Gavin Keeney

“Noverim me, noverim te.” – Saint Augustine, Confessions, 10.1.1. (397-400 AD). What would and will an urban commons look like that is slowly and incrementally being re-socialized? How would that affect urban planning “now” and in times of crisis? How do we prepare for the likelihood of rolling similar crises with an eye on returning the urban commons to citizens? There is the old adage that under capitalism, risk is always socialized and profit is always privatized. We are seeing it now, under the COVID-19 crisis. The huge bailouts launched by governments are symptomatic of the crisis in political economy, just as they were post-2008. “Too big to fail” has sponsored monsters that refuse to back off without threatening the collapse of the entire system. Francisco Goya’s “The sleep of Reason produces monsters …” comes to mind. Physical and immaterial culture, in our current Western civilisation, are intimately linked. Yet the focus for urban design is generally on the material or physical side, with the immaterial left to its own devices. Increasingly, urban design measures are merely ameliorative and aesthetic, with the larger share shaped by a political economy dictated by market ideology or “politicalology.” What transpires, nonetheless, is an immaterial commons that constitutes a public or private intellectual commons – often a mix of the two; but, in the case of domination by market ideology, the privatization of “general intellect” proceeds by abject appropriation. In such a technocratically driven model, subjective states become increasingly important. As Indian architect Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi once said, “Smart cities are smart people.” How might these two otherwise contiguous and synchronous systems be brought back into a properly civic-minded rapport with or without crisis-driven change? Are there alternate models for the urban commons? What measures might be put in place in advance, or as provisional intercessions?

‘The Debauched Commons: A Dark Parable’ summarizes issues regarding intellectual property rights and immaterial culture through a nuanced reading of how First Nations Peoples worldwide have been forced by forms of neoliberal-capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons to ring-fence and/or commodify their lived traditions, in many cases dating back 100,000 years and clearly predating any and all Western (First World) concepts of ownership. The intention of the structuralist-inspired reading of this enforced defensive position is to emphasize and clarify issues concerning prior art and moral rights, two of the most ambiguous and gamed elements of copyright and patent law. Drawing upon the international context of the _Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples_ (2007) and the _Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Heritage_ (2003), this essay will focus, in part, on the travails of Aboriginals in Australia as representative of First Peoples worldwide and their long-exploited and long-expropriated traditions, inclusive of land, but foremost _lived knowledge_, but also their often compromised position _vis-à-vis_ various Australian state and Commonwealth legislation concerning recognition of their copyright, moral rights, and intellectual property rights. In this complex dance between tradition, heritage, and law, the so-called public domain often also becomes a de facto warehouse for the eventual conversion of intangible rights to collectively held and stored cultural property, which is then leveraged and/or converted to cultural capital by both public institutions and private companies. The primary premise of the analytic to be applied is that commodification of knowledge is more or less co-equal to the digitization of culture and the regimes of expropriation and/or outright theft associated with platform cultures. Platform culture, in turn, implicates otherwise benign, or apparently benign institutions (for example, academia and the art world) claiming to advance understanding and resolution of the twin nemeses of post-contemporary cultural politics—diversity and justice. The subtle machinations of what has come to be called the art-academic industrial complex will thus be analyzed for implicit and explicit practices that are reducible to the appropriation of native rites and rights, and laws and lores, for self-serving reasons inclusive of radical-chic posturing and politically correct tokenism.

The idea of the “film essay,” from Alexandre Astruc to Harun Farocki, concerns arguments for and/or against cinema and its truth-telling apparatuses. For example, as discordant and often-dark elegy for themes present in everyday cultural criticism, yet themes often eclipsed by rationalist and neo-positivist biases, the subjective states of the “film essay” hold considerable promise toward new visual methodologies or procedures for psychogeographical inquiry in landscape-architectural discourse – through foregrounding novel forms of so-called vision plans toward the much-needed short circuit of persistent analytical models grounded in programmatic hubris. When applied to environmental design disciplines, the reverie-inducing “film essay” acts as a critique of the usual rules and biases of project design development and presentation methodologies, conjuring possible futures for sites that do not automatically default to utilitarian concerns and/or mere political expediency.

“Speak to it, Horatio. Thou art a scholar.” –Shakespeare, Hamlet With the recent passing of the world’s “best-known unknown filmmaker,” Chris Marker, it is axiomatic that left-wing melancholy now includes the ongoing loss of previously lost causes – a paradox that suggests the true address of all lost causes worth defending is a strange confluence of past and futural states, as one state. This double loss as gain is also the primary mark of the “landscape” of pessimistic optimism that also denotes the foremost position to occupy today in the battles associated with capitalist end times (Slavoj Žižek’s term). Cultural ecology is no longer what it once was – that is to say, a strange amalgam of vernacular essences perpetrated in the rather forlorn 1970s and/or the insistent and incessant production of difference. Instead, cultural ecology invokes spectral civil war – arguably the very state of things today – and the return of “the dead” in the persistence of forms of high-formalist and high-conceptualist works of art and architecture. This paper examines the late works of the late Chris Marker, including the very short videos he uploaded to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki” from 2007 to 2011, an event contiguous with his return to exhibiting very-still photography from 2006 to 2011. Marker’s simultaneous returns to still photography and the short film-essay are both magnificent gestures toward the austerities required of present-day media to effect the necessary “return” to what is always present in one form or another anyway – the non-place between world and world-to-come.

A 37,641-word exegesis for thesis "sur travaux". Includes: Research methodology; "Expositions des textes"; Paralogisms for scholars; Conference, exhibition, and research tour details and itineraries. PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) – Deakin University – 2011-2014 – Thesis by Publication (“sur travaux”): “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture” – Two monographs: Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (2012); and Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (2014) – Two curated, multimedia group exhibitions: “‘Shadow-lands’: The Suffering Image” (2012), Dennys Lascelles Gallery, Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library, Deakin University; and “‘Shadow-lands’ II: Not-I/Thou” (2014), Dennys Lascelles Gallery, Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library, Deakin University – Two archival submissions: “DCM Bequest” (2012), research dossier, Australian Film Institute/RMIT; “Shadow-lands”: The Suffering Image (2012), limited-edition, hand-made folio (exhibition dossier), Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library, Deakin University, and St. Paschal Library, Yarra Theological Union – Supervision: David Jones, John Rollo, and Flavia Marcello – External examination: Tom Conley, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Suzana Milevska, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria; and Anonymous, Australia – Research conducted in Australia, England, France, Croatia, and Slovenia – Seven conferences attended in Australia (3), England (2), Italy (1), and Greece (1).

This essay samples and describes the state of architectural scholarship across various platforms in the age of Cognitive Capitalism. The premise is that, much like scholarship in the Arts and Humanities generally, architectural scholarship suffers from the Either/Or schism between traditional academic research of a non-utilitarian form and the heavily mediatic practices of the mainstream – “mainstream” defined as both online and print publications that eschew the long-form essay or book in favor of the populist modality that serves the neo-liberalization of the discipline. The sampling includes the devolution of the thesis or dissertation to socio-cultural report and/or pseudo-scientific study, with speculative works relegated to the margins of architectural discourse. This shift, while emblematic of the “trade school” mentality of many architecture schools today, also signals a bias at large in the post-recession 2010s where research must be monetized to justify funding, or speculative work must adhere to a format that is dictated from the outside (from the regimes of capitalization imposed by publishers).

C’est la CEPT (a.k.a. “Emptiness within Emptiness”) as open-ended, performance-based cinematic project grounded in ambient architectural and scenographic utility, utilizes a semi-abandoned building (badminton court) in Ahmedabad, India, origin of the School of Architecture (c.1962), later CEPT University, for a polemical and tragi-comic investigation of the vagaries of institutional memory, inclusive of intentional repressions. The pseudo-psychoanalytical prospects of the project question whether “emptiness” is a concept relative to subjective versus objective states. By hypothetically placing one form of emptiness within another – i.e., via submission of the theatrical-cinematic work to a design competition for an installation at the EMST, a never-opened museum in Athens, Greece – an empty “ancient” building in India (the East) is conjoined with an empty new (i.e., never-opened) building in Greece (the West), the conflation becoming a means for doubling the subjective states under investigation and inducing hoped-for catharsis on all accounts.

A summary of the possible persistence of so-called useless humanistic research against the diktat of the Edufactory, the essay “No-media – Against the Coming Singularity” problematizes the complex field of forces and factors currently leading the life of universities toward the servicing of reduced aspirations for scholarship in an ultra-monetized society – plus neo-liberal academia’s penchant for the manufacturing of events and reputations at the expense of impersonal intellectual inquiry proper. An oblique critique of “vertical integration” strategies derived from corporate business models, foremost in media empires, and as applied to the production and management of knowledge, the essay prefigures a return to forms of scholarly and artistic production in alliance with universal moral and ethical precepts as preserved in droit moral – the Enlightenment-era concept of the Moral Rights of Authors.

Illuminated Mirrors and “No Rights” concerns the peregrinations of El Greco, from Crete to Spain, and various influences acquired along the way. The primary argument is that El Greco suffered a double exile: 1/ voluntary exile from Crete; and 2/ involuntary exile from Renaissance art and its humanist biases. As such, much of the art-historical record is a confused and often-doctored record of El Greco’s manufactured persona—i.e., he is not assimilable to the usual categories of art and art history.

Since the late twentieth-century shift from the liberal university to the neoliberal university (the latter distinguished by the managerial class installed to leverage and extract value from academic research, plus polish the brand of the franchise), the publications’ ecosystem for academics, foremost in the Arts and Humanities, has been altered beyond recognition. Notably, it has exponentially expanded while at the same time suffering maximum constriction in the form of what legal scholars have called the “great copyright robbery”.

My two-year experience with post-doctoral limbo has been categorically thrilling and appalling, at once. Upon finishing a PhD at Deakin University, in Australia, in June 2014 (meaning submitting my dissertation “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture” for external review), and having barely subsisted for almost three years on a nonetheless generous Australian Government-sponsored International Postgraduate Research Scholarship, plus stipend and occasional paid teaching, I first escaped to Ljubljana, Slovenia, by way of Hong Kong and England, where I wrote my first postdoctoral fellowship applications: first for a US Fulbright Scholar Award (which failed); and then, one year later, for an EC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Independent Research Fellowship (which failed). The latter was monumentally bureaucratic, and I only tackled it after the Fulbright had failed. It came back scored like Olympic figure skating. Mostly I got “fives” (and there were no Russian judges involved) ...