Do you ever look at yourself and think did I just play straight into the hand of neolibarism ? Because we just had that moment. As we see our first year of oneacre.online come to an end, we revisited our guardian words to realise that perhaps we shouldn’t have skipped the introduction. In Updating to Remain the Same : Habitual New Media, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun accounts on how “neoliberalism […] destroys the public by fostering the private […] by reconfiguring and constructing "all aspects of existence in economic terms.” that causes “the majority of people [to] endorse [the] neoliberal policies that actually hurt them. It mades us think how by monetising links, we extrude linking from the public into the private. An issue particularly present as policies are taking steps towards privatising the internet, multi-dollar companies are trying as hard possible to keep you from linking-leaving, or turn linking into a paid perk. All practises we don’t want to assist by normalising.
Originally our idea of ownership was heavily influenced by Walter Benjamin’s Unpacking My Library : A Talk about Book Collecting, we thought perhaps naively that by allowing to purchase the publications, — “ownership [being] the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects”, according to Benjamin, and the most sacred [something] for the western capitalist world — we could play the system, grand the reader all the rights that ownership allows offline, to the online. We could maintain the publication online without removing their context, by downloading or printing to pdf.And motivate our community to preserve the works they find intriguing. As we work on ways of detangling our links so that the links can exist, when perhaps even when our acre doesn’t.
Much like Ursula K. Le Guin accounts in the preface —we didn’t skip — of The Word for Wold is still Forest, her character Captain Davison might be the evilest thing she has created, yet she takes full responsible over him, so we do. To do so, we follow further Chun, into realising “the assumption: consent once, circulate forever” we propose CATALOGUED OBJECTS as a way of loitering in public, of re entering the public, that would allow the possibility of retracting one’s steps, possibly even erasing or forgetting, in case the authors or the circumstances feel as if it should no longer exist in the public. CATALOGUED OBJECTS collects our version of katamarian1 debris created as a result of our yearlong efforts in publishing and experimentation.
CATALOGUED OBJECTS is opening offline as an exhibition at Bladr, Griffenfeldsgade 27, 2200 Copenhagen, this Thursday 17th January and running till the 10th of February with the kind support of Københavns Kommunes Billedkunstudval. It displays all the physical things that remain enough our fist four publications are no longer available. The online counterpart of CATALOGUED OBJECTS is accessible under the HTML protocol at the fold of bladrbladr.net. CATALOGUED OBJECTS exist also in the dat:// protocol, a peer-to-peer protocol, that amongst over things allows you to download and seed the files, which will make it so that after dat://f68636ab851f7da6b8e8e26d27818f23fab5f768f81b5e159e7a1115600b0c9e/ will be accessible online for as long as someone who hosts the file is online. If you have purchased a link in the past and you are interested in deposit your copy in an public or semi public —online space you occupy, like you personal website, social media bio, feel free to contact us so we could include you in our debris collection, or you can always update CATALOGUED OBJECTS over dat://f68636ab851f7da6b8e8e26d27818f23fab5f768f81b5e159e7a1115600b0c9e/
1 In Poetics and Politics of Erasure, Yun Ingrid Lee writes on how Katamari Damacy, a Playstation 2 game, can be used as a useful framework to navigate the contradictions of our neoliberal and digital present. “The katamari (a recording medium) continuously picks things up and occasionally knocks them off (additive and subtractive processes of curating the new world) as it bumps into larger objects, becoming an ever-shifting and growing, honking, screaming, rumbling mass of giant octopuses, skyscrapers, and islands (hybrid and mutating collectivity) until it is large enough to form a new star to add to a reconstructed universe (a new state, but not a complete tabula rasa).”