Nicola: A couple more questions about the Zuidas. You work with urban issues a lot, an – when it comes to Amsterdam – two things come to mind: housing shortage and the myth of the “Creative City”. Given the “business district” profile of the Zuidas, how does the artist, most stereotypically associated with a bohemian lifestyle, relate to such an environment? After information aesthetics, can we talk about business aesthetics?

Tom: As more and more business districts pop up, they form a kind of global grid of financial activity and influence. In a sense this is a new form or territoriality – in a topological space. As the power of multinational companies grows beyond that of states or cities, the networked space they consume can potentially one day declare itself a sovereign nation.

At the same time, as more and more people do creative stuff online for fun, so the need for artists becomes questionable. After all, artists are not necessary to rulers anymore for amusement, for beauty or for design, because these are everywhere to be found. So can we still define contemporary artist as bohemians these days? When I entered the Zuidas for the first time, I felt as if entering a Royal court. I was sitting in public space, but at the same time I was on private property. This reminded me of a letter by J.S. Bach to his patron, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia:

“MOST GRACIOUS KING!

In deepest humility I declare herewith to Your Majesty a musical offering, the noblest part of which derives from Your Majesty’s own august hand. … and it has none other than this irreproachable intent, to glorify, if only in a small point, the fame of a monarch whose greatness and power in all the sciences of war and peace, so especially in music, everyone must admire and revere. I make bold to add this most humble request: may Your Majesty deign to dignify the present modest labor with a gracious acceptance, and continue to grant Your Majesty’s most august Royal grace to Your Majesty’s most humble and obedient servant , The Author”

The relationship between art and power, although more complex, is nothing new. I think artists offer something to the art collector which is beyond aesthetics or design. They create objects of arbitrary value, that can be dressed up in any price tag. Like a watermark. A seal of prestige. Most large companies in the Zuidas have extensive art collections, and they buy modern art all the time. The last exhibition at the VIrtual Museum Zuidas was of sculptures from the collections of the biggest companies there. Jeroen Boomgaard of the Art and Public Space group at Rietveld, wrote that one of the public sculptures – A large puppy by Tom Classen, that sits in the entrance to the territory of ABN-AMRO – exemplifies the role of commissioned art and of public space at the Zuidas. It is a symbolic guardian of public grounds that in practice is privatized by the bank.

Nicola: How do you think art, as an established factor in urban growth and district-profiling, can affect the Zuidas as a business district? You were invited to reflect on a developing area, while at the same time putting it on the map of global imaginary through your art. How do you feel about working as both a critical artist and a guest at the same time?

Tom: As I mentioned before, I was well aware of this issue. In fact, the inherent conflict of the position of an artist in residence in such a place has led me to develop the role of the protagonist in The New Model City – that of an artist in service. To cope with this issue of impartiality, I came up with a sort of personal strategy: First, I made sure my piece was funded by third parties, that have no interest in the Zuidas. I kept a distance from the official literature, PR and public debate on the Zuidas, and tried to see things with my own eyes. I did regular spontaneous walks in the area and tried to be there in person, avoiding all pressure to form judgement of project prematurely. I let decisions come slowly, and refrained from realizing them or talking about them until the right moment. And I read a lot. Then, I eventually compiled all of the information into a kind of story. Information is best transmitted as a story. To me the broader story of new urbanity, military occupation and Walking Through Walls was much more interesting to tell, than that of the specific place ‘Zuidas’. So my process was to objectify the places, which I also tried to do in my video. To make the location seem almost placeless and insignificant.

Nicola: You are about to start a PhD at Goldsmiths, in London. What kind of research are you going to undertake there?

Tom: My PhD will be practice-based and interdisciplinary. I plan to explore the role of art as a research platform, looking for the origins of political conflict, in the intimate relationship between the body, space and environment. I will work with Dr. Kay Dickinson and Dr. Suhail Malik, at the Media & Communications and Art departments, and will work in close contact with people from the Visual Cultures and with Eyal Weizman’s Research Architecture group. Practically I will present on a number of new art works that also have a written theoretical part. But in practice I expect things to develop and change as soon as the year starts in October.

Many thanks to Tom Tlalim for the interview! Check out his website.

Two skyscrapers in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: I liked your video because it is visually simple and engaging, but at the same time dense with actuality. Both the Israeli military practices, which you also mention in your video, and the World Trade Center in Manhattan, from which the Zuidas are inspired, remind of a complex global scenario (as described by urban theorists like Saskia Sassen) where the urban sites of business and war’s battlegrounds are increasingly overlapping.As an Israeli artist, how do you feel this global dimension is affecting your work and what do you think is the best way to critically investigate it?

Tom: I often feel humbled by the flow of information in the 21st century. I used to look for an absolute truth while I was growing up in Israel, but now I don’t anymore. I accept the fact that media reality is increasingly overlapping and networked in all fields, including conflict. It becomes much more difficult to trace a clear reality in the flurry cauldron of opinions and stories. So I prefer to treat both quantitative and qualitative information as rumors or stories. But arguably politics finance and the military have always been cross-linked. In the book Lords of Finance as one example, Liaquat Ahmed describes how in 1694 a group of protestant city merchants got permission to form the Bank of England – with exclusive rights to service the government, in return for lending the government £1.2 million which saved the country from bankruptcy over a war with France. This happens throughout history. It’s just that with the volume of media flow today, the public experiences all of these complex networks as they are formed, in real time. So the data attack becomes as overwhelming as any powerful weapon.

As an artist I am trying to understand how to deal with masses of information. How to show them and use their materiality. In Walking Through Walls, I am telling stories with them as a narrator. In Concerning Time We Remain, Divided‘, my other piece shown in the exhibition, I use spatial geographical information about the population and buildings of greater Jerusalem, as a 3-dimensional score for a generative sound composition.

Tom Tlalim, Concerning Time We Remain, Divided (2008). Exhibition view courtesy of the artist.

When it comes to conflict, and especially to that in Palestine/Israel, people also keep looking for a singular truth and justice. For a solution. But things have now become too complex. You cannot undo the brutality of murder, even if you kill the murderer a thousand times. But living in The Netherlands for ten years has given me a distance. Like in an ivory tower. My father, Asher Tlalim, directed a documentary called ‘Galoot’ (exile in Hebrew), where he discovers the story of Rabbi Elimelech of Lizensk, a great spiritual leader of the 18th century, who used to cast exile upon himself every now and then, and go wandering through the towns of Poland for months. This nomadic exercise gave him space to spontaneously meditate on daily life and deconstruct preconceptions and mental habits. I feel that such spontaneous practices have become less feasible in today’s environment, where space is increasingly monitored and controlled hierarchically.

A building in De Zuidas, missing a piece of facade. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: In Walking Through Walls, many cuts and transitions reminded me of first person shooter videogames. In Counterstrike (which is also a terrorism-themed videogame), after a player gets killed, he/she has the possibility to explore the stage location wandering like a disembodied, omniscent eye around the 3D landscape. You could also pass through walls as if they were paper-thin. Did you have this vision in mind when you edited your video?

Tom: The image of the technological soldier was definitely in my mind in the making of this work. I wanted to put the viewer in the position of a virtual walker through walls. With the typical detachment, apathy and professionalism. Counterstrike was introduced to me by Konstantin Leonenko, one of the editors of the piece, he’s a very broad minded cross-media designer, and often works with technology. He showed me the game and we recorded a number of sessions for inspiration.

Having worked with motion capturing and choreography, I think body language and motion dynamics reveal a lot about how mental conditioning is embodied in our physique, so this is of course very interesting for conflict and crisis research. It’s very ironic, for example, that technology disconnects the soldier from the battlefield. And while the gamer enjoys the realistic graphics, blood splattering and sounds of thrashing bones, bullets and bombs, running and ducking through an urban battlefield identical to Iraq or Gaza, S/he himself remains relatively still, in the safety of the living room. So when one finally dies, S/he also gets to be a ghost and walk through the walls. Maybe it’s a kind of outlet for controlled pagan ecstasy. But in fact, contemporary battlefield technology often puts the soldier in a similar position to that of a gamer.

Tom Tlalim, Concerning Time We Remain, Divided (2008). Exhibition view courtesy of the artist.

Nicola: Your work Concerning Time We Remain, Divided, is based on data. Why do you think the aesthetics of information and architecture are so important in art today? Do you think this can be seen as an ethical awakening after the postmodern numbness?

Tom: I see neither Information aesthetics, nor architecture, as particularly significant for art these days. Architecture exists everywhere in contemporary environment, and so does information. Hungry scavenging artists feed off these as they always did off other technologies, materials and modes of production. If some artists feel that they can bring service to society somehow by doing this, I’m truly happy for them. But there are probably as many Arts as there are artists. As for myself, I think for me Art is an attempt to express the way I am overwhelmed in front of the complexity of nature and things.

Artists have the benefit of a carte blanch where other disciplines don’t, This is probably because art cannot be labelled as right or wrong. This is why playing with real data is very interesting. As an artist I can use unclarity and ambiguity, use wrong interpretations and make mistakes. Artists also increasingly work in different fields in and outside the arts, regardless of their expertise.

These two works were shown in the context of the Deleuze conference, co-organized by Dr. Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam and Dr. Rosi Braidotti of the University of Utrecht. In one of the debates, Pisters laid out the discourse of art as informed by Deleuze and Guattari. According to her, Art operates in between Philosophy and Science. While philosophy is abstract and tends to look for ‘universals’ in concepts, and science usually investigates a very small material part of the world in its functions, art is both material and relating to universal aspects. Nevertheless each field has its own internal force, there is no hierarchy between the disciplines. But my concern is still that this abstract description of a possible relation between these fields, could be in danger of being interpreted too literally, as a geometrical relation. For example, by policy makers, who look for a way of positioning arts in the academy. So a wrong interpretation might lead to art being put in a hierarchical structure; that of funding, of the architecture of the corridors of the academy, of logical reasoning, of historical records etc.. I personally feel that if we want to try and implement a D&G’s kind of non-hierarchical relationship between fields, we should try to learn from Art rather than try to squeeze it into a box. Art has its own structure or mode of production, which is highly dynamic, and can scrutinize the academic structure, with the two structures feeding back into one another, like two warped mirrors.

(Check out the third part!)

In occasion of The Smooth and The Striated, a Gilles Deleuze-inspired art exhibition which took place at the Nieuwe Dakota and Huize Frankendael venues in Amsterdam, I had the chance to meet Israeli artist Tom Tlalim. Tlalim has been living in the Netherlands for a decade now, and recently he has been in the new business district of De Zuidas in South Amsterdam for a five months residency at the Virtueel Museum Zuidas. The works he exhibited dealt with contemporary themes of conflict, politics, war, finance, and urbanization, while maintaining simple yet technologically-layered aesthetics. The long interview that follows (and which will be published in three parts) covers a variety of issues, ranging from the intersections of art and science to public ground privatization, from the contemporary role of the artist to the Palestine/Israel conflict. All with the urban landscape of the developing business district of De Zuidas as a background.

De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: First of all, before being an installation artist or a video-maker, you are a musician. While visiting the Zuidas myself, I noticed the landscape is quite desolated and dispersed and, apart from a few bars – for example near the metro stop, next to the Accenture building – the area is very quiet. How did the sound of the Zuidas inspire you?

Tom: It’s interesting that you indicate the location of the bars by their proximity to a multinational company building. This happens a lot at the Zuidas. For me it was essential to keep a critical view of the place in my work, and not to use readymades such as brand names or PR materials. I wanted to experience this environment for what it is and let my opinion on it form gradually. In such a politically charged environment, the info, news and views, however impartial they may seem, often do tend to reaffirm the brand by placing it on the map.

As a composer, I am not only interested in sound, but also in structure. Musical structure can be described as the designed transformation of sound material over time. It is essentially temporal. In this way it resembles architecture and the manner in which a designed space transforms as it exposes itself to the visitor temporally. The correlation between the two creative arts becomes even clearer through acoustics, as the movement of the visitor through different acoustical spaces becomes a sonic transformation.

A bar next to the metro stop in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

The aurality of the Zuidas is very static and unspecific. Just like many other new business districts popping up around the world, it does not seem to have been designed with dynamic acoustics in mind. There’s that motorway hum, jet plane whistles, construction and drilling noises, central air conditioning buzz, train track squeals, commuters footsteps rushing with trollies etc. Altogether they make a familiar urban drone, or perhaps – a loud silence. But this drone is masked by the wild oceanic winds and rain of The Netherlands (There are many raging wind tunnels as well. One story I’d heard is that they had trees planted in the small square outside the train station in the attempt to stop the raging winds). The sounds of music in some restaurants and bars could have offered some more exciting sonic buzz, but these generally tend to play music off computer playlists, with popular 80′s hits being the current trend with the workers of the multinational companies. So this bit of the sonic dimension had been reduced again to a numb automation.

To collect information on the place and get a feel for it, I used a research method where I would walk around in a kind of Dérive, using a recording device with sealed headphones as a sonic travel guide. It’s like walking with a prosthetic ear, which amplifies all the small sounds around. Eventually I did manage to find a couple of nice sonic moments. For example, a huge sewage pump splattering sewage from one puddle to another. The combination of the fluid suction and splashing and the smell was quite dramatic. But overall, the lack of real dynamics in the acoustic environment made me drift ever more towards a large park right next to my studio, and take longer trips through the neighborhoods around. These drifts emphasized the limitations of walking freely in a completely designed environment, which became also the topic of the essay The New Model City (Intimate Stories on Absence, Onomatopee#41, ISBN 978-90-78454-40-3), and of Walking Through Walls.

A reflecting skyscraper in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: Fredric Jameson mentioned reflecting surfaces as an element of postmodern architecture. I noticed that you used mirrors or reflective surfaces in your previous works. At the Huize Frankendael, where your video was shown, there was also a mirror in front of the projection. Was it your choice to screen the video there? How do you incorporate them in your aesthetic?

Tom: The mirror is the main reason why I chose that room. The Hiuze Frankendael was built in the 17th century by the Dike and Shipping official Nicolaas van Liebergen, who was also served a term as the director of Curaçao Island – a central shipping point for the Atlantic slave trade. So the structure of the villa embodies the social hierarchy of the time. I think that mirror functioned as a way for the personnel to check out what is happening in the room from the corridor, without disturbing by entering it. But the specific shape of the mirror also resembles the video material I shot of the Zuidas. I was filming the urban landscape through consecutive rectangular holes in the train station pillars, moving the camera to the Left and Right. This motion is typical of aiming to shoot or for orientation, but repetitive like a clock pendulum or the lulling of a ship. The mirror added a voyeuristic dimension to the video, where I flirt with the idea of transparency all the time. So when visitors entered the exhibition space, they would first see the video through the mirror – cropped, inverted and distorted. And only upon entering the room would they turn around and see the real projection.

Exhibition view at Huize Frankendael. Photo courtesy of Tom Tlalim

Mirrors and reflections are fascinating as a tool of power. They provide a copy of reality which is necessary to prove our existence to ourselves. But it is only a reflection. Leibniz said that the soul is the mirror of the universe. In his theory of monads, he includes a depiction of a windowless universe of mirrors, each reflecting the other one to infinity. I used a similar image in The New Model City, transferring this image to the context of new urbanity (also inspired by Sharon Rotbard’s beautiful book White City Black City):

“When high-rises are built next to one another, each glass facade mirrors the other one, as they feed their mutual identity back into infinity. But this image has no content. At this point the medium becomes the message. And currency, which traditionally reflects a value, begins to reflect potential – the value of potential growth.” – T. Tlalim, The New Model City

Nicola: In your video, you compare the experience of the Zuidas, where it’s impossible to wander outside the overly-planned street grid, with the opposite practice of “walking through walls”. This practice was mentioned in a famous article by Israeli architect and critic Eyal Weizman, explaining the influence of French post-structuralist thought on how the Israeli military conducted urban warfare in Nablus in 2002.What are the spatial dialectics connecting a strongly constrained walk – the Zuidas – with the omniscient look of the israeli military, which penetrates walls?

Tom: The design and technology of the two different spaces represent two opposite approaches; The Zuidas is planned top-to-bottom in a short time period, while the palestinian village Lifta has a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical expansion pattern, where houses are cascaded on the side of a mountain, and have expanded gradually over generations, as families grew larger. The two represent a distinctly different social pattern.

The relation I wanted to show, between the Zuidas and Lifta, has to do with this opposition, and with the fact that both are cities under occupation. One – military – and the other – financial. The world of finance has traditionally drawn influence from the military, and building a business district is a kind of campaign for occupation of local grounds by a group of multinational companies. The Zuidas – an initiative of the ABN AMRO group – operates within the city of Amsterdam, to create a local space for multinational companies and their workers.

Tom Tlalim, Walking Through Walls (2010). Still frame from video courtesy of the artist.

There are hardly hard fences, mainly glass, mirrors, and what I call soft borders i.e. symbols that are known to be borders, such as an open gate, or a statue of a dog or a lion guarding the gate. So the walls that I was dreaming of walking through are not the walls imposed on me by someone, but rather the soft mental walls I put around myself, being familiar with the social code. These walls in one’s mind are the toughest to walk through. And it is no wonder that when one does, as the soldiers had to in Balata, one loses a sense of one’s own personal security. If this can happen to these people, it can happen to anyone.

The idea to superimpose the business district with the blown-off walls of Lifta came from reading Weizman’s article Walking Through Walls, and a chapter in Sharon Rotbard’s book White City Black City, which tells about a number of historical occasions when this technique was re-invented and reused, including at Manshiya – a neigborhood of Jaffa that was completely erased by the Etsel in 1947. It felt like the financial interests behind such new urbanity projects are often as blunt as armies in the change that they bring into the local environment, but this brutal force is concealed in slow processes.

Tom Tlalim, Walking Through Walls (2010). Still frame from video courtesy of the artist.

I decided to call the video Walking Through Walls after Weizman’s piece, because the title suggests a duality. On the one hand it symbolizes a romantic human urge to be liberated from physical and social confinements, and a desire to return to the wild, nomadic or pagan life. On the other hand, it is an army tactic. The forced penetration of residential walls by an invading army. In this process, while the locals lose their homes, privacy, security and identity, the invaders lose their moral upper hand.

(Read the second and the third part of the interview.)

Image from http://uqbarorbistertius.blogspot.com/

In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius the argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges imagined a place with a completely different perception of reality than ours.
In Tlön “the prime unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. The noun is formed by an accumulation of adjectives. They do not say “moon,” but rather “round airy-light on dark” or “pale-orange-of-the-sky” or any other such combination.” Also, lacking the concept of subsequentiality brought by verbs (and heavily discussed by scholars like Marshall McLuhan and Derrick De Kerckhove), “they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”. This also reflects on Tlön’s philosophy: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

To read the story many years later it’s kind of easy to think of it as a metaphor for the internet, even though there are some important differences between Borges’ imaginary land and the World Wide Web. Google continuosly caching the web makes time stand still, but the importance of real-time has been re-established after all the Twitter Search buzz that shook SEO blogs a few months ago. Also, sequentiality of events still matters a lot: any happening carries its own trail of cascade sub-events, parodies and top-down debate or conspiracy theories on the internet, and while blogging we’re desperate to link as much as possible.
Still, a crucial similarity to Tlön is the process of tagging. The self-selecting nature of meta-data, driven by user-generated tags and keywords ruling both Google’s ad services and the much more innocent knowledge-focused social bookmarking networks like Delicious, is one of the main features of Web 2.0 and the semantic web.

Just like “the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology”, to plug our content in the furious information stream we all navigate by we need to use a shared – yet personal – folksonomy. Such categorization takes place spontaneously and in slightly different forms: via Twitter’s hash-tags, Delicious’ no-commas tag lists, Wikipedia editing and of course also via the detailed self-representing meta-data portraits we paint on Facebook to impress our friends and potential partners.

Social bookmarking constitutes a sort of super-structure stemming above the Google result-level, a savvier and more localized look for the wise internet user. Of course the over meta-stratification will see social bookmarking networks popping up overnight and being social-bookmarked themselves, but that’s also for the sake of the critical emancipation of users. Well, so we hope.

The Pagerank Era might be ending, and the big G’s metaphysics are now endangered by information-crazed users who seem to be all about selecting, filtering, passing messages – often before even reading them. Because, on the internet, spreading the word is more important than spreading conscience, and the Michael Jackson-related post mortem Twitter spree overtaking the Iran elections hype is an example of the volatile attention of the web crowd.

Image from blog.compete.com

One thing I encountered myself in my Delicious and Twitter activity is selection, just like communication, becomes mandatory and hysterical pretty easily and the standards by which they work get lower and lower. Sharing links becomes a way of appearing, even if just for a flash, in someone else’s newsfeed, thus bringing traffic to your page. Ignoring the meaning of bounce rate, most of us think having complete strangers peeking in our little web-shrine will get us more friends, but we’re wrong.
Anyway accurate web content is still possible, available, and worth spreading, so it’s a bit of a pity the internet’s custom to over-do is also spoiling this second layer of user-selected information, pushing content up to a third level to which a next one will follow. The valid content might stay in the surface, but it’s harder and harder to keep track of it, especially when folksonomy itself is not an exact science. Tags are arbitrary and subject to capitalization and typos, plus each platform has their own comma and space standards. Needless to say, stuff gets left behind.

Image from http://www.pbcore.org/

Web 2.0 is great and we all love it, but it also constitutes the turning point after which taking part in this folksonomy and contributing to such a collective knowledge become an urge, an almost mandatory command to be there. There is an egotistical aspect to distributing (selecting+sharing) information through social networks, an unhealthy frenzy to communicate something you haven’t had time to make your own. The rise and fall of so many Twitter hashtags is just the most recent phenomenon of a deeper change in internet use.

“The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty – not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars… A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.
Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön.”
Or maybe not. I know no internet user who would have the patience to read a hundred volumes.