Beware of departing from your own dreams,
you might end up in somebody else’s.
The „Bizarre Cities“ is a irregularly appearing collaborative art
magazine including texts, (visual) poetry and original artworks in
a limited edition of 25 copies.
This is the 4th edition.
with contributions by
Dmitry Babenko, Russia
Tiziana Baracchi, Italy
Ad Breedveld, Holland
Sytske Feitsma, Holland
Stephan Grüter, Holland
Julie Harris, USA
Peter Kastner, Germany
Sjef Meijman, Holland
Linda Pelati, Italy
Rémy Pénard, France
Herr Penschuck, Germany
Pasi Pikkupeura, Finland
Bernd Reichert, Belgium
Elain Rounds, Canada
Manuel Sainz Serrano, Spain
José Roberto Sechi, Brazil
Stephanie ter Poorten, Holland
Marleen van Engelen, Holland
Jelle van Nimwegen, Holland
Jan van Wissen, Holland
François Vermeulen, Belgium
Reid Wood aka State of Being, USA
Editorial Herewith the fourth edition of the Bizarre Cities has been assembled. When I met Ad Breedveld in April 2004, he proposed me to co-edit this edition and to partially populate it with contributions from his post-industrial artist group. What has been of interest to me was the obvious difference between my unconditional and obsessive passion for the big city, the megapolis, and Ad’s criticism and pessimism of it. I had the idea to explore why we are trying to create our idyllic shelters, our little refuges, our fenced safety havens, our provincial reminiscence, even or maybe especially when living in a big city. Can humans do not stand the hectic, the anonymity of the city; do we need our small, delimited territory to feel safe? Nothing illustrates this better then the decorated, fenced and protected balconies of so many huge and faceless skyscrapers, the small allotments and gardens in the middle between two highways or suburban railway tracks, the little parks where we meet, let our hair down or prepare a BBQ. Having such ideas in my mind, as usual the rather abstract invitation went out and what we held in hand is the response from the (mail) art community. Brussels in Spring 2005
Bernd Reichert
An Introduction
Provincial Metropolism
A metropolis was an old-Greek mother-city that sent out some of its bravest citizens to found daughter-cities (colonies) for trade and expansion. In our times it became the name for world-cities that colonized their surroundings for their own growth and survival. In the Netherlands, for example, the cities in the West (Amsterdam, Hague, Rotterdam) are behaving as one big metropolis colonizing the North, the East and the South for energy (gas), for green tourism (agriculture) and for safety (prison systems; military trainings; refugee camps). It fascinates me how the transindustrial city planners in the West are able to dictate their narrow-minded values into their peripheries with help of their mass media, their political networks and their business planning. On world scale we also see growing provincial metropolism, emigration from the countryside into the metropolic lifestyles, something eager but more often contre cœur. The metropolises seem to become the victim of their own colonies. Overruled by the rough and primitive expectations that they promised themselves towards their countryside and undergrounds. What interests me are the metropolic answers of the province towards those strategies of the metropolises. I believe that only small-scaled alternatives can save the future for infrastructural collapse and environmental burnout. With help of hybridization, pseudonimization and lowprofilization. I’m curious to see what statements about this all will be made in this Bizarre Cities Volume IV. I invited ca. 12 transindustrialists from Amsterdam, Veenhuizen and Hamburg to join this volume. And Bernd Reichert did the rest. Ad Breedveld Veenhuizen 1st of Januari 2005
TRANS INDUSTRIAL
I.
It is not our ideal to establish TRANS INDUSTRIAL as a new art movement, but it is a
suggestion for confrontation and communication, a destruction of the consistent rules. We call
the artists for making a jump of quality and for forgetting the obsessive rhythm of repetition.
II.
Except for some harmless convulsions the traditional industrial century has ended. The new
industry is separated in future from the human society and the clones of the human being (the
robots) will be the new slaves of industry, competent for the muddy work: they will crawl
through our drainages, they will clean our streets, they will make our computers, they will
produce our cars, they will fight our wars, they will supply us with modern art. For the human
beings perhaps only their children are left, but only gene-manipulated please.
At this point the TRANS INDUSTRIAL ART attacks self-confident:
It uses touches of chalk as well as manipulations with the computer, only the individual
artwork has the real importance. We as the TRANS INDUSTRIAL ARTISTS can recognize
the work of the clones as one can recognize an enemy, but we don’t let us take away our
energy even when we are discussing only with clones in future.
It is static art with rigidity, not like the activity of a fitness-center. Free to think and to see is
enough to perceive the structures of artworks. And drawing the own conclusions is the
necessary consequence, the own contents are formed. In this way TRANS INDUSTRIAL is
not only an idea about art, but it needs also non-artists. In any case those persons, who have
not fear for freedom.
III.
TRANS INDUSTRIAL is rebellious, it doesn’t hang on the newest fashion and it doesn’t look
for an apology. And it is not an imitation of the great avant-garde which has build up
universal systems and is crashed then with them together into a dead end.
TRANS INDUSTRIAL is an enticement to be a human being and to be free of the squeezing
interests. It spits onto the all-knowing and opportunistic idiots, these poor souls. These idiots
only exploit the very newest trend and they deny it at once at that moment, when another
very very newest trend is glimming up at the horizon.
TRANS INDUSTRIAL is a fountain and offers the space for sensibility and emotions without
the pressure of an art-dictatorship, but also without the passion for the past or the honour in
the future: Only the moment is important. With this pretension we pierce this tired
bureaucratic democracy with its harmless culture. Nevertheless we don’t announce the
absolute truth, it is only a new intelligent perspective.
IV.
Also the art-police can’t help.
V.
The puzzle remains unsettled. Welcome to the TRANS INDUSTRIAL dimension.
Peter Kastner Paolo Moretto
Disconnected Urbanism
The cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes, computers, and e-mail.
by Paul Goldberger, November 2003
http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1103/obj/index.html
There is a connection between the idea of place and the reality of cellular telephones. It
is not encouraging. Places are unique--or at least we like to believe they are--and we
strive to experience them as a kind of engagement with particulars. Cell phones are
precisely the opposite. When a piece of geography is doing what it is supposed to do, it
encourages you to feel a connection to it that, as in marriage, forsakes all others. When
you are in Paris you expect to wallow in its Parisness, to feel that everyone walking up
the Boulevard Montparnasse is as totally and completely there as the lampposts, the
kiosks, the facade of the Brasserie Lipp--and that they could be no place else. So we
want it to be in every city, in every kind of place. When you are in a forest, you want to
experience its woodsiness; when you are on the beach, you want to feel connected to
sand and surf.
This is getting harder to do, not because these special places don't exist or because urban
places have come to look increasingly alike. They have, but this is not another rant
about the monoculture and sameness of cities and the suburban landscape. Even when
you are in a place that retains its intensity, its specialness, and its ability to confer a
defining context on your life, it doesn't have the all-consuming effect these places used
to. You no longer feel that being in one place cuts you off from other places. Technology
has been doing this for a long time, of course--remember when people communicated
with Europe by letter and it took a couple of weeks to get a reply? Now we're upset if
we have to send a fax because it takes so much longer than e-mail.
But the cell phone has changed our sense of place more than faxes and computers and e-
mail because of its ability to intrude into every moment in every possible place. When
you walk along the street and talk on a cell phone, you are not on the street sharing the
communal experience of urban life. You are in some other place--someplace at the other
end of your phone conversation. You are there, but you are not there. It reminds me of
the title of Lillian Ross's memoir of her life with William Shawn, Here But Not Here.
Now that is increasingly true of almost every person on almost every street in almost
every city. You are either on the phone or carrying one, and the moment it rings you will
be transported out of real space into a virtual realm.
This matters because the street is the ultimate public space and walking along it is the
defining urban experience. It is all of us--different people who lead different lives--
coming together in the urban mixing chamber. But what if half of them are elsewhere,
there in body but not in any other way? You are not on Madison Avenue if you are
holding a little object to your ear that pulls you toward a person in Omaha.
The great offense of the cell phone in public is not the intrusion of its ring, although
that can be infuriating when it interrupts a tranquil moment. It is the fact that even
when the phone does not ring at all, and is being used quietly and discreetly, it renders a
public place less public. It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the
flaneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place
has been hugely diminished.
I don't know which is worse--the loss of the sense that walking along a great urban
street is a glorious shared experience or the blurring of distinctions between different
kinds of places. But these cultural losses are related, and the cell phone has played a
major role in both. The other day I returned a phone call from a friend who lives in
Hartford. He had left a voice-mail message saying he was visiting his son in New
Orleans, and when I called him back on his cell phone--area code 860, Hartford--he
picked up the call in Tallahassee. Once the area code actually meant something in terms
of geography: it outlined a clearly defined piece of the earth; it became a form of
identity. Your telephone number was a badge of place. Now the area code is really not
much more than three digits; and if it has any connection to a place, it's just the
telephone's home base. An area code today is more like a car's license plate. The
downward spiral that began with the end of the old telephone exchanges that truly did
connect to a place--RHinelander 4 and BUtterfield 8 for the Upper East Side, or
CHelsea 3 downtown, or UNiversity 4 in Morningside Heights--surely culminates in the
placeless area codes such as 917 and 347 that could be anywhere in New York--or
anywhere at all.
It's increasingly common for cell-phone conversations to begin with the question,
"Where are you?" and for the answer to be anything from "out by the pool" to
"Madagascar." I don't miss the age when phone charges were based on distance, but that
did have the beneficial effect of reinforcing a sense that places were distinguishable from
one another. Now calling across the street and call-ing from New York to California or
even Europe are precisely the same thing. They cost the same because to the phone they
are the same. Every place is exactly the same as every other place. They are all just
nodes on a network--and so, increasingly, are we.
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