissists, and now that they are growing old and facing death, they can’t even conceive of their own death. Instead, they project their own coming death onto the world. They say, I’m not going to die, it’s the world that’s going to die.

HUO:And this is an earlier generation.

AC: Yes, it’s the generation before mine. They’re basically heroes of their time, a time that believed in self-expression as almost a public duty. They are individualists who believe that self-expression is the most important thing. This means that what you feel inside yourself, inside you head, is the most important thing in the world. But if the world is all in your head, then when you die, the world dies with you—it ceases to exist, because you can’t express yourself. Because narcissists don’t have anything beyond themselves, apart from their children, which is why these people are obsessed with their children—they don’t have a trade union or a political party or religion. They know these people will go on beyond their death, but they won’t. On the other hand, people like me who were brought up by old socialists, although I’m not a socialist, what it did instill in me is a strong belief that you work towards something that will go on beyond your own death. I mean, that’s really what you’re put on this world to do.

In Conversation with Adam Curtis, Part I

SS Cyanide Capsule

X

Miley/Sinead

already-mades

Since the 1930s total mobilization has not stopped; we are still and permanently mobilized within the flux of "active life" (la "vie active"). Being whatever singularities we are like blank pages on which any history could be written (that of Eichmann, that of a great artist, that of an employee with no vocation); we live surrounded by objects that could become ready-mades, could remain everyday objects, or traverse these two states. However in front of these possibilities, in a light sleep, beneath the surface of the real, a spread of advertising slogans and a host of stupid tasks saturate time and space. Until an interruption, we will remain foreigners to ourselves and friends with things.

Parataxis is thus the very form of our existence under a regime said to be democratic. Class difference remains calm, racism stays hidden, discrimination is practiced amidst a multitude of other facts, all flattened on the same horizontal plane of an amnesiac senile present. The images, impressions, and information we receive are a succession of "stuff" that nothing differentiates or organizes. Collage and channel-surfing are no longer separate activities, they are the metaphor for our perception of life. This is why we believe that it is no longer necessary to go one way or another on the death of the author: for if the author as "convention" seems more necessary than ever in the meaningless struggles to protect copyright and in the interviews with creators that infest the periodicals, we no longer even have to ask whether it was ever anything but a convention to serve the interests of power.

Claire Fontaine
Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A few Clarifications

citizen-terminals

Elon Musk unveiled plans for the Hyperloop in a 57-page PDF

What indeed is left of the notion of service when you are auto-matically controlled? Similarly, what is left of the notion of public when the (real-time) public image prevails over public space?

Already the notion of public transport is gradually giving way to the idea of a transit corridor, the continuous prevailing over the discontinuous. What can one say about the wired household of electronic domesticity, with houses that have computers wired into them, controlling the house systems, or of the smart building, indeed the intelligent and interactive city such as Kawasaki? The crisis in the notion of physical dimensions thus hits politics and the administration of public services head on in attacking what was once geopolitics. 

If the classic interval is giving way to the interface, politics in turn is shifting within exclusively present time. The question is then no longer one of the global versus the local, or of the transnational versus the national. It is, first and foremost, a question of the sudden temporal switch in which not only inside and outside disappear, the expanse of the political territory, but also the before and after of its duration, of its history; all that remains is a real instant over which, in the end, no one has any control. For proof of this, one need look no further than the inextricable mess geostrategy is in thanks to the impossibility of clearly distinguishing now between offensive and defensive—instantaneous, multipolar strategy now being deployed in 'preemptive' strikes, as they say in the military.

And so the age-old tyranny of distance between beings geographically distributed in different places is gradually yielding to the tyranny of real time which is not the exclusive concern of travel agents, as optimists claim, but a special concern of the employment agency, since the greater the speed of exchanges, the more unemployment spreads and becomes mass unemployment. 

Redundancy of man's muscular strength in favour of the 'machine tool' from the nineteenth century on. Now redundancy, permanent unemployment, of his memory and his conciousness, with the recent boom in computers, in 'transfer machines', and the automation of postindustrial production combining with the automation of perception, and finally with computer-aided design, enabled by the software market, ahead of the coming of the artificial intelligence market."

Paul Virlio - Open Sky

cybersyn

What do you think will be the content of the “post-capitalist planning” called for in the Manifesto. How would this be significantly different from schemes, not only of GOSPLAN but also of Technocracy, Inc or Italian Futurism?

Our conclusion that post-capitalist planning is required stems from the theoretical failures of market socialism as well as from our own belief that a planned system can distribute goods and resources in a more rational way than the market system. This differs from previous experiments with such a system in rejecting both the techno-utopian impulse of much recent writing on post-capitalism, and the centralised nature of the Soviet system.
With regards to the former – we valorise technology not simply as a means to solve problems, but also as a weapon to wield in social struggles. So we reject any Silicon Valley-ish faith in technology – a problem that the liberal left often falls into. On the other hand, we reject any discourse of authenticity which sees technology as an aberration or as the source of contemporary problems – a problem that the proper left often falls into. The question has to be ‘how can we develop, design and use technology in a way which furthers leftist goals?’ This means thinking how infrastructures, data analytics, logistics networks, and automation can all play a role in building the material platform for a post-capitalist system. The belief that our current technologies are intrinsically wedded to a neoliberal social system is not only theoretically obsolete, but also practically limiting. So without thinking technology is sufficient to save us, we nevertheless believe that technology is a primary area where tools and weapons for struggle can be developed.
With regards to the centralised nature of planning, it should be clear to everyone that the Soviet system was a failure in many regards. The issue here is to learn from past experiments such as GOSPLAN, and from theoretical proposals such as Parecon and Devine’s democratic planning. Particularly inspiring here is the Chilean experiment, Cybersyn, which contrary to the stereotype of a planned economy, in fact attempted to build a system which incorporated worker’s self-autonomy and factory-level democracy into the planned economy. There remain issues here about the gender-bias of the system (the design of the central hub being built for men, for instance), yet this experiment is a rich resource for thinking through what it might mean to build a post-capitalist economy. And it should be remembered that Cybersyn was built with less than the computing power of a smartphone. It is today’s technology which offers real resources for organising an economy in a far more rational way than the market system does.
It has to be recognised then that communism is an idea that was ahead of its time. It is a 21st century idea that was made popular in the 20th century and was enacted by a 19th century economy.

The Speed of Future Thought: C. Derick Varn and Dario Cankovich Interview Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek authors of the #accelerate Accelerationist Manifesto