A blog post in slow motion.

So lately, in anticipation of experiencing Intermedia Open House for the first time, I began to think of an essay I read not long ago that did a wonderful job of examining the way we experience art events, and also managed to impact the way I think about artistic production in general (which is a lot for one essay to do.)

"Earthworms Dancing: Notes for a Biennial in Slow Motion", by Raqs Media Collective, appeared in e-flux journal #7 back in June of this year. It is a short read, and I would recommend it to anyone.

"The earthworms take their time; let's take ours".

In the essay, Raqs Media Collective constructs what I think is a lovely analogy comparing artistic production to that of millions of earthworms; patiently ploughing the cultural soil "through multiple acts of turning, burrowing, tunneling, and composting."

Much attention is given to our notions of contemporaneity, specifically an asynchronous contemporaneity that we experience when endless multiple processes are operating simultaneously within their own "time". I find myself agreeing with the argument that as artists we are often expected to feel that certain practices are more contemporary, or true to our times, than others. An example could be the constant, yet rapidly changing, assertions of "new" that have seemed to plague "new media" practice since it was defined as such. Raqs suggests that an openness to the dormant, hibernating, or still-forming processes under the surface of readily apparent reality is crucial to understanding contemporaneity (in contrast to trends, movements, and singularities). Raqs is primarily critiquing the major art institutions and systems of exhibition here, and I become interested in the degree to which these institutional attitudes propel the individual production of the artists that they are exhibiting (I often feel guilty of following trends as well as feeling the anxiety of not being fully up to date and "contemporary").

Despite having never attended a major art festival or Biennale, I have no trouble identifying with Raqs summery of the way these events are experienced: "This slicing-up of attention — attention to different layers of simultaneous and overlapping, or immediately serialized, circuits of exhibition — leads to a rapid acceleration in the experience of artworks. The momentum of the experience of contemporary art then becomes a matter of being borne aloft by the velocities of the strong currents that propel exhibitions and/or artists from one show to another."

When do we allow ourselves to decompress? I think that Raqs impulse to slow down is comforting, and something that I recently tried to grasp as I was overwhelmed standing in front of a magazine rack crammed full of the latest art/culture periodicals, trying to decide which one I needed to read (Can I read them all?). Being overwhelmed by contemporary cultural production is something I think we can all identify with, especially as we desire to assert ourselves in the flow of this rapidly producing machine.

An interesting idea presented in this essay is that of syncopation (an analogy borrowed from music composition). This particular idea underscores what I find very compelling about events such as the recent Works in Progress festival as well as our own Open House event: "To co-inhabit a time is not to establish orders of precedence or chronology, but to create structures and processes by which different rhythms of being and doing can act responsively towards each other."

Raqs idea of moving towards a "biennale in slow motion" could be summed up as drifting away from the continual loop of recovery and anticipation of the event itself, and moving towards a continual process that grows and expands at its own pace. A continual platform "for the development, rather than the statement, of an argument".

Of course, I already see this slow motion biennale taking shape in many ways, and I find myself wanting to participate in it. Thankfully, I haven't missed the deadline.