introduction:

This is a list of early projects and writings taking from a 2002 catalogue booklet. Images of work in no particular order.

INSIDES (belonging to the emperor) --------------------------------------------0.0

OUTSIDES (embalmed) -------------------------------------------0.2

VERY LARGE (tame) -----------------------------------------------------0.4

PERFORMANCES (suckling pigs) -----------------------------------------------------0.5

VERY BRIEF (fabulous) --------------------------------------------------0.53

ARCHITECTURAL PROPOSALS (STRAY DOGS) --------------------------------0.6

INSTRUCTIONS TOWARDS DE-ORGANIZING (INCLUDED IN THE PRESENT CLASSIFICATION) ----------------------0.8

NOTES ON COLLABORATORS AND OTHER FORMS RE: BETRAYAL OF    SUBJECTIVITY(FRENZIED) ------------------------------------------------0.84

NOTES ON SURRENDER (INNUMERABLE) ------------------------------------------------0.89

NOTES ON PERFORMANCE (DRAWN WITH A VERY FINE CAMEL HAIR BRUSH) -------------------------------0.9

NOTES RE: SPURSE (ET CETERA) ------------------------------------0.92

SPURSE AN ARCHITECTURAL INTRODUCTION (HAVING JUST BROKEN THE WATER PITCHER) -----------------------------------------------0.91

PUBLICATIONS (THAT FROM A LONG WAY OFF LOOK LIKE FLIES) ---------------------------------------0.98

insides:

1.Oswego Web: Installation and performance piece. Fall 2003 SUNY Oswego Gallery. An installation centered around developing a methodology to consider the active agency of space and its deterritorializing potential upon the phenomenological body. (From the proposal): A theatre piece of distributed agency. An extended theatre piece -- what is an art exhibition if not this. entrances and exits, speed and slowness. action from somewhere -- actors unlocatable – all at once. a hyphosis (a simple truth)-- gone further – folded back upon itself – an exhibit conscious of its status as event. space – total space – not walls, floors, lights, and some objects, but a space – this space as a total space -- a thick space – a space as agency. not space as object, or space as containing objects, but space as force. a density of action. an all over space – an enfloding weave.

perhaps a description then – a large gallery 20`by 80` above a ceiling at 15`and at one end an opening at the other floor to ceiling windows – a charged volume already immanent – add to this – ropes, strings, cords, thick, thin, transparent, colored, rough, smooth, long, short, braided, sheathed, monofilament, knotted, woven… – extending. begining quite thin – by the entrance nearly invisible individual transparent lines far apart. Thicken, weave, -- twist together mixing with other cords and ropes. a dense weave of structural ropes – opens to a body allowing to bend, fall over, rise up, worm through, sit, hang, slip – to no longer move forward but up, down, sideways, belly-up weaving a new body -- a new space. sounds whisper, voices above, below quiet, demand silence, beseach movements – images projected stream by as the only light added into the space -- intermittant flashings gestures of an empty time.

a second hyphosis. a preformance begins the theatre space – audience outside looking in -- distanced fishbowl – infinitly long bodies drawn out from the walls, glacial movements weave through space horizontally, worlds projected swarm across them, sounds magnified from across a body of water. Ending. this comes back over the period of a month as images streaming over a global circuitry – falling

2.HALIFAX PROPOSAL: (Fall 2003). The basis of this installation will be the presentation of things and sounds collected principally from Mexico City and Halifax. The objects collect are all marginal detritus fitting in both categories of the natural and human produced. The objects would be both suspended from the ceiling and held up from the ground plane (Mexico City objects from above and Halifax objects from the ground). The sounds would be played by numerous tape decks placed around the space, plugged into existing outlets. In addition to the objects and sounds, a delicate web of transparent and colored filaments and cords would fill the space, making physical connections to points on the walls and ceiling – these strings would suspend objects at varying heights. Each cord would trace out a set of points derived from our participatory analysis of Mexico City and Halifax. The objects held up from the ground plane would rest on very thin metal rods. Over the course of the installation the configuration of elements would change setting the space in a slow flux of oscillating objects, changing soundscapes and vibrating filaments. The installation process would begin with an extended visit to Halifax during which we would conduct an urban walking/hiking expedition. This walk's path (or series of walks over approx. one week) would be based upon superimposing our routes through Mexico City on Halifax (see preliminary study map fig. 1). This would lead us on a series of transversal movements through urban, suburban, rural, and maritime zones as part of a single continuous cut. This performance would be open to community participation (see 'participation' below). This walk would follow the exact route of a walk done in Mexico City in the fall of 2002 (above). And along this walk various collections would be made (objects, images, and sounds). And it is these things which would be folded into the actual installation. As an extended part of this prepatory phase we would solicit people to perform similar walks in various international locations (individuals who would be both part of the extended spurse community and individuals located using a score derived from our Mexico City data pool). This solicitation would become an ongoing part of the installation -- with materials being added (and subtracted) to the piece over the duration of the installation (see 'temporal' below). Spurse members in Canada, United States, Mexico, Great Britain, Germany, Finland, Ukraine, India and Taiwan will participate in this component of the installation. Installation: Objects: The objects collected -- which for the most part make up a detritus of liminal things (broken metal shards, wrappers, rocks, buttons, plants, containers, animals … (see inclosed images fig. 3) would be suspended and placed on the ground or just off the ground. The placement of these objects in space would be based on a determination of virtual points on an extended map of Mexico City/Halifax that would be superimposed as it meets a manner of understanding the active nature of the gallery space) -- producing a haptic engagement with things and the self (see fig. 2). Note these maps are virtual data fields and would not be visible as part of the installation. The suspended objects (Mexico City/world collections) would be held by string which would run up to the ceiling travel through an eye-hook and then attach to a location on the wall (not necessarily the nearest wall, and not at a consistent height -- rather all these points would be further determined by the Mexico city scores). The string would be generic, visible, and of a darker part of the color spectrum (but varying according to a further system). The effect would be of vertical lines hanging objects connected to a swarm of obtuse angular lines going in all directions from the ceiling to the walls. This method of suspension would allow for the heights of the objects to vary during the life of the installation. The objects on the floor (Halifax and environs collections) would either sit directly on the floor or be placed at a distance off the floor held up by thin metal rods. These would also vary during the duration of the show (amount -- oscillating in quantity). (Note re: gallery space -- conceptually we do not consider space to be neutral -- the “white cube” is a problematic metaphysical illusion. All our systems and scores would have as part of their operation a way of being effected by the actualities of the gallery space.) Installation: Sounds: Environmental sounds gathered (from Mexico City, Halifax and other locations), based upon scores, will be played back in an unfiltered manner. The sounds would be played from various tape recorders (of all differing sizes-- approx. 15 tape decks maximum at any one time). The recorders would be distributed around the space based on a score (as would the extension cords leading to them -- the cords would be of excessive lengths allowing them to snake through the space. The volume of the sound emitting from the tape decks would be varied during the show, as would the tapes and which ones play or not. Archive: All notes and documentation for the show would become part of the installation. Added to and inter-leafed within this archive would be all the documentation that others would send us regarding urban conditions and performing the scores in alternative locations. Thus it would grow during the life of the show. This collected archive of documents would be stacked and placed on a long narrow table supplied with three chairs directly outside of the gallery entrance. The archive would act as a device to undermine the traditional discursive mystique of the artist and the production of art as inspired acts. The archive will lay out the rhizomatic dispersed cellular nature of our collective and its modes of decentralized functioning.  It would genuinely contain everything -- which for spurse consists mainly of voluminous email correspondence. Folded into this correspondence would be a set of all the images collected. Installation: Photos: Photos have and will be taken based upon a rigorous system governing location, direction, view, and other parameters. These photos will serve as a participative tool for visitors to the gallery. Upon entry, each visitor will be welcome to take a photo postcard that would include a score for the visitor to follow while navigating the installation. In addition to directional cues and instructions, the photo would include a score prompting the visitor to physically alter the photo, including folding, tearing, and wrinkling, as a way of making a personalized record of their movements. This resulting map-object could then be left in the space as a permanent part of the object collection (there would be a specific set of locations chosen for these to occupy). These would become part of a web site, be used for promotional materials, become part of catalogue, used as information flyers etc. Distant Locations: During walk we would leave minor installations along the route -- these would be documented and listed as part of an accompanying web site. Web Site: A web site would be constructed to both allow dispersed individuals to participate in collections as well as to house a complete catalogue of objects and events. The site would be interactive and in flux -- a tool.

3.Dumbo’s Stool: An installation. Following Barnett Newman when he stated that sculpture is that which you back into when stepping away from a painting to get to the right distance. A large block moving towards a bench becoming a concise history on early minimalism to be sat upon – which responds actively to displace the viewer/user in a literal embodied sense. Part of an exhibit on the question of the contemporary circus. Designed in conjunction with Austin Museum of Art. “Dumbo is always leaving. And with him the ever-moving circus appears everywhere -- it is no longer a thing or even a spectacle but the movement of the self away from the self -- a nomadic "becoming unknown". The circus can in this manner be seen as an event that seeks to redefine structure, movement, and other forms of constraint as creative trajectories of otherness. Thus moving from the understanding of the circus as a spectacle of the extraordinary, we wish to expose the circus of the commons, and reveal the extent to which the banal harbors forces of the big top.” (from the program catalogue). Davis Gallery, Austin, Spring 2002.

4.Wall: Installation. Monroe Community College Spring/summer 2003. From the proposal: A wash of sound caresses an unwitting interloper as they enter into a space formed by a wall of small audio speakers set into/onto a large group of image(s) screen printed onto this membrane of sound. The interloper has now become one of many potential intersections colliding with this wall of sound and imagery. How is it that one navigates this hall of event, or architectural becoming? The interloper is faced with an experience of space (the wall-sound-image mechanism) that confronts their existence as a passive force. The wall-sound-image mechanism activates this body of potential forces and folds it into this space as event/becoming. In conjuction with Paul Bartow and Rick Metzger.

5.POSTCARDS:  A collection of postcards (a set of 15, 10 copies of each.) was placed within the University of Texas library stacks -- placed in books awaiting an infinitely delayed future. Designs solicited from the international spurse network. Cards which called for the “s” to meet “he” in all books, abstract cards, storied cards, active cards...). Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin (placed 2000).

6.RE-FLOORING: Covering floors and elevator of a campus building with fresh sod. Terrains inverting to meet the actual full dimensionality of the natural. To problematize the artificial. A haptic pastoral. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin 2000.

7.FLOOR WRITING: Quotes from Ruskin’s ``Stones of Venice`` projected onto building floor’s on the University of Texas campus. The question of public space emerges not as a given to be preserved, guarded, and extended – but as an ever active permanent construction unfolding in action itself – shall we call this (echoing Ruskin) provisionally the ‘decorative’? Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

8.PLUMBING SOUNDS:  A theatre piece without actors filling as little of a space as possible – beseeching space as much as any individual. Samuel Beckett's 'not I' filling bathrooms from hidden speakers – the volume set at as faint as possible. (A woman’s voice in the men’s bathroom and a man’s voice in the woman’s bathroom). Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin. “out … into this world … this world … before its time … “ (Beckett, from Not I)

9.FLUTES: In a plastered stairwell, steel conduit and copper piping riven from the walls and fashioned into rudimentary flutes -- a transversal gesture visible in the interstitial space between identities. To be lifted into song from (the whomever) – those who would constitute passerby musicians – or any open category definable only by its relations. A building speaks when given voice. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

10.MEMORIAL SLIDE: To make the stairwells of a building confer on downward motion their singular blessing. To make ascent a problem and to make descent a danger. A slide in building stairwells in rememberance. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin. “Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of nonsense! Only don’t fail to pay attention to your nonsense.“ (Wittgenstein).

11.PROPOSAL MUSEUM: Ongoing. Initial installation – walls/windows covered with event proposals -- transparent. Currently they appear everywhere – a global pollution of ideas. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

12.BALLOONING LIGHTS:  A theatre proposal/installation in stasis – a transversal architecture – above an enormous olympic pool – in the near dark – water suspends light dripping. Spectators navigating an edge looking up voices everywhere – an opera in these drippings. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin. (2000.) ”Yes they do that. And so anything puts up with identity” (Stein).

(OUTSIDEs:)

13.Enfolding the Commons: Seating space – multiple locations. Architecture receives the body as public space -- welcomes all with a friction of conviviality – walls to sit or lean against, window ledges to facilitate a conversation, stairs to welcome a performance. Everywhere these are currently being transformed into an environment hostile to the body – speeds replace slowness – bollards, spikes, cones, slopes, and narrowing entrances seek to smooth frictions into flow. An international project seeking to actively return these marginalia to the body and to allow the frictions of conviviality and the commons to recode streets. (2001—ongoing).

14.ZOCALO FLOWERS: Flores en el Zocalo … una linea de flores puesta de squina a esquina, diagonalemente, en el zocalo de la cuidad de mexico. Temprano por la manana, gent eve linea en el suelo, saliendo del metro, doblando una esquina, cruzando la calle, desde ventanas, - que es o para que son las flores. Que va a haber – preguntan. Algunos ven de un lado a otro, esperan a que alguien los detenga, reconjen una flor del suelo y continuan su camino sonriendo. Otras Cruzan la plaza caminando al aldo de ellas, turistas se toman fotos con la bandera y la cathedral con las flores en el piso. Los barrenderos barren entre las flores y recojen algunas para si, y otros, con la Mirada fija, no se dan siquiera cuenta de la existencia de las flores, se veian preocupados. Algunas personas llegaron a algun otro con una flor que recojieron en el zocalo. Within the Zocalo in Mexico City a line of flowers extends from one corner to the far edge of the space – a transversal line of blossoms bisecting the Law of the Indies reframing a politics of governace in terms of a fleeting event – flowers that become a momentary economy and then grace 10,000 unknown living rooms. ( Mexico City, January 2002).

15.PALLET TOWER: A tower built of discarded pallets approx. 20 feet tall placed upon a site in central Austin heavily contested by developers and community. An intervention in value -- to open up a piece of land to other potentialities outside of debate while silently folding itself into a debate. To activate the actualities of a space as its potentialities in distinction to its future value as ‘developed’/’developable’. With the support of the University of Texas Twentieth Century Architecture Seminar. December 2000.

16.PING PONG: A public sculptural installation left out proposing and extending play – short-curcuiting links between the causalities of the body's understanding of its spatial rememberances. A new metaphysics of the generosity of things. Phrased differently: A ping pong table with 8 planar and 12 cylindrical playing surfaces. In this game there can be...? Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

17.SPILL:  A performance piece that is left to its own devices. Thousands of wooden blocks (stamped w/ postage – thus ready to be mailed) bearing the word 'image' poured through, and swept out of, a building. And then left in heaps – children will come; the mail person will come; something will happen and images will be gone – but only gone – nothing more. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

18.ROPE LADDER: Rope ladders (each composed of a single red rope knotted at intervals) are suspended invisibly in the air leading nowhere – hung so the bottom is just outside of reach. Someone has suggested the sky is full of these – we reply: study string theory – knots are something else. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

19.WARMING THE EARTH (PIG/ROAST): Somewhere smoke pours from the ground ...  A hallowed courtyard of quiet reflection frames the sky, clouds and shuttering palm fronds. One’s gaze carries upward while the walls of the enclosure whisper dreams of former inhabitants. A smoldering scar beneath a magnolia tree breaches the calm with the buried, immanent celebration of porcine abundance. The fat seeps back into the ground – the smoke gone into a paper thin sky – nothing visible – your memories will be activated in butcher shops. Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

20.TONGUES:  A building disgorges its contents. To take all the debris of a building and carefully allow it to stream out of its upper story windows – a discarded identity hanging on.  Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

21.EMBEDDED PENNIES: Ongoing. Global project to reconstruct value beneath the foot – take what is valueless and place it in what is missing. Gaps in stones on heavily trafficked sidewalks filled with pennies set in acrylic. “The other community forms not in a work, but in the interruption of work and its enterprises. It is not realized in having or producing something in common but in exposing oneself to the one with whom one has nothing in common: the Aztec, the nomad, the guerrilla, the enemy. The other community forms when one recognizes, in the face of the other, an imperative. An imperative that not only contests the common discourse and community from which he or she is excluded, but everything one has or sets out to build in common with him or her.” (Lingis).

22.PLANTED TEXTS: Modified texts left out to grow and run wild --a project to rework a language of place -- to open up both a language and a place to other forces: “in the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side roads. we see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.” l. Wittgenstein. Situated on the University of Texas campus the main mall lies on axis between the Texas State Capitol and the iconic University Tower. The mall is a wide, broad, sloping and open grassy space lined with large live oaks -- as well as statues and monuments to commorate civil war heroes of the South. It was here that the 70+ texts were placed. Their placement being designed to foster their movement to other sites (physical or otherwise) and rearrangement by unknown others. The phrases are the product of a series of variations and modulations of chance determined texts (letters, words, phrases from Jabes, Char, Stein, Veyne, Mallarme, Ikkiyo, Celan, etc.) subjected to a method of acquisitional mutation. The authors of these variations and modulations were multiple and worked independently -- generating differing systems and methodologies to produce these texts. Without authorship -- a language set out to sea. A corresponding virtual world was developed. (1999).

23.NAMING NAMES: A project to rename the University of Texas School of Architecture the “Pierre Menard School of Architecture”. Over the entrance was carefully placed a new simulacrum of the name carved in apparent limestone. New stationary was given to all members of the faculty. A tiny banner of random donor names was placed along all the main halls. Instructions from the dean to the school demanding solicitation of a name for the school from donors in exchange for payment was placed in students' boxes. An article was penned for the journal “platform” meditating on nature of naming; then distributed in school. (1999).

24.BAPTISMAL FONT: Public Installation. Milan -- replace bombed out baptismal of church with one fashioned of reclaimed liquor bottles -- again a question of the generosity of things.  Italy 2001 (Done with the aid of a Mebane Grant).

25.EGG: Reconstruction of Massina's painting with car mats and light bulb above side walk. History as a spandrel of weakness looking out to the gestures learnt crossing all thresholds. The gateless gate of small commodities and dreams. Italy 2002 (Done with the aid of a Mebane Grant).

26.ARCH: Adding a Gothic arch made of discarded fruit boxes to a renaissance church. Literal shelter and figurative support -- the renaissance was always in need of a good buttress. Italy 2001 (Done with the aid of a Mebane Grant).

27.GALLERY TANGENTS:  Exterior installation to Milan Gallery of Contemporary art. Addition of work to facade of gallery. Lines reach out traversing streets – composed of clear packing tape – no symbols where none intended.  Infection of an infection – to turn history back to its future moment. Italy 2001 (Done with the aid of a Mebane Grant).

28.UMBRELLA: Light rain falls – an empty park kept dry -- suspend above an umbrella floats – an unseen shelter. Italy 2001 (Done with the aid of a Mebane Grant).

29.MOVING WALL: A long serpentine brick wall that slowly moves over an extended period of time traversing part of campus towards state capitol. Conflation of construction and destruction. Bricks salvaged from the disappearing end of the wall are incrementally laid as the vanguard limit of the moving wall. Austin 2000.

30.PLACING PENNIES: Place pennies on ground. A project to engage in the marginal mythic spaces of the collective imagination that fosters and invents public space – the values of the contingencies of micro-generosities. Someone will bend down to turn a penny over so another can pick it up. Luck. Care of an unknown other. Welcoming otherness outside of recognition. Gestures of care at the edge of visibility. (1998-ongoing)

31.MEXICO CITY CHAIRS:  Place chairs in barren Mexico City Zocalo prior to its inhabitation and trace with chalk and conversation the travels and transformations of stools. A vectoral charge to deterriotialize and accelerate new public occasions. (2000, Done with the aid of a Mebane Travel Grant).

32.CANVAS OF STREET: A blank canvas screen placed on temporary facade accepted additions. After disappearance of actual canvas, there appeared a virtual canvas, a refrain of the former and emergent compositions. 2001.

33.2X4'S: Gaudily painted blocks found and placed in new context. An open disruption that becomes a dance of reconfigurations – a passage of the circulation of gifts. (1999- ongoing – blocks still re-appear).

34.SQUAT AUSTIN:  A web site to aid squatting in Austin, and the general production of the commons. Data on how to access information on legal questions of property ownership, tenants rights, how to set up a squat, basic hygiene systems, legal rights, police tactics, local regional and international groups, local free food, building resources, legal aid, Austin utilities, Austin electricity, city ordinances and governance information, civil liberties union, state legal codes, supreme court precedence information, freedom of information access, police accountability, how to deal with vacate orders, general squatting resources, history of anarchism, local national and international squat links, civil disobedience information, demonstration manuals, mass organizing tactics, etc.

35.(http://mather.ar.utexas.edu/People/students/cadlab/TransArchitecture/squat.html)

(Sponsored by the University of Texas 2001—ongoing).

36.URBANISM LABORATORY: A forum to reconsider the global urban condition from a level of a microphysics of power. Continual re-evaluation of the presumed intelligence of so-called smart growth. Rethinking the inherent limits of smartness as an engine for marginalizing into exclusion the assumed urban marginal groups and events. Use of international network to develop observational database for specific urban opportunities/issues. Development of direct engagement strategies to catalyze latent, unknowable potentialities across dispersed locations. Currently developing a set of proposals which will include architectural interventions, urban sociologies, performances, and installations for Austin, Texas.

Very large:

37.Mexico City Investigations: (An extended set of investigations of urbanization and the global condition – not as a given to be discovered – but as a terrain of invention. This work will consist of an ongoing set of performances, installations, and publications. Beginning fall 2002)

These works are based in a type of urbanistic investigation which is an out growth of our fundamental claim that the contemporary world is an urban world. The basis of this urban investigation is complex, multifaceted, and baroque. It is our contention that the world now consists of a radically urban geography.  This latent urbanism is both often unrecognized and denied. Currently of half of the worlds population lives in an urban context – which is to say we have crossed some form of threshold. But it is a threshold condition which is about more than population density. Briefly one could define this urban condition as a mode of being in the world where the world is full, active, participatory (across all levels, systems and hierarchies) – and where the human is continuously decentered. This series of works takes this new urban context -- this historical condition -- as a starting point, but we have no interest in, either illustrating urbanism or becoming urban anthropologists. Rather we envision a new amorphous space opening up out of this context that demands of us, as global citizens, methodologies for the invention of new notions of subjectivity, ethics, and public space. Thus this project involves no deep image or objective understanding of this condition – rather we see ourselves involved along side our audience in an experimental development of new forms of perception and ethics.

We envision that this could begin through a set of immanent cartographies/choreographies that place one squarely in a situation of the radically concrete actuality of the present. This concreteness of locality (both of place and presence of the phenomenological subject) is the beginning of our investigations and at the core of our concepts for this installation cycle -- which is to say the installations are not illustrations of a set of pedagogic concepts -- but an actualization of an open-ended event – itself engaged in the unfolding of these issues. It is both an actualization of an event and is part of a larger global event – but in such a manner that the binary distinctions of local and global give way to a set of fluid field situations of multiple centers and peripheries – a set of linked but discreet distributed systems.

PROVISIONAL DEFINITIONS:

If urbanism is the rubric under which this work develops it centers around a set of linked issues (1) an ethics of things -- an ethics of the active agency of the displaced and the marginal (2) the production of the commons -- the development of the actuality of public space (3) the actuality of the local -- new forms of distributed locality (4) the question of the body (5) temporality (6) cartographies/choreographies -- not as representation but as new methodologies and strategies for engagement.

URBANISM: Current definitions of urbanism are founded upon population density, land use, and infrastructure. By this measure, Mexico City is the most urban place on planet earth. We do not seek to decry these measures, nor are we seeking some pearl of knowledge that will crystallize the urban condition as if it were a singular entity. On the contrary, urbanism is constantly building and rebuilding itself. It is a complex field situation which is in flux. Like a virus, it morphs in order to survive. It is a type of open-ended becoming. It is, as Deleuze states, an assemblage which “has neither base nor superstructure, neither deep structure nor superficial structure, it flattens all of its dimensions onto a single plane of consistency upon which reciprocal presuppositions, mutual insertions, and intersections play themselves out”. Our interest is in developing forms of action and becoming that are part of this event of urbanism such that urbanism itself becomes a tool towards new forms of subjectivity and ethics that distribute agency fully across this assemblage of our future. Thus Mexico City is, for us, a type of non-deterministic guide, an experimental territory, and a fully global space.

THINGFULLNESS: Things – somehow we have inherited a world made up of subjects and objects – the active and the passive. Things are considered to be “objects” – mute, passive, manipulatable things. “Subjects”, in contrast, are things we allow to be involved in ethics – we allow subjects to have their own agency – their own otherness – to go their own way. But things are not within this sphere – they do our bidding – this metaphysics allows an enormous violence to occur – a silencing of the active agency of the world.  As well as the removal of a “self” (defined more as a dematerialized entity) from the actual flux of forces that compose it as wholly part of the world.

Now what of those things that are further marginalized? The things beneath our feet – the trash, rocks, sticks, plants, insects, and defunct products … all waste.  What is the ethical space of this world? – which is the urban world – the world recoded as human, useful, and as used-up – thus urbanity functions on the margins and surface of ‘the used-up’. How can we begin to allow agency to become distributed across the whole field of our world – how can we begin to have an ethics that recognizes the active nature of things – of liminal things? How can we begin to recognize the space of urbanism as one in which definitions of artifice vs. nature disappear – in which all things actively – and paradoxically -- go their own way?

COMMONS: Investigating the form of urbanism that is transversal requires an interaction with boundaries that are themselves not confined to roles of definition, exclusion, or demarcation. Boundaries are instead inflections within a vast field of common urban space. Although distinct and variegated, this urban space is nonetheless completely public. It is not public by fiat nor fixed by decree, rather it is held in a fluid suspension by the co-invention of the public (audience) that inhabit or engage the space. This type of public arises in part out of a direct encounter and willingness to be subject to the encounter rather than to a pre-existing real or remote dominating subjectivity. To expose all space as public, one can use the tools effective in navigating a transversal urban space. Through using experimental events, the hyper-concreteness of things, and non-deterministic cartographies, one can activate a public space that is not reducible to its constituent part and forces, but that produces, however ephemeral or permanent, a tangible and conceptual space cleared of dominating subjectivities.

ACTUALITY OF THE LOCAL: So often we generalize. White Caucasian American midsize import sedan. Locality becomes treated in a similar fashion – stripped of complexity – stripped of its interweavings with other spaces and systems. Every place is specific – but this itself allows for unnecessary generalizations. To say simply that place is specific allows locality is understood on a regionalistic model of dividing space as a delimited territories – which forces one to fall back on a micro-nationalistic model. Our contention is that regionalism is a particular form of a field situation – all regions have a prespectival global embrace – all regions are part of extended systems etc. Thus there is a manner of being concrete that allows this immanent actuality of distributed forces and prespectival engagements to become visible and visibly active. Our goal then is not to celebrate or reinforce new regionalisms, but rather to actualize all things – to activate forces.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BODY/THE URBAN BODY: The human body is urban and what is urban is open to the body. There is not a world outside the body. Conversely, there is a world within and across the surface of the body. If the transversal urban can be inhabited and engaged, it requires a body sufficiently supple, sensual and open as to perceive the world through a means of experimentation, devoid of the hegemony of either the mind or the body alone. The body without organs serves as a model. The body is undifferentiated; there are no independent organizers translating the world according to a fixed subjectivity. The surface of the body, which is an enfolding of all subjectivities of the human organism, is continuous and fluidly active. It is this surface, thought of as a plane of immanence the rather than a skin or container that engages the world in a co-productive dance of becoming. The body as an engine of possibilities is inseparable from what is the transversal urban.  (It is the elbow that gives balance and the bare that inhabit the cold).

TEMPORALITY: Temporality – time is not a series of sequential moments but it is the active space of things differing – time is difference differing. Time as a qualitative change allows us to begin to conceptualize the world as relational – as an event. The immanence of the unfolding of the givenness of things always leads towards a radical newness – things have an indeterminate potential becoming). If one grants agency to the distributed phenomenon of all things then one is immersed in a responsive relational context – urbanism. Or to follow William Carlos Williams, before one can get to the status of ‘no ideas but in things’ one must position oneself within ‘no ideas but in the event’. To allow the event its own becoming – the ethics of urbanism.

38.CHANCE COLLECTION: Public Installation: Items rigorously collected using chance procedures to traverse large sections of geography -- carefully cataloged and displayed in Austin Buildings. Allows for a new archelogy to occur on a global scale. Undermining distinctions between seeming orders of things – governed only by proximity – stone feather dead rabbit photo burger wrapper living ant water seeds gum rusting nails old pottery ….  Installed in public places directly opposite elevators open to a gaze as framed by an institution denying its framing of an architecture of occupation. Now part of larger set of investigations that have become centered around Mexico City and the global urban condition. (1998).

39.(RE)MOVING GOD: A dialogue with Diogenese of Sinope, the Orace at Delphi, and the American currency. A question of generalizing trust – using trust to frame the event. Tear the word 'god' out of American paper currency so phrase reads "in _______ we trust". Return to Circulation. (ongoing). (1998-).

PERFORMANCES:

40.I have no face 1: A collaboration with Sharir-Bustemante Danceworks to develop systems for dancer-computer interactivity Using wearable computers and the algorithmic generation of active images. Based in a rethinking of the status of the “Virtual” – beginning from Henri Bergson. Towards the exploration of streams, technological, corporeal and immanent, we propose a virtual  that is a question of the immanent and unknowable potential of reality -- that does not understand a reality as being bounded by a parallel technological realm of seeming simulacrum or distinct virtuality -- rather we begin with a reality composed of infinite virtuals as open potentialities. To achieve this, or even to begin to explore this, we envision folding in a number of various streams (thus to move from the condition of streams to a condition that is oceanic), which collectively and individually, would blur the lines between a fixed reality (possibility) and  immanent  futures (the virtual). The world of the dancer presents itself as a continuous transformation, responsive to and suggestive of a choreography outside itself. (the virtual as the development of an open system -- non-predictive milieu). (Premiere Spring 2002 at the Bates Recital Hall, Austin, work has been subsequently performed in Leeds, UK; Monaco and Jamaica).

41.I have no face 2: A continuation of the above collaboration to develop two new systems. Two new pieces commissioned for winter 2002 and spring 2003 (performances in Athens, Monaco and New York).

42.KINOSPURSE: An open-ended investigation of the nature of the world (matter) as images as begun/inspired by the works of Dizga Vertov. "Things are themselves images, because images are not in our heads, in our brains… Images are constantly acting and reacting on each other, producing and consuming. There's no difference at all between images, things, and motion." Gilles Deleuze. A large site specific event involving 40+ performers (dancers, projectionists, musicians, technicians).  3+hr. duration. Sponsored by the UT School of Architecture and the Center for Russian and East European Studies. Spring 2001.

43.CELL PHONE SYMPHONY: In a University Research Library suddenly a cell phone goes off -- then another – slowly more and more ring -- a global symphony calls in -- choreographed. A proposal based upon the assumption that all things begin after the “third” echo or occurance… – excess can make a leap from annoyance – ‘more is other’.  Sponsored by the Art and Art History Dept. at the University of Texas at Austin.

44.ORB: Public performance. An experiment in literalism -- Orb: Eight costumed and two minders gather a form given by all others. Eight shimmering slices/wedges/crescents/lunes set themselves adrift in a performative solace and restore a platonic order only with an improvised ritual hemmed by a crowd.  Each costume belongs to the other, but together belongs to none.(1998).

45.PROTEST ORB:  Same orb acts as a silent disjunction at a protest.(1999).

46.JUDD GOLF: Minimalism as counter-history. Donald Judd as a great humorist – Rabelais. A performance piece done in Marfa – a round of golf through Judd’s large concrete sculptures.  Play as if Judd designed through the game of golf – minimalism as the territorial refrain of the event. Performance as decor – Ruskin (again). (Fall 2001 Done with the aid of a Mebane Grant).

47.ODOUR:  Public Performance. A collective set of smells as a persona. Each a singular smell dispersed in a crowd – a jarring simplicity merging dispersing as hints of an open multiplicity – condensing becomes a cloud being of a foreign air (1999).

48.LEOPARD DANCE: Performance piece. Very slowly one becomes an animal. Very slowly one joins this animal. An architectural proposition. Theater after Balzac’s story of the French Lieutenant and the Leopardess, affected by butoh.  Stage is a desert where man and leopardess fall in love and become more like the other – which other? This becomes an open question. More like others – finding an otherness beyond. (1999). Midway this way of life we're bound upon,/ i woke to find myself in a dark wood,/ Where the right road was wholly lost and gone./ And see ! not far from where the mountain-side/ first rose, a leopard, nimble and light and fleet,/ clothed in a fine furred pelt all dapple-dyed,/ came gambolling out, and skipped before my feet, ... (Dante)

49.TUBE: Public performance: An act of heroic literalism as five fourteen foot tall tubes navigated the caves of central Texas. Tube: An improvised experiment in the “whatever” object. Defined simply as three pieces of cylindrical telescoping cardboard worn over the torso, extending eight feet above the head, the costumes elicit definition outside of our control and pronate our movement into horizontal frontality (1998). “Whatever” is constituted not by the indifference of common nature with respect to singularities, but by the indifference of the common and the proper, of the genus and the species, of the essential and the accidental. “Whatever” is the thing with all its properties, none of which, however constitutes difference. In –difference with respect to properties is what individuates and disseminates singularities…. (Agamben)

50.WATER DANCE:  A horse walks as if a sun setting flashes -- smaller still -- a barrel opens -- a word precedes it, rising over its punctuation, claiming its own cleanliness. Leaving the horse to an infinite but small sea and crossing the sand you have become -- a gift passing out and back again -- nothing meant by it -- a performance occurring in a pool for a falling body. Two dancers emerge slowly from an under lit  superficial film cast over water. Their bodies are lost in the surface tension made apparent. A third dancer moves ponderously while a fourth hangs inevitably still above, awaiting collusion. The waterborne dancers, negotiating the constraints of buoyancy, suspend the resolution of the hanging dancer, freed temporarily from any traffic of gravity. A lilting, sudden release and the four commingle into a single strain against submersion. (2001).

51.BAMBOO FOREST:  Public performance – a thicket roams – senseless – a mass of slowness looking for more. A bamboo grove, walking and sylvan, captures a clearing amidst the crowds. Five figures, fifteen feet tall, moving to rhythms given by their stalk limbs, discover the speed of rhizome’s propagation (2001).

52.BAMBOO DANCE: Public Performance -- A gift. The sound of bamboo rustling in a racquetball court. Movements become sounds becomes space becomes performance and thus enclosure. Bamboo dance: Within a concrete reverb chamber (racquetball court), a shuttering mass covered beneath a diaphanous skin sheds itself, slowly revealing a body of infinite limbs. Bamboo stalks and leaves, fabric, flutes, three foot drum/boots and three dancers, nine feet tall, tangle and percuss, then untangle and silence themselves in such a way to leave the body of infinite limbs not clarified, but displaced and extended (2000).

53.K(NOT) DANCE: Constraints are engines of creation – taken literally. Performed in the theatre of the Austin Millennium Youth Center. Knot dance: Exploring motion constrained by the logic of a progressive tangle leads toward freedom. As an experiment to discover freedom through limits, five dancers pulmonate slowly in a rapturous knot. Tied less together than within one another, all collapse into a series of specific vectors and parameters of movement, unfettered by singular causal relationships. A shadow play records the collective tangle. (Sponsored by the Millennium Youth Center and Heimsath Architects, 2001).

54.YELLOW TABLE: Reactivate the general economy. (Part of our international urban investigations laboratory). Sell intangibility directly. Set up the market as in direct opposition. Make the city be the sole proprietor of this intangibility – claim no price only exchange – pushed to infinity (first installation 2000).

Very brief:

55.3D Computer Workshop: (University of Texas at Austin 2002-2003). Spurse will conduct two workshops (three weeks each) with the UT Dance Department to develop an experimental laboratory to conceptually, philosophically, and materially think through the potentiality of 3D graphic platforms as emergent active agents. Topological Morphology. Parametric Plasticity. Alogorithmic design.

56.FILM SERIES: A free film series for an extended public based up a translation of community input which floats into new terrains based upon faulty (transversal) hearing. (2000 – 2001 With support of the University of Texas).

57.ART BREAKFAST: A method of working to allow an experimental lightness to develop. Over breakfast on Monday devise an (art) project to do that week. Do it. Part of the working method of the urban laboratory investigations. Generalized to a global scale (ongoing as a de-localized cellular internet system of generating the event of intervention).

58.READING GROUP:  Read foods. An ongoing series of banquets all invited. The north atlantic current, a color bar, inclompleates, remembering a counter tenor, wedding thickets… and many others. A production of a public through the incompleteness of eating (1998- ongoing). “If the other person is really other, at a certain stage I must be surprised, disorientated. If we are to meet not just through what we have in common but in what is different between us this presupposes a transformation of myself and the other as well” Merleau-Ponty.

ARCHITECTURAL PROPOSALS:

59.ASTRODOME REUSE: Over an extended period, a period that passes beyond this new century, a skin appears in the Astrodome. Slowly the Astrodome's interior becomes a new surface of nature -- growing upwards in a smoothed depthless skin of a sphere. a hollow volume -- a hollowed out nature rises up to the roof and then becomes the roof -- over time an orb of green folds in upon itself. From this green ceiling of the earth above ones head floats a cloud of trees -- a forest suspended between earths. growing over time upwards -- the trees are thus lowered down. A space of Sisyphean journeys -- one spirals upward and outward from an inner nature to an outer nature and slowly back again. a space that would be open to whomever could make use of this new nature -- and in the process lead to its becoming. An outside placed inside that allows one's own outside to become deeper enmeshed inside. To walk around, then through and then above trees without contact -- brush up against a world felt as effects -- clouds of moisture condensing, winds rising and pushing down -- a sudden squall -- a spider glides by. The interior volumes of the stairways, ramps, concessions etc. would be open to further attempts at use -- but this layer would come later in the geologic lifetime of the Astrodome. For now, use would be bracked out of consideration -- we turn to what is fully in our control leading us outside of the possibility of control. And thus the Astrodome can capture a process of becoming an undiscovered nature, not unlike the experiment in open-ended gigantism in which it originally took part. The dome no longer contains space but becomes a continuous active surface. We are no longer confined to seats or directly constrained by allusions -- the dome as a total surface allows us to discover a nature beyond our predictions  within our inventions.

60.JEFFERSON MEMORIAL: To memorialize those who were enslaved at Monticello - to bring back to our awareness and to our conscious reflection the reality of those individuals who were enslaved and died namelessly, buried together in communal graves. This is not something that can be approached in a direct or polemic manner. Neither the dead nor the issue can be put to rest -- for this very problem is still with us and is part of the disturbing horizon of our future. Thus we propose a large, thin, flat, rectangular expanse of highly reflective metal (that would be flush with the ground) at or near the site of the communal burial area. The mirrored slab would be carefully sited to both resemble, and perform in a manner similar to a French enlightenment era reflecting pool. From a distant perspective -- such as the view from the mansion of Monticello -- the surface would glint brightly -- so that it would become a visible presence of light without fixed form or shape lingering on the periphery of one's vision. This unknowable glint draws one out towards it. Only on approach would one's awareness expand to embrace its reflective/reflexive material surface. Yet it is still unknowable.  direct encounter with its edge it reveals its infinite depths -- a vast vertiginous sky underfoot -- reflecting the heavens, the forests, fellow visitors, Monticello -- inverted and at a distance... Around the perimeter of the mirrored surface in small, solemn, compact lettering are etched the names of all those enslaved at Monticello. Nothing further would be inscribed on the slab. We feel that the quality of the individual names and the vastness of the mirrored surface alone would provide the necessary context in which to meditate upon the complex and real paradox of such profound suffering in the apparent face of such radical liberatory aspirations. We clearly want to frame this issue outside of any easy dichotomy. We do not wish to place blame nor direct guilt. Nor do we strive to offer a singular answer. But rather bring these issues to a level of quiet and solemn visibility allowing for meditation. A thoughtful consideration on the continuum of our history, as well as our present and future aspirations as a people who still struggle to understand what freedom, liberty, and justice demand of us. Each morning the mirror shall be carefully and ceremoniously swept and polished -- whatever leaves, branches, debris, memorial objects, raindrops that collect shall remain for the duration of the day – floating delicately on a winged and groundless ground reflecting outward, upward and inward -- awaiting those who might come...

61.UNIVERSITY ENTRANCE SCULPTURE: The University of A & M at Corpus Christi desires an entrance sculpture -- as a way of helping to define their identity. Rather than reducing the complexity of identity to a logo-sculpture, our proposal strives to create a place that would embody the dynamic, contingent, living reality of a marine research university. The proposed sculpture-park-instrument would have a visible presence and offer a site for active contemplation of the nature of being in relation to a world of forces both cultural and natural. This site would also open itself up to multiple diverging uses -- a stage for other events. Fundamental to our conceptualization of the space was its ability to actively engage participants in a dialogue about the nature of the larger community embodied in the university -- social, cultural, material, natural, political etc. The design concept creates a large habitable sound sculpture. A covered community space built into the hillside and cooled by a large cave structure (aligned to the prevailing breezes). This cave would act as a sound chamber pierced by structural masts/flutes and tensioning-cables/vibration-strings – thus activating and magnifying acoustic forces that could be engaged by participants. The tunnel also magnifies the aural environment – vocal, pedestrian, aeolian, oceanic; the cables can be plucked, strummed, bowed, held; the poles tapped, rubbed, closed, trumpeted. The tunnel would act as a large ear concentrating and distorting sounds from the communal gathering area above/outside/beyond/atop – all of which would filter out of multiple roof-holes/light-shafts. Parallel to these direct translations of forces would be an integrated web-activated speaker and microphone system so that the space could be actively engaged as part of a distributed global network. The formal design of the sound sculpture would be itself the by-product of data sets gathered by meteorologists and at the university. All major components of the structure are derived through algorithmic translation of weather data. These same algorithms (now active) would be used to control the web based interaction system (volume duration, amount etc.). Thus, the investigative goals of the university fold directly into the design and active output of the piece.

62.Nuclear Memorial: Proposal for a decentralized monument. Description of the product: Plutonium is for all intensive purposes a man-made object.  It has two major uses: as a fuel source of deep-space vehicles and as a weapon.  The vast majority is produced for terrestrial use in a weapons grade powder. Concept: Plutonium is one of a few substances that acts more like a concept than a physical, definable object. Radiation, while loosely understood, remains a mysterious force.  One could relate this property to the likes of magnetism; presentation of the facts do little to demystify the physical truths about the forces at play. However, while magnetism allows interaction and exploration to increase understanding, plutonium is nearly impossible to get near to due to its toxicity, radioactivity and value. These barriers frame plutonium in a mystique of physical and cultural uncertainty bordering on myth. It is our proposal that a centralized memorial will  do little to help a majority of the population develop an understanding of the physical properties, uses, political consequences nor the ethical responsibility for disposal.  It is our intention to insert the substance  directly into the conditions from which it arose. Decentralization: A centralized monument requires pilgrimage. Pilgrimage occurs when a population feels strongly about the ideal, sentiment, or dogma represented by a monument: the Vietnam Memorial, the Dome of the Rock, Mt. Rushmore. This intensity, this desire to journey to a touchstone often precludes its manifestation as a monument. The necessity of our memorial to educate and demystify does not mesh with this typology. A decentralized memorial will help each individual understand their part in bearing the responsibility for the production and disposal of plutonium. One’s personal engagement with the memorial should not be grandiose and momentary, but rather personal in scale and intriguing in appearance. It will interact with the people/landscape. Audience: In order to establish an understanding of the characteristics of plutonium in human terms, a monument to this substance should be distributed amongst the financiers of the product.  The monument should describe the extent of the human, fiscal and environmental effort that went into its production. As the half-life on plutonium is over 24,000 years, the life span of this monument/ containment system has to be viewed in these dimensions as well.  Dissemination of the memorial will be determined through analysis of the voting records of Congressmen of the United States House of Representatives since production began. Votes are tallied and weighted by year. The more aggressive the district's support of nuclear defense, the greater percentage of responsibility it bears for plutonium produced in that year. Simply stated, more votes in support of nuclear defense equates to a larger percentage of memorial for that district. This will place monuments in a distribution throughout the country, based on choice, with a focus on responsibility and education. As well as educating individuals about the physical characteristics of plutonium, we seek to inform about the ramifications of nuclear defense: the potential effects of plutonium decay to the environment, the costs of production and disposal, and general comparisons of government spending. We will incorporate a timeline of the past 24,000 years to help people understand the magnitude of plutonium's lifespan. Each memorial node will keep a historical record of it's own timeline.

63.Kinetic Housing System: We are currently working towards an anticipated 2004 completion of a prototype of a kinetic housing system that will move from Tuktoyaktuk (Canada) to Vinpiao (Chile) over an 800 year period beginning in 2007. The expected finite length of this system will vary between 227km and 453km.

Instructions towards de-organizing:

The world is in its detail and entirety is an invitation.

Nature has only one definition – that which cannot be refused.

Include all, both one at a time and simultaneously.

Resist exclusions with an alternate strategy.

Don’t problematize the status of nature – assume everything is nature – take this as an invitation to experiment – do so.

Meetings: the Laundromat on 24th is wonderful, meet there.

Develop a program and leave it on the bus.

Mute event: Don’t speak for a day. Continue this the next day.

Let ideas sleep.

Work towards someone else’s goal.

Look at every piece of paper. 

Mutant event: Speak gibberish for a day.

Media event: speak all text you see for a day.

Treat trash as gifts.

Enter the general economy as excess.

Internalize those things that you are expected to externalize.

Issue your own parking tickets.

Develop in some format ideas towards the gratuitous.

Look over your shoulder only if there is a caterpillar there.

Produce a set of stamps: Stamp at will: currency, library books, whatever. And then return to the world.

Discover echoes where there is no surface – be active in their discovery.

Think what they are doing in the arctic right now – and then do it.

Bike event: Ride with a flat tire as long as you can. Use your seat as a wheel.

Observe this behavior: Hiccupping at regular intervals. Hopping every 10th step. Closing one eye before crossing the street.

Distribute truths only if you think they will be made false.

Greet friends in a consistently ineluctable language.

Don’t give up.

Develop an ear infection when listening.

Event: Sell intangibles.

Duck tape hand to foot. Duck tape someone else’s hand inside your mouth. Go through a regular day like this – let it change you.

Eat piece of own flesh.

Event: Open ended trust: Remove God from currency: 1. Carefully tear “god” out of the phrase “in God we trust” so it reads “in ______we trust” (best done by folding bill in half through word  “God” and then tearing out) 2. Collect gods and do something better with them. 3. Return the currency into circulation.

Leave instructions for those who can’t read (include your self in this category).

Decide what to do after it’s done.

Defend ideas you don’t know anything about. But don’t litigate.

When asked for something finished, construct erosion.

In all library books read, add an ‘s’ at the beginning of all instances of the word ‘he’, then return books into circulation..

Serve food that is well prepared, thoughtful, nutritious and incomplete.

Arrange yourself by color – but not along color lines. 

Fall asleep.

Wrap a gift in a gift.

Surround yourself with imperfections. Don’t fix them.

Let cream in coffee mature.

Carry an empty book of addresses. Ask someone for their address.

Ask a question and refuse to understand the answers.

Hide yourself, then find a way out.

Make a list and complete from the bottom up. Always begin the latest entry.

notes on collaborators and other forms re: betrayal of subjectivity:

pass all ideas through others (fold all work through its outside)

refuse collage

accept only transformation or infection

make work open to complete change at each step of process

put no limits on authorship (use name that anyone could legitimately appropriate – spurse is to be included in this category – use it at will)

invite anyone interested to join

thus allow anyone to appropriate the name etc.

do not feel obliged to be democratic, inclusive, or elitist

embrace contradictions

do not go back

approach everything as a multiplicity

refuse form

refuse function

the "body without organs" as a model – place everything on a singular plane of immanence

see constraints as the engine of creation and thus freedom

multiply constraints

become inhuman

treat everything as a movement into the unknown -- an experiment that is not based upon an already known and desired outcome

refuse identity/representation etc.

don’t generalize (no etcetera’s)

walk every where at once

(ignore ownership)

distribute agency

don’t bother problematizing nature problematize artifice. Push it further.

Ignore others identities

notes on surrender:

Across a vast distance this faces you -- swarming towards you -- looking outward your gaze only confronts it -- without seeing or knowing

From a vast distance that you can no longer separate yourself from -- a confrontation without separation or distinction -- it meets your gaze

As it changes you will change -- becoming unrecognizable -- becoming visible -- a wind from deep within yourself pushes you out far beyond distance

An open hand held out beseeches -- an open gaze disclaims -- and then moves on -- it commands of you from a distance -- moving

That which is outside -- that which is before -- that which refuses recognition pushes into you -- shaping your words -- shaping your movements

Failing you -- you failing you -- an identity passes by

Notes on Performance:

If we are (to have a purpose) – and we do not (have one) -- then perhaps that purpose is to (breach an opening filled with) wonder – understand this statement three ways.

Rending hollow, then capturing wonderfully the expectations the spectator seeks will satisfy our purpose, leaving the meaning alone for others to bring together – it is never a question of a lack of meaning but always a question of too much meaning. Thus we begin.

Our intent is ultimately empty itself, our purpose simply a vehicle, we await the conclusions of those that we invite into our hollows. Whether we invite others to act both within themselves and within a given space or if we invite a given space to act within us the spectators, is left to yet another outside force. Weakness only weakness – no refusals – only weakness in the face of any development.

Our invitation conspires neither the didactic nor vicarious, rather spectators participate in the same imaginative space we seek to open, apart from us, but in collusion. The performers and spectators are bound together in a space precariously held open. We (this underdetermined we), the performers, remake ourselves bodies without organs while the spectators in their imagination (themselves bodily embodied) consist a space without organs.

Tense play collapses the space into itself. Wonder doesn’t resolve itself; nor does it wander ethereally. It is stitched and tangled, with tentative and persistent hands,  to an idea of itself. Itself creative of its own othernesses.

Performance is the action of water and ice, in a freeze thaw gambol, that in the end carries with it the slow inevitable unpredictable future of gravity.

Further notes on spurse:

Spurse is an international architectural collective dedicated to experimentation with the active agency of the urban milieu (Canada, USA, Germany, Italy, Mexico, India, Finland, Great Britain ….)

Spurse is an organization that has no (fixed) content or members -- it is rather a viral multiplicity that is continuously reforming itself as it becomes new projects and new events. Spurse is open to change, contradiction, multiplicity, inversions, tangents, hybrids, illness, infection, betrayal -- spurse is an affirmation of, and experimentation with, the unknowable becoming of the giveness of reality.

Spurse is the art of looking, where looking is broadly, but specifically defined as an active engagement with environmental movements -- as we are looking we act and are thus consequently part of our looking as well as in excess of it.

SPURSE -- by way of an architectural introduction:

the human body contains more creatures in and on it than it has cells. these creatures, some permanent, some temporary, all in one way or another are central to the reality of the body. this reality is most accurately seen as a fluid constellation of swarming agents. these swarming constellations of beings problematize any clear distinction between what is the body and what is not. a body could be thus defined by whatever an entity can incorporate – or what forces can come together to become something else. an entity is thus always involved with its outside – its other – as well it is in a continuous process of becoming other.

architecture, to the degree it can be considered an entity (though it is more accurate to pluralize architecture – and consider it a type of field situation of multiple differing dynamic entities) is also involved in a continuous enfolding of the outside – we could say in keeping with this notion of the body that it contains more that it is not than what it is.

to work in the field of architecture then is to work in this dynamic interstitial space of fluid incorporation – to be an architect is never simply to be one who builds – this manner of definition produces procrustian architecture shorn from its full space of becoming and agency. The space of the event that is the built world is fully social, political, cultural etc. – it is a dynamic field of active dispersed agency. thus spurse is both a product of, and engaged in the production of, new forms of public, public space and the social theatre of the actual.

spurse, as an architectural collective, strives to trace out and engage with these multiple contradictatory becomings that make up the larger field of architecture. Hence much of our work involves performance, fleeting interventions and installations, temporary structures, proposals, manifestoes, discussions, investigations in other fields, music, dance, fashion......

this plurality is reflected in the diverse make up of the group which includes architects, biologists, builders, philosophers, musicians, blacksmiths, landscape architects, geographers, writers, statisticians, teachers, professors, dancers, artists, designers, decorators, computer technicians and choreographers. but it must be noted that spurse as an organization has no fixed content or membership – it is rather a viral multiplicity that continuously reforms as new projects and events incorporate the group into their own open becoming.

spurse interspurse spurs dispurse spares spurn spears spurgle spires expurse spores spurious spoor exspugate spursification sprup spurge sprout spruik sprue spruit spurry sputter

purses sespur supers ruspe epurs upres respu ss p ur e spu re rse up pr uses us r ese press u r spur spurse

a breach a break

a crack

a line leading out

experimentation

architecture without its archi without its origins or stable ground but rather a continuous tectonic a continuous techne opening outward in time beyond the stability of a world of things aestheticized.

imageless

-techture to which an arche returns as a creative beginning a creative fluid growth of an unknown future – of an unknown architecture

Publications of the spurse press:

Planted texts: Book re installation – includes insitu pictures, texts, and web graphics (50$ 100 pages on velum perforated pages)

Corpus Cristie: Proposal Book – full color (100$ -- 11x17 color 50 pages w/ CD)

CD alone 20$

Pennies: Text gathered from pennies and their human lives. With color images of global collection (30$ color, black and white on vellum )

Collected Works (50 pages documents essays images – changing 100$)

Dumbo’s Stool – Instalation Catalogue (20 page catalogue of archive documents – 20$)

Scores:

Cell phone (single page to be performed anywhere)

Kinospurse (set of scores and notes – unbound varying sizes 100$)

Mexico city=world (set of maps notes scores documentation of ongoing collections 100$)

Interventions:

Remembering schwitters (booklet – 10$)

When I raise my hand I do not usally try to (set of 15 transparent stickers to be placed as one wishes 10$)

Posters:

Kinsopurse (large 20$, small 10$)

Movies (as set of 10 – 100$)

MUST (10$)

Please make all checks payable to ‘spurse’