Régime is a second part of continuous Migrating Reality congress on migration organized by KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne and >top – Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V.. Régime is also generously supported by the Embassy of Lithuania in Germany within the framework of the German-Baltic Year of Culture 2008 and General Public project space, where the event will take place.

CONCEPT
Régime “the inhibition” or an exhibition of inhabitation is an attempt to envision, outline and subsequently produce ideas and artifacts addressing the constitutive dynamic of the following triad: intimate-personal-public. A group of ten art students (later artonauts) from Ecole européenne supérieure de l’Image, France, Kunsthochschule für Medien, Germany and Vilniaus Dailės Akademija, Lithuania will be “embedded” in a 70m2 space at the General Public gallery (Berlin) for a duration of one week. By the sheer fact of this orchestrated cohabitation which will progress as dwelling and creating together, artonauts will constantly engage in a chain of socially charged and for most part unplanned and unprovoked situations thus rendering the space into a “living” audio-visual laboratory for interdisciplinary micro urbanism. Students’ creativity is expected to unfold in a direction of such issues as:

Near art. Small event strategies and art of cooking together;
Play in a public and private space, the art of group dynamics;
Pocket space – a micro dwelling or an economic appendix;
Swarming – a criteria of teaming;
Intersections: from intimate through personal and into the public, or the other way around;
Scale, a measure or a policy?;
Coordinated and nonordinated flow;
Protecting vs. exposing, emotional space;
Imprints of cohabitation, patterns of wear;
Spatial routes of people, phrases, and things, spatial identity identity in space;
Hiding and finding;
Communication in a small space, gesture touch;
Strategies of active and passive trespassing, invasion;
Inside-byside-outside;
Act of sharing as a synchronization mechanism;
Surveillance and control;

…among the myriad of other possibilities. Artonauts are asked to choose from the pool of aforementioned themes and progress in a preferred audio-visual medium ranging from performance, sound, installation, video, traditional arts, photography up to sketches, plans and maquettes. The participants will delve with issues of urbanism, anthropology and ecology, however approaching it from an angle of innovation and unhindered creativity, at an expense perhaps of rigidity and thoroughness of scientific methodology.

Living and working together in a single space would lead to a combination or amalgamate of the distinctive value routines such as art making with the residual acts (non-value routines) of human habituation. As a spatio-temporal mélange this event is envisioned to follow as a social and aesthetic experiment rather than a specific attribute of the categorical schemes of genre or medium. A synchronous but not synchronized mosaic of activities overlapping in certain periodicity (see picture 1) performed and/or lived by the artists (Artonauts) “embedded” in the gallery space would constitute a combined average flow of actions or a continuous performance.

The event will be broadcasted (to the Internet and locally) similarly as a “Big Brother” but not as trivially explicit as reality TV; metaphorically, it strongly suggests a kind of staged being similar to the specimens of fauna in the zoo, however artonauts are the active agents expected to maintain an active engagement exploring and contemplating urban space around and outside the gallery.

Regime is also meant to address the issues of surveillance and control, although as an attempt of broadening the well-known paradigms of the state and an individual and directing their focus towards selfregulation and selforganization of a group in a shared environment. Synchronization of human activities driven not by the imposed goal but by the act of sharing is among the key issues of the project.

ASSOCIATED IDEAS
Daily life of an artist is for most part invisible and easily discountable condition in an object-oriented society, unless of course it substantiates the value of an object (artwork). Creative process on the other hand, has gained a certain acceptance on its own, thanks to numerous and sometimes shocking routines of the actionists, happening artists and all kinds of related performers and also legitimized by the currently popular economic concepts of creative industries. There is however a looming dichotomy between the actions of value (production in general and of the artwork in particular) and the actions of no value. The latest are being associated with all kinds of diminutive, self-oriented, socially idle or borderline-conscious acts, exempt from the institutionalized structure of consumption-production, and left or rather abandoned as an area of the “free choice” of an individual.

BACKGROUND THOUGHTS
Regime is always territorial. As a structural principle or ideology it exerts control over terrain along with all its subjects, furthermore, with an equal formative zeal, it controls such non-spatial territories as language and values through the systems of grammar and belief. Regimes shape social space primarily by modulating the very resonance of the individual to self: regime of revolution tunes an individual into a citizen, hospital regime turns one into a patient, at the same time, a regime of free-market democracy (ad)dresses an individual as a consumer.

Supremacy (or regime) of consumption is a spatial enterprise for it hinges upon an extrusion of desires into the space where it unfolds as an engagement of subject to object or subject to objectified subject. The new-ageist or neo-gothic regime of the sharpened spiritual arousal purports an equally acute spatial engagement of the kind subject spirit. Spatial metaphoric is the key narrative factor in the mythological toolbox of the system of control. The regime is a mechanism of an absolutist control and as such it attempts to expand its control into an absolute – the space, also know as the final frontier. Ideology of space unfolds in almost purely trigonometric fashion; it is an enterprise of points (markings), angles between the group of points (rules) and the line (boundary/law) connecting these points. Therefore, space becomes a medium of regime.

Such publically observable modules of elevated survival as a space station, or such high gestures as space walk, planting the flag on a far away places, setting foot on the moon and etc, signals the expanded area of control by placing the point where no other regime is able to. Back on earth, in places of social (and spatial) destitute where personal is being lacerated by brutal spatial circumcision, particularities of single beings are synchronized to a singularity of an event. An event in these circumstances is not only forcefully unified, but is also marred by a deep spatial anguish – for it is an event of control. From a field marshal agonizing over the looming battle to an inmate of the correctional facility or the inhabitant of the homeless shelter, spatial anguish is a condition on the both sides of the line, for those at the pinnacle of power as well as for those on the anvil and under the iron fist.

On an elated end of spectrum, jolly newlyweds address their physical anguish spatially – by venturing on a honeymoon. Newlyweds perform a conversion of a particular-private into an anonymous-public with a temporary granted or rather staged spatial autonomy, a strategy not uncommon in theater. To some degree, astronauts perform a similar conversion, though in their case celebratory sexual is being replaced by the parade of pure labor. Scale is another utterly spatial attribute, which at conceptual level displays an irreconcilable paradox of an overlapping infinity already known to Greeks. Practically however it is rooted in a relationship to human body: majestic means many times bigger than I am, and cozy could be defined as being in close proximity to a personal scale. Consumption, especially an expanded global one, produces a near-impossible topology, it draws together myriad of remote points forming the tangled lines of dependencies and selfintersecting shapes of zero-size area.

Chilean apples in an Indonesian fruit bowl in my kitchen in Cologne are part of my personal space, however the space of economic engagement is immense if not majestic. Reducing consumption would scale down the overextended personal space and would fit it to the scale of an individual immediacy. Same wise, reducing the spiritual regime would reduce the phantom scale of imaginary. Survival is a localized strategy, when consumption reaffirms the opposite – it sprouts out into the global. Reduction and untanglement of the economic trigonometry scales down the space of transactions qua space and shifts the social resonance from repetitiveness of ownership to unpredictability of authorship. Ownership is a necessary approximation of the multiplicity of origins, although in case of a single origin, authorship is a relationship integral to the homogeneous structure. I am the owner of the Chilean apples and the fruit bowl and the refrigerator and also many other things that draw in the long lines of origin and tangle me – the owner – into the world wide web of dependencies, thus reconstituting the area consented as my personal space into a multilayered conglomerate.

In fact, I am the owner but not an author of almost anything within my sight.

Design:

Nicolas Rivet