Altered Perception

Social Relations and Critical Spaces 2010 has definitively altered and defined my perception not only on art but also activated an ongoing procedure of self-reflexivity (or a critical sense) of the how the apparatus or moreso the process of art can become highly complex and its strategies challenging. Also that art is fluid and can be transferred or shift or combine into distinct strands from an object to post-object type work and how other institutional mechanisms of power operate and tie-in/correspond/intersect with art – outside itself and within – ie politics, culture, socio-history, community/collaborative practices, etc. Trying to see how all these various and distinct 'machines' work and how their dynamic resonate/relate. The course overall provided an array of quality concepts/material readings/links to quickly get through which tested my own ability to take as much on board as possible through as much of the readings/texts as I could acquire and in combination with the weekly blog as a continuing format not only was it challenging but it became rewarding as it developed my technique to fine tune, critique and engage (with others in an ongoing physical dialogue) with these new strands of knowledge. Overall I find it all beneficial in my progression to look at all these various strategies yet remain eclectic and true to my own directives, a key way to keep developing my research/art practice per se. So reluctantly I walk away from this THAP course that has altered me on many different levels and hopefully in many positive/beneficial ways.

In The Age Of Ambient Spectacles

The contradistinction built within Nikos Papastergiadis Aesthetics and Politics between two key figures of art & socio-political theory – between that of Jacques Ranciere and Gerald Raunig develop a parallel gauge to view their socio-philosophical determination and how their contemporary theory is applied or can be applied within certain contextual practice per se. Even though Papastergiadis provides a foundational point by expanding similarities the main drive of his argument is the disjunction point when these minds divert. I don't need to explain Raunig's Deleuzian concept of 'concatenation' or 'transversality' or Ranciere's 'distribution of the sensible' because Papastergiadis clearly articulates these concerns through juxtapose and disparity, disseminates his argument eventually by correlating these theorists inherent diversions. Ostensibly, the main differentiation between these two key thinkers is the fabric of art and politics, their distinctions compromise a comparative articulation on how both art and the political machines remain indivisible and for Ranciere should remain in line with an ethical sensibility yet also as a critical force that can remain true to 'dissensus' while remaining in their distinct machine fields ie art or politics. Papastergiadis elaborates that Ranciere denounces the framework of 'convergence' specifically that of contemporary artists practicing in 'relational aesthetics' and even goes so far to also question the validity of and 'rejects both the aesthetic value and political force of artistic strategies that are formed in direct relationship with new social movements.' Ranciere may see this state of dilution solely as a motive to provide an authorial position to equate power relations in the case for 'relational aesthetics' and possibly for artistic/political strategies in alliance, lose this sense of radical potency by way of convolution. In turn losing their distinctiveness (concreteness/singularity) but Raunig counters this with the ability for a particular machine to weave (shuttle or flow) around and between each other from various levels/planes into the 'dispositif' – through concatenation – and re-articulate possibility even still enforcing a pertinence of critique. Papapstergiadis affirms the elemental drive of concatenation, "The dynamics of concatenation are generated by the tensions within and between constituent parts. These complex, unstable and highly differentiated entities interact in a manner that stimulates new lines of movement and resist consolidation into a fixed hierarchic structure. The flows that constitute a concatenation invariably lead towards a mutual transformation in both fields" whether or not this transformation reveals a potent radicality qua Ranciere or for a particular field should not remain dismissive but signify that the value of concatenation between art and politics (or transversality between say temporal alliances/disjunctions between various machines) can test these levels of potentiality, sine qua non.

A Letter from Afar

In Slavoj Zizek 'A Letter from Afar' in Irwin: Retroprincip 1983-2003 (Frankfurter am Main: Revolver, 2003) he comes to the defense of Laibach/NSK. The appropriative use of Nazi symbolism in a proposed poster for Tito's relay race plays key example within his argument to differentiate the significance between its semiotic justification in design and its representational strength when replaced in a 'different social context'. The context of a semiotic-sign or what Zizek specifically notes as a 'semiotic-Marxism' approach in relation to either Laibach/NSK or true fascism/Nazism – the true ideological or essence from that symbolism is definitively grounded from being a 'product of concrete social circumstances'. Hence the rhetorical distinction is axiomatic. This so called 'semiotic path' by Laibach as he denotes holds transparency when used strategically but also more importantly is its contextual articulation being a (re)formulation into a new sign or symbol. The sign in this case the NSK poster possibly still retains its original symbolic power, its socio-historical fascist power and xenophobic signification, while diametrically opening out an opposing state or totally different virtuality and semantic. This strategy is emblematic of NSK aesthetic and ideological reification or (re)ideology, if there is ever such a term. In this sense their technique to delimit the socio-political history of central-eastern Europe by displacing its power apparatus, reflecting it back through those same mechanisms of power become quite profound and in Zizek's words 'something entirely different.'

vigueur d'art publique

Miwon Kwon's Sitings of Public Art: Intergration Vs Intervention ostensibly magnifies the complexity of constraints inherent in public art. The two key examples she defines fall into the US public art category of art-in-public-spaces specifically that of Serra's Tilted Arc and Ahearn's South Bronx Sculptures. These two key works as selected by her signpost the constraints of producing a public site-specific artwork without the proper consideration (this could be an infinite range of factors from community, consensus, demographic, dialogue, inquiry, investigation, historical context of both place and people, the list is endless, etc) and hence being rejected by the community in turn detrimental to the work's longevity, and public justification and identification. Both of these artworks are object based site-specific artworks they are not object based community artworks per se. What I mean by community is the depth or high level of collaboration intrinsic to the work qua community. These artworks did not fail as art but Kwon highlights these objects in the way they form certain constraints, very distinct thresholds which bound them to a place, an identity, and of course a community. Ultimately being rejected by this community due to the multiplicity of complex mechanisms that are involved in socio-cultural power, and institutional power aspects of public art. In Serra's case – bureaucracy, and the art-name fetish became a determining force for selection; in Ahearn's case this predilection to use members of the community as representations within his work secured his role. What becomes problematic especially in Ahearn's case moreso than Serra, is that using people from the community (assimilation) as models for representation within the work don't necessarily constitute this notion of public art that embraces community it may uphold some kind of communal identity but it remains simply too rudimentary as public art or public identification. Assimilation (or incorporation, or involvement) I think in this sense is an authorial tool, a tool of representation (authorial determinism by Ahearn) which doesn't take into account the complexity of identity formed by community and place or that can somehow encompass or address the communities inherent overall complex dynamic/diversity/signification/reflexivity/structure et al. Kwon's varied premise argues not for any particular way to navigate through the difficulty and layered field of the public art sphere, so the dialogue she develops seems liminal almost like some intricate display of fence-sitting which is not a bad thing just tricky to determine and definitely highly engaging due to those multiple and complex notions that so penetrate socio-political art objective/subjectivities.

SI vs WK

I previously used this citation in my last blog for Social Relations where Raunig quotes and expands Guattari. It reverberates with this centralized idea of the term 'revolutionary' and placed against the context of contemporary art practice that embraces 'socialpolitical activism/intervention' for beneficial change. Here it is again -

"The problem that Guattari deals with in his first machine text, written briefly after the experience of 1968, is the problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: an instititutional machine that does not transform itselft into a state or party structure; a machinic institution that does not reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent practices:" "The revolutionary project as the machinization of an institutional subversion would have to uncover these kinds of subjective possibilities and ensure them ahead of time in every stage of struggle against being being 'structuralized.' Yet this kind of permanent check of the machine effects that affect the structures could never be satisfied with a 'theoretical practice.' It requires the development of a specific analytical practice, which immediately applies to every step of organizing the struggle."

(Raunig, Disruptive Monsters: From Representing to Constructing Situations [Chapter - Excursus On Machines] in 'Art & Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century,' 2007. p.147)

Yes, I know it's a long quote but it's relevant if we look and contrast the two different approaches from two different socialpolitical periods and spheres - and how a contemporary collective practice system navigates their way through a system of state apparatus bureaucracy to 'revolutionize' a process that instigates an effective process for socialpolitical effective alteration (which is that of WochenKlausur). In juxtaposition we can place SI on the opposing end in its mechanism for change highlights this 'problem of a lasting revolutionary organization' while WK embodies and through a systematized approach weaving into the many institutions of power/control ie art-machine, government, etc remains as a somewhat (possibly) lasting and ongoing 'revolutionary' approach. We would normally signify the term revolutionary with direct confrontation that ends in a significant way, hypothetically though and even though not as directly oppositional the term revolutionary could be applied to a concept that is subtle and uses institutional mechanisms to assist in creating an art-object which is conceptually patterned on a type of 'activism'. The machine that WockenKlausur is, doesn't necessarily transform itself into a state or party structure it howevers uses or appropriates the vehicle of the state or party structure to apprehend areas of concern - framed by this idea of 'socialpolitical intervention/activist art'. A subtle yet highly effective 'instituent [collective] pracitce' that may circumvent the notion of a temporary revolutionary organization? A lasting 'step of organizing the struggle'? Lasting 'institutional subversion'?

MACHINE

"Imagined beyond this evolutive schema, the machine is no longer only a function in a series imagined as starting from the tool, which occurs at a certain point. Similar to the way the techne concept of antiquity already meant both material object and practice, the machine is also not solely an instrument of work, in which social knowledge is absorbed and enclosed. Instead it opens up in connections and couplings: "There is no such as either man or nature now, only a
process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. (p.144)"

"The problem that Guattari deals with in his first machine text, written briefly after the experience of 1968, is the problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: an instititutional machine that does not transform itselft into a state or party structure; a machinic institution that does not reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent practices:" "The revolutionary project as the machinization of an institutional subversion would have to uncover these kinds of subjective possibilities and ensure them ahead of time in every stage of struggle against being being 'structuralized.' Yet this kind of permanent check of the machine effects that affect the structures could never be satisfied with a 'theoretical practice.' It requires the development of a specific analytical practice, which immediately applies to every step of organizing the struggle. (p.147)"
"As post-operaist theory formulates, following Guattari, due to the logic of economic development itself, it is necessary that the machine is not understood merely as structure that striates the workers and encloses social knowledge in itself. Going beyond Marx's idea of knowledge absorbed in fixed capital, Virno thus posits his thesis on the simultaneously pre-individual and trans-individual social quality of the intellect. "Living labor in postfordism has a raw material and means of production: thinking that is expressed through language, the ability to learn and communicate, the imagination, in other words the capacity that distinguishes human consciousness. Living labour accordingly incarnated the General Intellect (the 'social brain'), which Marx called the 'pillar of production and wealth.' Today the General Intellect is no longer absorbed in fixed capital, it nol longer represents only the knowledge containded in the system of the machines, but rather the verbal cooperation of a multitude of living subjects.

By taking up Marx's term Virno indicates that "intellect" is not to be understoood here as the exclusive competence of an individual , but rather as a common tie and a constantly developing foundation of individuation, as a social quality of the intellect. Here pre-individual human "nature," which lies in speaking, thinking, communicating, is augmented by the trans-individual aspect of the General Intellect: it is not only the entirety of all knowledge accumulated by the human species, not only what all prior shared capability has in common, it is also the in-between of cognitive workers, the communicative interaction, abstraction and self-reflexion of living subjects, the cooperation, the coordinated action of living labour.

Finally, on the basis of Virno's writings we are able to connect General Intellect as a collective capability and a machine concept in Guattari's sense. Knowledge as collective intellectuality is complementary to the machinic quality of production and social movement. General Intellect, or the "public intellect," as Virno further further develops the concept, is another name for Guattari's expansion of the machine concept beyond the technical machine and outside its realm. "Within the contemporary labor process, constellations of concepts exist, which function as productive 'machines' themselves, without needing a mechanical body or a little electronic soul. (p.148-9)"

(Raunig, Disruptive Monsters: From Representing to Constructing Situations [Chapter - Excursus On Machines] in 'Art & Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century,' 2007. p.138-49)

If SI is a machine system that dislodges itself from so-called art yet in its detachment still securely becomes attached to it and magnifies back this 'detachment' then proceeds to initiate and run and against political machinic state apparatus - Is this revolutionary, perhaps? Anti-art as revolution, revolutionary in the everyday. The above fragments from Raunig's Excursus On Machines assist our understanding of how SI is but a machine - a machine within a machine - a collective entity evolving with certainty to disrupt and dislodge itself and undermine the status quo (from the confines of art evolving into socialist politics), it is more interesting to identify the evolution and the proceedural framework from how such a machine has developed from an avant-garde practice - an identity of an artistic/social synthesis - into still in my regard an avant-garde practice with a centralized priority for political even somewhat militant change. SI exemplifies a collective that aligns itself with not only a theoretical foundation inturn directives for change it constitutes a strategy through ideas initially from one prioritization into another. In an axiomatic sense the SI theory driven basis both reflects the everyday and the politics of the everyday people - a direct reflection on the socio-cultural political climate of the time, a machinic system embracing the so-called 'General Intellect', or 'collective intellectuality', or as 'a social quality of the intellect', etc and its transition from one theoritcal form into another even could say physical model - a mechanism that engulfed a culture with not only a complex yet equalized form of self-control '...banish all totalities and hierarchies' but also vehicle for complete yet highly agit-prop strategies that endorsed almost guerilla-like occupations of factories, workers, etc - so the situation unfolds which inturn met its apex in the May 1968 revolts. Political revolution as art, no matter how anti-art something is it always places more emphasis back on itself as Art, it is interesting to see how the term 'revolutionary' as initiated and activated and sustained by SI took its natural course as a situation that questions Guattari's problem of a lasting revolutionary organization: an an instititutional machine that does not transform itselft into a state or party structure; a machinic institution that does not reproduce the forms of the state apparatus, those provided by the paradigm of representation, but produce new forms of "instituent practices."

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

"II.
In recent years, Neuhaus divided his time mostly between Place and Moment works. In the latter group, to which Time Piece Beacon (2005-present) belongs, periodic, almost imperceptible, sonic tones gradually build up over several minutes, then abruptly cease at a designated moment - the hour, in the case of Dia's piece. This sudden absence produces what at first seems to a silence, a silence that to many people proves more audible than was the sound's presence. For, in what is percieved as silence is the ambient sound particular to that site in that particular instant. The last Moment work Neuhaus created, in 2007, was commissioned by the small German town of Stommeln-Pulheim. The arrest of the low, almost inaudible, hum, again created from and in relation to its sonic environment - a site fronting a former synagogue - marks the halachic hours of the Jewish ritual day. Recalling another absence - that of the town's former Jewish population - this work, in addressing historical memory, takes on an overtly memorializing dimension rare in Neuhaus' oeuvre. Previously, issues relating to a site's history concerned him less than its sociopolitics.

As issues of identity and history come to the fore in the Moment pieces, so do notions of community. Whatever sense of collectivity is generated by a Place work like Times Square is a function of serendipity, of coexistence and contiguity; it automatically involves those who recongize and engage with the work. Yet, as Branden Joseph argues, referencing Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community, this fugitive community implies and entails nothing beyond itself at that moment.: it is built on "adjacency rather than identification with whatever exclusionary ideal." In contrast to the Place pieces, the Moment works operate on two distinct registers. The uninitiated, the casual passersby, attend to the silence, which they experience more in their bodies than in their minds. Howver, for those who become familiar with a Moment piece, and who therefore experience it as a part of their daily soundscape, the sound, too, plays a role. Sometimes consciously, often almost unconsciously, its iteration is registered as each hour approaches.


The regular and frequent whistles from passing trains, counterpoints to Time Piece Beacon's precisely scheduled interventions, are similarly impossible to ignore: they, too, are integral to the sitess sonic texture. Yet, though also periodic, they do not share the invincible regularity - the reliability - of this Moment piece and so lack its deterministic authority. Moreover, their sound is commnonplace and generic, whereas that of Time Piece Beacon is singular. At once unique and instantly identifiable, Neuhaus' piece functions as a timekeeper whose auditorycode imparts identity to the terrain within its sonic reach, effecting a kind of social bond, however rudimentary its basis.

While Time Piece Beacon has a distinctive acoustic signature, its low, ringing harmonic tone has been likened, by the artist himself as well as others, to the sound of bells: it evokes not merely the function but the character and rhetoric of campanology in rural place in times past. As Alain Corbin reveals in his fascinating study Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-Centruty French Countryside, the ringing of bells traditionally seved multiple roles - in addition to providing an index of collective sensibilities, it fulfilled various communicative agendas: public and private, secular and religious, exceptional and mundane, singular and regulatory, festive and tragic. The unique sound of a hand-cast bell in a clarion ensured that the compass of its reach would identify the community when no other form of communication could range so far so fast and none could prove so resourceful and distinctive. Audible to virtually everyone within its sonic field,it demarcated space acoustically and imparted identity by drawing boundaries to shared territory.


The people who frequent Dia: Beacon could be said to constitute a small, temporary, and quite specialized community, in contrast to, say, the considerably larger, stable, and more diverse citizenry of Graz, Austria, whose town square is the site of another work in the Moment series. By reactivating older notions of community, both works provide an occasion for thinking about the identity, desirability, and viability of community: to its current relevance as well as its historical legacy. In one of his few statements about historical change , Neuhaus argued that by about AD1100, "the church bell had become united with the mechanical clock. The bell no longer just announced special events but provided a communal time base for the general coordination of activities." He noted that today "most of these minute by minute functions have been taken over by radio and television." By his reckoning, this change entailed a loss measurable in terms of the particularity and individuality of place and, hence, of community: "The intrinsic nature of these media generalizes and depersonalized functions," he concluded. His succinct overview contains a clear expression of the sociopolitical dimension at the core of this final series of works and implies a potentially stronger notion of community than that which, pace Joseph, pertains to the Place pieces. For, in addition to confirming the value Neuhaus attributed to any significant work of art in the public sphere, this statement highlights a key function he now required of locational – and even, perhaps, localized – listening."


(Lynne Cooke, 'Locational Listening' in Max Neuhaus: Times Square, Time Piece Beacon. New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009. p.37-9)


Last Wednesday i went to the AGNSW to watch Stephen Vitiello/Lawrence English perform a sound piece in the main entrance space of the interior quadrangle. There was a rectangular table setup with sound equipment/laptops/etc and seating formed in a rectangular grid around the performance set. Speakers were positioned behind the rows of rectangular forming chairs, with camera men dispersed in the same vicinity both shooting footage and photos of the performance. People walking around their footsteps, and whispering mixed with Vitiello's field recordings of the Kimberley. What fascinated me about the sound from the performance was not only its immersive quality but its ability to simulate and sonorously magnify nature definitively transforming and transcendence of the space. A sonorous energy vibrated into the audience pushing the work along, almost meditatively the sound opens out into a synaesthetic experience giving the Kimberley WA a distinct identity and in the process senses overload – my own imagining of a visual, olfactory, spatial dimension (coinciding with the sonority) of a place that I'd never seen let alone heard before. Then the soundscape would resonate from the punctuation, metronome like, of a bell, jolting me out of a meditative state. The institutional site for that one moment was transformed into 'nature' into a kind of pure sound as representation and narrative. The above, again, quite lengthy quoted passage from Lynne Cooke's essay on Max Neuhaus made me think of how an institutional site can be like transferred in its confinement and temporal/spatial setting into 'another'. Another place that maintains levels of interplay, and identification - how a place takes on a different socio-cultural-political persona, 'Audible to virtually everyone within its sonic field, it demarcated space acoustically and imparted identity by drawing boundaries to shared territory. [...] At once unique and instantly identifiable, Neuhaus' piece functions as a timekeeper whose auditorycode imparts identity to the terrain within its sonic reach, effecting a kind of social bond, however rudimentary its basis. [...Neuhaus]By his reckoning, this change entailed a loss measurable in terms of the particularity and individuality of place and, hence, of community [...]'. (Cooke, 2009. p37-9)

Cooke's essay reminded me alot about Vitiello's AGNSW performance it is hard not to reflect on certain levels and similarities in their works. Sonorous entities (works) that demarcate space and their transferral (mixing in the now) that 'open out' and hopefully direct reflection to concepts of history, identity, temporal, spatial, social, cultural allusion or awakenings.

homeomorphism

topology - noun
1 Mathematics the study of geometric properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of figures.
• a family of open subsets of an abstract space such that the union and the intersection of any two of them are members of the family, and that includes the space itself and the empty set.
2 the way in which constituent parts are interrelated or arranged : the topology of a computer network.

So many parts of the October#110, 2004 interview of Pierre Huyghe provide fascinating insights into the complexity of his ‘dynamic’ works. Huyghe’s articulation against Baker’s questioning bring about the nature of certain aspects and reveal how he, Huyghe pushes his work through by way of an interest in mathematical systems - ‘topological systems’ –


PH: I am interested in an object that is in fact a dynamic chain that passes through
different formats. I am interested in a movement that goes through and
between some of the fields that you mentioned.

PH: […] I am more interested in what we can call topological systems.

PH: It is about how you use something. It refers to a process of translation.
However, when you translate something, you always lose something
that was in the original. In a topological situation, by contrast, you lose
nothing; it is a deformation of the same.

PH: It refers to an equivalence.

GB: […Philippe] Parreno writes:

Topology is concerned with the relative positions of figures, a question of
points, the set of which defines spaces. . . . A donut and a cup of coffee are
topologically equivalent because they describe the same space. An object
is a more or less complex situation which can be transformed into
another. By deforming it, by pushing it to its limits, we discover its affini-
ties with what exists outside of it.. . . To blow up an inner tube is to trans-
form it topologically.2

PH: It is the fold of a situation. It’s a way to translate an experience without
representing it. The experience will be equivalent and still it will be different.
(Baker/Huyghe, October#110, 2004. p.90-2)

Huyghe definitely has a knack for developing intricate systems or sets that utilize various ‘formats’ to tangle or maybe untangle inter-subjective relations(hips). It was easier for me to understand topological systems in a mathematical sense, as a family of open subsets than as an open/varied type of systematization explained by Huyghe within his art practice. One could place the open subsets as ‘formats’ or ‘fields’ they are singular yet become equivalent even when applied together or intersected they do not lose their characteristic but still retain this 'deformation' through possibly a form of isomorphic 'instance' - however that particular instance can 'open' out and this 'opening out' or 'outside itself' we could term it 'relation' becomes key.

In the mathematical field of topology, a homeomorphism or topological isomorphism or bicontinuous function (from the Greek words ὅμοιος (homoios) = similar and μορφή (morphē) = shape, form) is a continuous function between two topological spaces that has a continuous inverse function. Homeomorphisms are the isomorphisms in the category of topological spaces — that is, they are the mappings which preserve all the topological properties of a given space. Two spaces with a homeomorphism between them are called homeomorphic, and from a topological viewpoint they are the same.

Roughly speaking, a topological space is a geometric object, and the homeomorphism is a continuous stretching and bending of the object into a new shape. Thus, a square and a circle are homeomorphic to each other, but a sphere and a doughnut are not. An often-repeated joke is that topologists can't tell the coffee cup from which they are drinking from the doughnut they are eating, since a sufficiently pliable doughnut could be reshaped to the form of a coffee cup by creating a dimple and progressively enlarging it, while shrinking the hole into a handle.

Topology is the study of those properties of objects that do not change when homeomorphisms are applied. As Henri Poincaré famously said, mathematics is not the study of objects, but instead, the relations (isomorphisms for instance) between them.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeomorphism)

Maybe I'm wrong with my understanding of 'Topological Systems' but I think an attempt on my behalf to unravel/unpack its complex nature has strengthen my resolve to look at 'ideas' or art that certainly disrupts the norms whether they be of a 'relational' or 'situational' aesthetic is of little consequence. Its strength for me relies on its layers of complexity and 'opening up' of the work, those particular 'instances', in my humble opinion.

Relational Power

"Essentially, though, the history of art can be read like the history of successive external relational fields, propped up by practices determined by the internal development of these fields. It is the history of the production of relations with the world, as publicised by a class of objects and specific practices.

Today, this history seems to have taken a new turn. After the area of relations between Humankind and deity, and then between Humankind and the object, artistic practice is now focused upon the sphere of inter-human relations, as illustrated by artistic activities that have been in progress since the early 1990s. So the artist sets his sights more and more clearly on the relations that his work will create among his public, and on the invention of models of sociability. This specific production determines not only an ideological and practical arena, but new formal fields as well. By this, I mean that over and above the relational character intrinsic to the artwork, the figures of reference of the sphere of human relations have now become fully-fledged artistic "forms". Meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of encounter and relational invention thus represent, today, aesthetic objects likely to be looked at as such, with pictures and sculptures regarded here merely as specific cases of a production of forms with something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind." (Bourriaud, 2002, p28-9)

'Invention of models of sociability... sphere of inter-human relations... all manner of encounter and relational invention' - Why does Bourriaud propose such overtness toward ideas/concepts that can determine artistic modal representations for social situational experience or interaction? The above large quoted citation, the conclusion to his introduction doesn't really determine the importance of why so called 'inter-human' relational systems of art (a production of relations) hold significance against art-objects, which he terms as 'a production of forms with something other than a simple aesthetic consumption in mind.' He does go on to typologies of suggested works that become prime examples for his argument of a 'Relational Aesthetic'. These examples of course validate his quite determined approach, the signification of these works tend to stress the direct relationship between artist and audience, in this case audience/attendee equates to participant and hence 'engagement'. These situational representations even though determined by the artist provide sites of collaboration and participation (sites of negotiation or interaction, even sites of equalizing the 'power relation' between the artist/viewer) regardless whether they the participant has had a hand from the inception to completion of the work - also regardless of whether they are situated in the gallery/museum or otherwise. The 'situational engagement' of these works become their primacy, the 'concept' – for the framework – ostensibly is the 'object' whereby the 'situational engagement' the site of inter-human relations can highlight both the subjective and objective inter-relations within specific areas of concern through engagement (emotive, psychological, social, cultural, technological, etc) of the art-work heightening the awareness, and the 'relational power' of the social individual per se.