The Project for Collective Becoming Philosophy of Platform Marc Lafia
What it is? We are creating a series of global gatherings to introduce and connect people through sociability, philosophic revelry, enjoyment, reflection and action. It involves both private and public actions, projects of collaborations and solitude, including on the go projects, critical and cross media research and investigations that are site specific to places, groups and individuals.
Taking the experience of making films, online publishing, artist residencies, social media projects, emergent knowledge archives and teaching, and further them to create a platform to produce a new medium of encounter at the juncture of research and recordings.
The aim is to produce projects that bring its participants into a larger participation and awareness of context of the world. To create projects realized individually and collaboratively that give a relational sense of the all-at-once-ness of things. The platform is a program to create and observe an emergent narrative in the distributed space of the personal and collective. To work at Self-transformation which involves self-destruction. Coming-to-be – passing-away. To be attuned to a beauty and value that lies precisely in its potential for unexpected flights, moments of self-reflection, and whimsy. It is not about product not productivity. It is about being present to the particular and creating with the lightest touch a new kind of being space, a new kind of archive, a series of performative exercises to find the shape of ourselves in contact with varied realities. The two (three) year project involves traveling to 15 countries, where a gatherings of 15 to 35 people get together for 3 days and through a series of exercises create a variety of mixed media works that in their aggregate create an index or portrait of a simultaneity of being in the world. Part anthropology, performance art, documentary, happening, systems analysis, self-critique The idea is to heighten the sense of being public and private, individual and collective. It is a desire is to create a series of maps, equations to visualize the mesh within our selves of overlapping system, for the project to map these on the go collectives as nodes in a global system to take an index of our contemporary environment. To be in the presence of those moments, to get closer to our subjective and psychological states, to value and attune to those energies, to heighten those states. It is attuned equally to reading and un-reading those systems and multitude of apparatuses that capture our sensorium, the digital, architectural, environmental. The project is a tuning into the mapping of the inner and outer edges of ourselves, psychically, emotionally, and geographically. What informs the project? – The project is a call to re-evaluate the mental conditioning imposed on us by our technology and media, our internalize beliefs, our national beliefs. The bearings that give us our sense.
The looking at our world and ourselves is shaped not just by ideas, but by the way we are habituated to perceive.
Seeing the seeing in and of ourselves, our culture, our technologies, our sciences, our very status of being and becoming catalyses the project
Want to produce new architectures of the social encounter, encounters no longer tethered by the familiar anchors of place, class, clique, place in the sexual hierarchy, or financial transaction. Or to see the very tethering of each and every encounter as necessary and irreversible.
-A call to imagine the future in terms of the repeated deconstruction and reconstruction of the “local” and the “subject,” and to actively discover the things that are “coming” and “forthcoming”. Why we are doing it? We want with each other to see our perception, to see the frameworks in which we see and apprehend the world.
We want to discover a new kind of being space, a new kind of archive, and shapes of ourselves in contact with varied realities.
We want to unfold our fictions and fact, our everyday with the invented, imagination and reality, our inner and outer selves, the stories that haunt us, the narratives in front of us. In what context and how Alone and in the social.
With ourselves, with our media.
In the media of the body, in the being of the body, in the body being, in the digital, the computational, and our global and networked world, we must begin to find new ways of living, new ways to produce experience, to have experience of being, to ask new questions:
In an age of digital proliferation, what becomes of our representations, our constructs of knowledge that are always already reproduced to infinity, always already iterating and undoing themselves?
With our constant contact with others in the network, where exactly is the place of experience of being with another, of being in love, of being a body politic?
What happens to individuality as we collectively create and curate ourselves within the global network?
As our world accumulates and proliferates images, and information, what new kinds of sense-making emerge? What kind of social body emerges? What kind of social agency can have voice and power?
Around these questions a network of individuals and collective actions will emerge coming together to investigate a state of things, their condition of being.
It is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, organizing and being in the world. The work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.
What is it that we are doing that others can do something with? We want to create tools, contexts, models, methods, system, approaches – as much as works as much as just be,
The project explores, explodes, and performs these questions of systems and events, systems that create events that proliferate, produce, and organize the world.
We want to present the seeing and being of the world, that is this world and a possible new world.
Why a collective? The collective puts into practice the social, conversational and distributed aspect of the network.
Only by gathering together to know ourselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net can we see ourselves.
As much as we insist on our individualism we are a social body, networks of social bodies and systems.
How it works The process sets out a way to inhabiting and producing time, new ways to record observe and invent.
Drawing on exercises, instructions, scripts, images, readings, an ongoing group investigate their 'private lives', ‘private moments’, ‘friends’, ‘families’ and ‘governments’ ‘corporations’.
It is a being that reflects the new modes of personal recording, personal revelation.
Let’s say we know Federico in Rome, we meet in Rome with his creative friends and others. We set about to do 3 creative projects in the course of 4 days.
It is an event open to everyone, anyone that shows up. No applications, no reviews, no program, no show times.
Part workshop, part party, it is an accounting of things. We make a film, have a happening, a party and meet friends to discover each other’s agendas.
Over the course of traveling the world, the collective works of the events are put together in a film, online, in an exhibition.
What it is not It’s not an art biennial, an academic conference, a spiritual retreat, a WTO protest, the tour-de-France
It’s not an -An institution -Glomming onto to a cause -That is there are no causes -There are no performances no works proscribed a head of time -No VIP dinners -No spectatorship
This not a one to many, a speaker talking to people or exhibition with select artists, nor a residency - it's really very group focus, participation focus.
The group aims to mark and transcend worn-out and authoritarian models opting for playful and performative modes of being
Again what it is. What it is -An ongoing recording -Discovery -Listening -Encountering -Self-criticism -Self-actualization
The project is about enacting, doing, becoming.
How it will work Over the next two years groups of people yet known to each other will gather in 18 cities around the world. Their purpose is to discover each other, the places they live and the momentary beingness of being
Part performance, part research group, on the go performative troupes who self select themselves will gather in Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Tierra Del Fuego, the South Pacific, places all over the world. They gather to know themselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net.
Preparations before we met -Invitations (ongoing) -Locations a place to meet, a place to work -A set of readings -A set of instructions, a trajectory -Coordinated online
How will people know about it? We hope to create a method and perhaps even a movement.
To document and create varied works and touch points for people to connect.
-Art exhibitions -Workshops -Film festivals
Recordings, Performances, Videos are made from all 15 places around the world to create a ongoing index or snapshot of the state of things, year in and year out. Some precedents for this include TEDX, The Living Theatre, the many art Biennales going on, Burning Man A online archive of the project with readings, videos, images and project will be produced on an ongoing basis. The project will continually put all its works online, including its methods and instruction and references. It will use its online site as an ongoing archive and communications point so that more and more groups can facilitate their own groups. The project is based on a series of exercises, games and situations that heighten the participants sense of being, space and place. There are no spectators, no specialists and open to all. The time spent together is project based. How to get involved At given time we have different projects going. Have a look at our project list and see what interest you.
Themes The projects explore the mythic and very real contrast of appetites and typologies of an international condition of globalization. The body as a metaphor for political organization Self-transformation was the logical outcome of self-caring The global and local, The mobility of language, Multiple myths, The simultaneity of things, Philosophic reflections on infinity, the panoptic, the horizon, Revolt, the post colonial, Our networked conditions, control, space, language, art and cinema. Gods and the death of gods; The persistence of avarice, equally distributed in all men; Carnival, festival; the intimacy of personal death; The absent center; Sex as theatre; The simultaneity of difference; The horizon and the notion of infinites; Pirates The transgressive as social becoming; Revolutionary emblems;
Outlaws and in-laws; The horizon and the infinite; The sea; Murder as the willfulness of assertion of being; The imagination and real, Adolescence; old age; The panoptic as the collapse of the geographic horizon; Control as the eradication of difference; The horror of the void; Cinema as an instrumental optic; The Asylum and the moral instruction of normalcy; The invention of moral order; The theatre as a frame; The social proscription of decorum; Representation and artifice, Cinema and its event.
Marc Lafia Marc Lafia has created collectives of artistic groups as an artist and filmmaker, and distributed authoring environments as a software designer. He is taking this participatory approach of forming on-the-go collectives that investigate themselves into a multiyear global project to create a platform to focus on encounter as a medium at the juncture of research and recordings. The groups and projects are the production of encounters as simultaneously forging a present moment, a recording event and event of system of narration. The group looks both to themselves and those around them to create and observe, and to question what is it to be, what is our social contract, the relation between the civic and the private. His work brings together both computational and cultural ideas of distributed authorship, relational knowledge, repetition, difference, instructions, inscriptions, context and the self. The group takes up the body, perception and being and the tools of cinema, network media, photography, urban design, the visual arts and information design in order to explore possibilities of the being and image, of narrative, of art, of knowledge and sense making, of media itself. The work and research is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, and organizing the world. The work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.
The Project for Collective Becoming Philosophy of Platform Marc Lafia
What it is? We are creating a series of global gatherings to introduce and connect people through sociability, philosophic revelry, enjoyment, reflection and action. It involves both private and public actions, projects of collaborations and solitude, including on the go projects, critical and cross media research and investigations that are site specific to places, groups and individuals.
Taking the experience of making films, online publishing, artist residencies, social media projects, emergent knowledge archives and teaching, and further them to create a platform to produce a new medium of encounter at the juncture of research and recordings.
The aim is to produce projects that bring its participants into a larger participation and awareness of context of the world. To create projects realized individually and collaboratively that give a relational sense of the all-at-once-ness of things. The platform is a program to create and observe an emergent narrative in the distributed space of the personal and collective. To work at Self-transformation which involves self-destruction. Coming-to-be – passing-away. To be attuned to a beauty and value that lies precisely in its potential for unexpected flights, moments of self-reflection, and whimsy. It is not about product not productivity. It is about being present to the particular and creating with the lightest touch a new kind of being space, a new kind of archive, a series of performative exercises to find the shape of ourselves in contact with varied realities. The two (three) year project involves traveling to 15 countries, where a gatherings of 15 to 35 people get together for 3 days and through a series of exercises create a variety of mixed media works that in their aggregate create an index or portrait of a simultaneity of being in the world. Part anthropology, performance art, documentary, happening, systems analysis, self-critique The idea is to heighten the sense of being public and private, individual and collective. It is a desire is to create a series of maps, equations to visualize the mesh within our selves of overlapping system, for the project to map these on the go collectives as nodes in a global system to take an index of our contemporary environment. To be in the presence of those moments, to get closer to our subjective and psychological states, to value and attune to those energies, to heighten those states. It is attuned equally to reading and un-reading those systems and multitude of apparatuses that capture our sensorium, the digital, architectural, environmental. The project is a tuning into the mapping of the inner and outer edges of ourselves, psychically, emotionally, and geographically. What informs the project? – The project is a call to re-evaluate the mental conditioning imposed on us by our technology and media, our internalize beliefs, our national beliefs. The bearings that give us our sense.
The looking at our world and ourselves is shaped not just by ideas, but by the way we are habituated to perceive.
Seeing the seeing in and of ourselves, our culture, our technologies, our sciences, our very status of being and becoming catalyses the project
Want to produce new architectures of the social encounter, encounters no longer tethered by the familiar anchors of place, class, clique, place in the sexual hierarchy, or financial transaction. Or to see the very tethering of each and every encounter as necessary and irreversible.
-A call to imagine the future in terms of the repeated deconstruction and reconstruction of the “local” and the “subject,” and to actively discover the things that are “coming” and “forthcoming”. Why we are doing it? We want with each other to see our perception, to see the frameworks in which we see and apprehend the world.
We want to discover a new kind of being space, a new kind of archive, and shapes of ourselves in contact with varied realities.
We want to unfold our fictions and fact, our everyday with the invented, imagination and reality, our inner and outer selves, the stories that haunt us, the narratives in front of us. In what context and how Alone and in the social.
With ourselves, with our media.
In the media of the body, in the being of the body, in the body being, in the digital, the computational, and our global and networked world, we must begin to find new ways of living, new ways to produce experience, to have experience of being, to ask new questions:
In an age of digital proliferation, what becomes of our representations, our constructs of knowledge that are always already reproduced to infinity, always already iterating and undoing themselves?
With our constant contact with others in the network, where exactly is the place of experience of being with another, of being in love, of being a body politic?
What happens to individuality as we collectively create and curate ourselves within the global network?
As our world accumulates and proliferates images, and information, what new kinds of sense-making emerge? What kind of social body emerges? What kind of social agency can have voice and power?
Around these questions a network of individuals and collective actions will emerge coming together to investigate a state of things, their condition of being.
It is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, organizing and being in the world. The work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.
What is it that we are doing that others can do something with? We want to create tools, contexts, models, methods, system, approaches – as much as works as much as just be,
The project explores, explodes, and performs these questions of systems and events, systems that create events that proliferate, produce, and organize the world.
We want to present the seeing and being of the world, that is this world and a possible new world.
Why a collective? The collective puts into practice the social, conversational and distributed aspect of the network.
Only by gathering together to know ourselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net can we see ourselves.
As much as we insist on our individualism we are a social body, networks of social bodies and systems.
How it works The process sets out a way to inhabiting and producing time, new ways to record observe and invent.
Drawing on exercises, instructions, scripts, images, readings, an ongoing group investigate their 'private lives', ‘private moments’, ‘friends’, ‘families’ and ‘governments’ ‘corporations’.
It is a being that reflects the new modes of personal recording, personal revelation.
Let’s say we know Federico in Rome, we meet in Rome with his creative friends and others. We set about to do 3 creative projects in the course of 4 days.
It is an event open to everyone, anyone that shows up. No applications, no reviews, no program, no show times.
Part workshop, part party, it is an accounting of things. We make a film, have a happening, a party and meet friends to discover each other’s agendas.
Over the course of traveling the world, the collective works of the events are put together in a film, online, in an exhibition.
What it is not It’s not an art biennial, an academic conference, a spiritual retreat, a WTO protest, the tour-de-France
It’s not an -An institution -Glomming onto to a cause -That is there are no causes -There are no performances no works proscribed a head of time -No VIP dinners -No spectatorship
This not a one to many, a speaker talking to people or exhibition with select artists, nor a residency - it's really very group focus, participation focus.
The group aims to mark and transcend worn-out and authoritarian models opting for playful and performative modes of being
Again what it is. What it is -An ongoing recording -Discovery -Listening -Encountering -Self-criticism -Self-actualization
The project is about enacting, doing, becoming.
How it will work Over the next two years groups of people yet known to each other will gather in 18 cities around the world. Their purpose is to discover each other, the places they live and the momentary beingness of being
Part performance, part research group, on the go performative troupes who self select themselves will gather in Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Tierra Del Fuego, the South Pacific, places all over the world. They gather to know themselves in each other, to be part of a larger inquiry which is to live concurrent to others, to be in a larger embrace of time, a politic of being, an island in the net.
Preparations before we met -Invitations (ongoing) -Locations a place to meet, a place to work -A set of readings -A set of instructions, a trajectory -Coordinated online
How will people know about it? We hope to create a method and perhaps even a movement.
To document and create varied works and touch points for people to connect.
-Art exhibitions -Workshops -Film festivals
Recordings, Performances, Videos are made from all 15 places around the world to create a ongoing index or snapshot of the state of things, year in and year out. Some precedents for this include TEDX, The Living Theatre, the many art Biennales going on, Burning Man A online archive of the project with readings, videos, images and project will be produced on an ongoing basis. The project will continually put all its works online, including its methods and instruction and references. It will use its online site as an ongoing archive and communications point so that more and more groups can facilitate their own groups. The project is based on a series of exercises, games and situations that heighten the participants sense of being, space and place. There are no spectators, no specialists and open to all. The time spent together is project based. How to get involved At given time we have different projects going. Have a look at our project list and see what interest you.
Themes The projects explore the mythic and very real contrast of appetites and typologies of an international condition of globalization. The body as a metaphor for political organization Self-transformation was the logical outcome of self-caring The global and local, The mobility of language, Multiple myths, The simultaneity of things, Philosophic reflections on infinity, the panoptic, the horizon, Revolt, the post colonial, Our networked conditions, control, space, language, art and cinema. Gods and the death of gods; The persistence of avarice, equally distributed in all men; Carnival, festival; the intimacy of personal death; The absent center; Sex as theatre; The simultaneity of difference; The horizon and the notion of infinites; Pirates The transgressive as social becoming; Revolutionary emblems;
Outlaws and in-laws; The horizon and the infinite; The sea; Murder as the willfulness of assertion of being; The imagination and real, Adolescence; old age; The panoptic as the collapse of the geographic horizon; Control as the eradication of difference; The horror of the void; Cinema as an instrumental optic; The Asylum and the moral instruction of normalcy; The invention of moral order; The theatre as a frame; The social proscription of decorum; Representation and artifice, Cinema and its event.
Marc Lafia Marc Lafia has created collectives of artistic groups as an artist and filmmaker, and distributed authoring environments as a software designer. He is taking this participatory approach of forming on-the-go collectives that investigate themselves into a multiyear global project to create a platform to focus on encounter as a medium at the juncture of research and recordings. The groups and projects are the production of encounters as simultaneously forging a present moment, a recording event and event of system of narration. The group looks both to themselves and those around them to create and observe, and to question what is it to be, what is our social contract, the relation between the civic and the private. His work brings together both computational and cultural ideas of distributed authorship, relational knowledge, repetition, difference, instructions, inscriptions, context and the self. The group takes up the body, perception and being and the tools of cinema, network media, photography, urban design, the visual arts and information design in order to explore possibilities of the being and image, of narrative, of art, of knowledge and sense making, of media itself. The work and research is a hybrid project drawing a new map of a territory yet to be defined, a territory with new and yet unknown modes of authoring, reading, and organizing the world. The work simultaneously questions, probes, discovers and creates this new territory, these new practices.