Off-Modern ManifestoProjectsPublicationsIndex of Works


Leaving LA (2003)


See also:

The Off-Modern Panic Manifesto for 2010

The Off-Modern Condition


Nostalgic Technology:
Notes for an Off-modern Manifesto

1. A Margin of Error




Many technological inventions, including film and space rocket were first envisioned in the science fiction; imagined by artists and writers, not scientist. The term “virtual reality” was in fact coined by Henri Bergson, not Bill Gates. Originally it referred to the virtual realities of human imagination and conscience that couldn't be mimicked by technology. In the early twentieth century the border between art and technology was particularly fertile. Avant-garde artists and critics used the word “technique” to mean an estranging device of art that lays bare the medium and makes us see the world anew. Later the advertisement culture appropriated avant-garde as one of the styles, as an exciting marketable look that domesticates, rather than estrange the utopia of progress. New Hollywood cinema uses most advanced technology to create the special effects. If artistic technique revealed the mechanisms of conscience, the technological special effect domesticates the illusions and manipulations.

Has Art itself become a mere outtake, a long footnote to the human history? In the United States it is technology, not culture, that is regarded to be a space for innovations. Art, it seems, has overstayed its welcome. But the amateur artists, immigrants from the disintegrated homeland, survive against all odds. Often they cross the border illegally and like the diasporic repo-men try to repossess what used to belong to them, re-conquer the space of art.

The amateur artists aspire neither for newness nor for a trendy belatedness. The prefixes “avant” and “post” appear equally outdated or irrelevant in the current media age. The same goes for the illusions of “trans.” But this doesn't mean that one should try desperately to be in. There is another option; not to be out, but off. As in off-stage, off-key, off-beat and occasionally, off-color. One doesn't have to be “absolutely modern,” as Rimbaud once dreamed, but off-modern. A lateral move of the knight in game of chess. A detour into some unexplored potentialities of the modern project.

Broken-tech art doesn't thrive in destruction. At times, I go so far as to hit my computer, give it a mild spanking, push it to the limit. I want to handle it manually, like a craftsman handles his tools but without craftsman's faith in the materials. Yet I never wish to annihilate the computer and return to the anxieties of leaking pens and inkblots on the grid-paper of my childhood. Broken-tech art is not Luddite but ludic. It challenges the destruction with play.


Leaving Santa Barbara (2003)

2. Short Shadows, Endless Surfaces

In the early twentieth century French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue wanted to make photography do what it couldn't do: to capture movement. The blurs on the image are photographic errors, nostalgia for what photography could never be, longing for cinema. Yet photography shouldn't become as garrulous as a film. It offers an elliptic narrative without a happy ending. Its fleeting narrative potentialities would never find their scriptwriters and producers. There would always be a cloud or two, a crack on the surface of the picture, a short shadow that evades the plot.

With his inimitable oblique lucidity Walter Benjamin wrote about the importance of short shadows. They are “no more than the sharp black edges at the feet of things, preparing to retreat silently, unnoticed , into their burrow, their secret being.” Short shadows speak of thresholds, warn us against being too short-sighted or too long-winged. When we get too close to things, disrespecting their short shadows, we risk to obliterate them, but if we make shadow too long we start to enjoy them for their own sake. Short shadows urge us to check the balance of nearness and distance, to trust neither those who speak of essences of things nor those who preach conspiratorial simulation.





Leaving New York (2003)

3. Errands, Transits.

We are surrounded by the anonymous buildings of our common modernity, a part of the other International Style not commemorated in masterpieces but inhabited in the outskirts of Warsaw, Petersburg, Berlin, Sarajevo, Bratislava, Zagreb, Sofia. These buildings, often indistinguishable from one another, even in my own photographs, compose an outmoded mass ornament of global culture. That is only at the first glance, of course. If we look closer we see that no window, balcony or white wall is alike. People in these anonymous dwelling places develop the most nuanced language of minor variations; they expose singular and unrepeatable out takes of their ordinary lives: a lace curtain half-raised, a dusty lampshade in retro colours of the 1960s, a potted flower that knew better days, a piece of a risqué underwear hung on a string here and there. The inhabitants of these buildings dream of elsewhere, homesick and sick of home. The satellite dishes spread out over the ruined balconies like desert flowers.


Touching Writing
(Homage to Jacques Derrida)

4. A Critic, an Amateur



