SHIFTER

Contributors:
Éric Alliez
Bernard Andrieu
Eric Anglès
Kader Attia
Elena Bajo
Lindsay Benedict
Nicholas Chase
Seth Cluett
Zoe Crosher
Krysten Cunningham
Yevgeniy Fiks
Dan Levenson
Antje Majewski
T. Kelly Mason
Michele Masucci
Daniel Miller
Seth Nehil
Warren Neidich
Susanne Neubauer
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Chloe Piene
Sreshta Rit Premnath
Linda Quinlan
Patricia Reed
Silva Reichwein
Barry Schwabsky
Gemma Sharpe
Amy Sillman
Francesco Spampinato
Tyler Stallings
Laura Stein
Clarissa Tossin
Brindalyn Webster
Lee Welch
Olav Westphalen
James Yeary

Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.

The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh*. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, “the child [...], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning.”**

These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Ranciere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”*** Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public “we.” Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.

This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including “detournement” and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore “Pluripotential”.

Footnotes:

*”The Merleau-Ponty Reader”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ted Toadvine, Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern University Press, 2007; Pg. 405
**”Potentialities”, Giorgio Agameben, Standford University Press, 1999; Pg. 179
***”The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible”, Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2006; Pg. 12