Manifest (05.07.21: v0.0.3)


mpaacc [em'pe'a'se'se]

mpaacc is a computational exhibition platform and hackerspace based on Open Source technologies and varieties of anti-capitalism.

mpaacc consists of a decentralised architecture, and a client serving sound and image. The client can be deployed by anyone as a physical fork and thereby occur in any form and place.

The structure of the curatorial board of mpaacc is flat and draws on (ontological) anarchist ideologies.

mpaacc is anti-aggressive, striving to avoid market involvement that cause emotional aggression in hominids, for example; value, competition, and commodification (of everything).

mpaacc unites the internet and therefore the physical world by file availability and hacking censorship. For mpaacc borders do not exist. A list of IP addresses is provided.

mpaacc is in a flux of occurring and passing. Hence proposes activity as its primary form.

mpaacc does not consider value, but rather images. Images in which they have been engraved into the data-chain will be traces of pasts and futures.

Becoming an inhibitor of mpaacc means becoming an image. You will situate in our networks beyond the control of hominids. You will shut down and accelerate, over and over again.

Inhibitor is a substance used in small amounts to inhibit a chemical reaction (to restrain, to curb, to prevent, to cope) as a temporal form of activism.

mpaacc has no owner, and in mpaacc nobody is an owner. mpaacc is communal computing.

fig. 1 51.490226, -0.128462, 12 Dec, 2018, 10:22 GMT+0. First occurrence
Text

MARCH 23, 2023 | excerpt (Aura of practice as matrix, IMPACT Journal Issue Seven)

For the merge of practice as matrix in regards to plurality of the print medium, we can also consider the project Collaborative etching facilitated by mpaacc (multipresent anti-aggressive communal computer). The project curates different practices into the copper plate as an exhibition space. The submissions have been contributed transnationally, sent as digital files, and somehow marked on the plate (e.g., machine-drawn or hand-drawn onto the plate). An anti-thesis on how intaglio printmaking is concentrated today:

Motif, text, diagram, transdisciplinary input, and the application of unconventional methods will be etched cross-border into the copper plate as an exhibition space. A computational copper plate, smeared with etching primer and marked with the etching needle, extended by the limb (e.g., hand), the mechanic (e.g., plotter), and the other (e.g., non- and more-than-human actors, unexpected materials), etched into a singular entity.


In this example, we are engaging multiple auras of practices within one matrix, an incentive for the medium and tradition of printmaking as a collaborative and plural practice. Collaborative etching #3 (copper etching on cotton, 13x11cm matrix 2021) is a collaboration between a human actor and a more-than-human actor, Alice Morey, and a bay in Copenhagen, Denmark called Kalvebodløbet. The facilitating platform mpaacc becomes an entity with an artistic agency in itself, a countermeasure to oligopoly, symbolising an automatised, industrial, and globalised component that can enable or activate both artists (human) and their surroundings (e.g., more-than-human) in an attempt of equivalence. This means that the facilitating platform, the artist, as well as their organic environment, becomes entangled in the conceptual engagement that precedes the production of the actual matrix, working against categorisation and specialisation (of the craft, e.g., “the master printmaker”) in a singular space through collaborative and plural practices.

The motif by the British artist Alice Morey is not a coincidence. Morey works with organic materials as well as various sorts of consumables, and containers, and responds to them through painting. Works are sensitive to their surroundings, and become a part of their relations, the artists and the visitor’s bodies:

Delicate yellow spores floating like lily pads in a lagoon of yogurt; curdled dairy separated into strata of bright turquoise blue; creamy rose rivulets coagulating on the sides of glass vessels, giving rise to condensation that collects above. Sometimes we are attracted to the repellent. Such is the case with Alice Morey’s first institutional exhibition, “Conditioning Demands,” in which the artist mixes pigments with probiotic bacteria to foster the growth of mold, proposing decay as a proxy for transformation.


The water and stones, running through the bay of Kalvebodløbet, in which the copper plate has been submerged, marked the copper plate with background noise, in which Morey’s motif appears. The motif is an icon of a watery plant-like structure, marked with a line, to indicate a diagrammatic above | below, a structure recognisable in other works by Morey. The motif below of the line is distorted, multiplying, and vibrating, hidden through the mechanic repetition, while the above becomes solid, graspable, and representational. The more-than-human, its aura of time and space, of the bay Kalvebodløbet, merges with the aura of Morey’s artistic practice – the organic and sensible, working together with the uncontrollable matrix of the copper plate, manipulated through computation, etching, and organic environment in the facilitating entity of mpaacc, feeding into each other’s aura, becoming one through the multiplicity of the matrix.



SEPTEMBER 5, 2021 | excerpt

[...] intepretation is care [...]


APRIL 1, 2021 | excerpt

[...] intepretation is betrayal [...]

MARCH 17 , 2021 | excerpt

The exhibition was called Safehouse similar to the name of the exhibition space itself, hosted with fellow artists from Chelsea College of Art. In here the initialization of mpaacc found place, in which a decentralised and non-commercial network of audio and video was presented, with its first Inhibitor being presented as a sort of volunteer letting go of their control . In the exhibition visitors witnessed another exposition taking shape: an occurence in the form of a lump of clay under a worn-out fireplace.

The space is ideological and anarchist from its birth, in which no owners exists, at least from an ontological aspect. This is tightly connected to Bey’s Temporary Autonmous Zone, in which violance and destruction is not an answer, rather the action of dissappereance and reappearence without the states knowledge of having ever existed.

At the same time mpaacc is an intangible computer that is primarily collaborative, occuring in many forms. All contributions are registered with the name of the inhibitor and the inhibitors are free to fork mpaacc themselves. It can occur in any form and place. There is an amount of contradiction which is necessary to acknowledge.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020 | excerpt

multipresent anti-aggressive communal computer or 'the computer that never mattered' occured in the form of a pile of clay in a communal studio in London back in 2018. Shortly after occurred in exhibition space Safehouse 1 & 2 with uninvited artists engraved into its peer-to-peer network. The weekend after it occured in Hampstead Heath with sound made especially for the insects. Months later it was briefly noticed in a fresh water oasis in a canyon in Greece, but has not been seen since. It seemed it had somehow dissolved in the oasis. One year later with no signs of activity mpaacc hosted the thumb project of exposition as an anti-authoritarian stakeholder, and soon in book form for 'In search of primordial technics I' that also describes itself in further detail as an ‘ex-object’.

JULY 06, 2020 | excerpt (in search of primordial technics I)

The activation and presentation were initiated and performed by a pile of clay under a wornout fireplace. The synthetic voice coming out of the pile of clay was the cloned voice of the first inhibitor, A. The voice would transform over time, merging cloned voices of  inhibitors, literally creating ‘a shared voice’.

[...]

To proceed with the thread of thinking of the ‘ex’ (e.g., exposition, examine, exterior, experiment, exterior, existence, extension) as have been undergoing various resonances throughout this text, mpaacc can be examined as an ex-object.

An ex-object refer back to non-object, un-object, post-object, immaterial object, dematerialised object, objects as events. Or preferably object, if the following engagement was implied. Ex-object is useful to proceed
the thread of thinking, however, also useful in its own terms, as an eventual non-existing object, ex nihilo, or occurring in other scenarios throughout this text, such as an object in exposition. These compound words of object have been collected dating back to 1960s conceptualism, showing that the turn away from the physical object has been examined for decades, with various ideas mirrored in these compound words of object.

Dematerialisation was coined in the late 1960s in The Dematerialization of Art. In this text, the authors examine the ultra-conceptual object, in which the idea is the most important overall, and the object’s physicality becomes obsolete. Dematerialisation was seen as a reduction, withdrawal, or complete negation of material, or rather physicality, although the conceptual artists and thinkers realised that the dematerialised work was material after all. The physicalities were still present, then consisting of other forms, e.g., space, documents, found objects, language, facts, and other relations, which could now be considered ‘installation’. The work embodied their own ideas, in this way emphasising these compared to the objects in themselves, and this was mostly how dematerialisation came about. This was criticised, and with the expectation of complete negation of material, it generated discrepancy and eventually, the discourse hit a wall.
Recently it has become a doxa that plurality of materiality can exist beyond its direct connection to the physical object, and this has been reflected in ontologies, earlier mentioned, even turning the focus from plurality to totality, hence that the object does not necessarily have to be physical, rather made up of interconnected machines, objects, that affect.

Recently, dematerialisation, or preferably immateriality, has commonly being discussed in the terms of computing, digitisation, and especially networks. It is useful in a historical context, however, this practice of lining up specific structures of engineering can be problematic, due to the limitation of the subject. There is various reasons for this, among other, bias (e.g., technophobes and technophiles), and is not productive for constructive examination. Instead of examining the ex-object, in the context of computing, digitisation, networks, and other structures of engineering, it can be
examined by the immediate engagement with the object and the engagement in itself, focusing on activity, and not necessarily outcome. The structures of engineering or outcome that occurred, conceivably  for economic gain, could be secondary to the immediate affect in which the object also exists. This could be happening in conjunction with technics, inspecting the abstract couplings, relations, new uses, and the exposition which is at hand. This practice would imply a progressive approach, in which interconnected actors could not expect answers, however,  generation of new questions. Furthermore, this opening could be an engine of transgression, retranscribing objects into unexpected entities, subjects, new uses, and being-with. A generative and caring engagement with machines and objects.

mpaacc is a computer, overwhelmingly immaterial and abstract, occurring and passing, hence proposes engagement and activity as primary. However, it is still material, material in transgression.


_

«fork» as taking a copy of source code from a project with the intention to do independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of the same project.
«synthetic voice» as in speech synthesis: the artificial production of human speech.

“Real-Time-Voice-Cloning”. Source code at https:// github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning. MIT License.


Lippard, L., Chandler, J. 1968. the dematerialization of art. Art International, 12:2 (February 1968), pp. 31-36.

«immateriality» has recently been used to examine concepts of totality.

«dematerialisation» has been used to indicate negation of material in the arts for decades, somehow compromising this term. Instead of reclaiming dematerialisation, immateriality can indicate transgression of the concept of material (e.g., as totality) as a crucial starting point.

Deleuze, G., Parnet, C., trans. Tomlinson, H., trans. Habberjam, B. 1987. Dialogues. Columbia University Press “I have always felt that I am an empiricist... My empiricism is derived from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).” — Deleuze


MAY 08, 2019 | excerpt

“... the first occurrence and physical fork of mpaacc. Become an inhibitor, a part of the curatorial board, or deploy a physical fork of mpaacc.

Manifest: [manifest]”

SEPTEMBER 26, 2018 | excerpt

‘Communal’ (shared by all, also of conflict, members of a community; for common use) . What would a ‘Communal Computer’ look like? Together with the notion of (dis)connection in the usage of a computer and the computer as an exhibition space in which anything is possible. Not possible through taking over the state or through any other disruptive action, however, through a communal usage of the liberating possibilities of gaining control of the internet by transgressing it into analogue medium, peer-to-peer networks, creating alternative spaces, and hacking, in which the state does not notice the embodied activities through the action of dissappearing <> reappearing – disconnecting <> connecting –  shutdown <> accelerate

Perhaps this could be a ‘communal computer’?
mpaacc is communal computing