KodwoEshun

Expert of Geert Lovink's "Speculative Dialogue with KodwoEshun": »Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there« http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/co/6902/1.html

I have experienced cycles in speculative thought, of discovery and excitement, travelling further and further, until you reach a moment of realization (or not). The concept then dies, fades away, loses its magic, and start to feel worn out. In certain cases, speculative thought is being developed in complete isolation. It is even likely that these journeys towards the end of theory are undertaken in uncontemporary circumstances. Though the hermit position is not always a voluntarily one. Forms of criticism which are engaging, searching for new languages and aesthetics, could be a way out. In your experience, how are speculation and criticism related?

Kodwo Eshun: Everywhere around you, the death of critique becomes visible. But critique and criticism are not the same. In my case I started to connect music with art and science fiction. Then you start realizing they are already connected and social disciplinary apparatuses are at work to separate them. Once you see that they are connected, the effort stops to bridge them. You stop being reactive. It turns around. That's when scale becomes more important than analogy or metaphor. You start thinking how across scale and materials general processes emerge which you can see and follow. That's when cybernetics start to become more important. You want to be specific generalist. At a certain point you want to be maximalist. Think of that strange rectangular material in a recent work of the Berlin company Art&Com. Or the typographer David Carson with his giant word objects, which has these twisting 3D forms. I also like the HyperArchitecture of Lars Spuybroek with its non-Euclidean geometry. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is only a start. In ten years more and more things will use spine vectors. That is why the futurists and constructivists are so useful. They tried to extend the immanent processes which their medium suggested to them, which was coined at a moment of extreme mutation. The digital artists I worked with, all try to understand the psycho-geography and what computer networks are doing to location, topology and place. Where they are when they are on-line and what happens when they go off-line.

That's when concepts start to become functionality and are not just anymore idea, ideology or fashion.

Kodwo Eshun: I started noticing how many neologisms were used in HyperArchitecture. I counted so many of them! All these architects were obliged to introduce neologisms, to carve out this space they are working in. WilliamGibson?'s idea that neologism is the primal act of pop poetics. It is the fist phase of concept manufacture, which depends on immanent analysis of the forms of the medium you are in. Since this medium is the process of extreme change, this puts pressure on your language. I love the idea that digitization does not stop at the screen. Concept manufacture on the one hand is an indulgence of the intellect, on the other an absolute necessity.

Everything is being digitally mutated. And all the descriptions are obliged to change as well.

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