The installation of Mark Hansen reflects the interactive media world we are living in: the sound you can hear comes from the audience itself; it is scratched on the record while the dancer performs.
It is an unknowing participation - listen the throat cleaning, coughing - of the audience. You can compare it with the internet: only a few online users are aware that the media learns constantly from our own behaviour. It is the first time in the history that the masses are structuring a media by using a common 'brain'. This 'brain' with its 'thinking memory' makes the real nature of the internet.
A new definition of communism for communication: backcoupling
Toronto based radio/performer and turntablist Mike Hansen is one of more than 50 international artists featuring music video as a lively artistic medium which redefines both Pop music and art on occasion of the exhibition 'The Communism of Forms'.
The curators Fernando Oliva and Marcelo Rezende explain the title with a definition by the French critic/curator Nicolas Bourriaud from his publication 'Postproduction' (Les Presses du Réel, Paris, 2003).
In this exhibition communism of forms means that artists and spectators interact with the help of new media such as the internet. How much this has to do with communism as a political system or economic theory about eliminating private property isn't further discussed: probably because today's society of a post-communist era has learnt to pick the best from all political directions - even from communism - with the conviction that the elimination of private property would cause the deletion of individuality.
The exhibition isn't propagating the elimination of property rights of music producers, artists, writers...; the inherent meaning of the title 'The Communism of Forms' reflects the current trend in our global society to keep up the international interaction between artists, spectators, curators... in an emancipated, 'backcoupling' communication.
"The idea of appropriation, collage, assemblage – as technique, quotation or means of arriving at a pastiche – was a constant in the avant-garde processes established in the first half of the twentieth century. But the Communism of Form was not about returning to or recovering a utopian or revolutionary procedure from the past. Its function was primarily strategic: creating a realm in which artists and spectators could interact, where there was an ongoing conversation; one that was both critical and a symptom of consumption, production and service relations in latter-day capitalism, determined by material abundance, anxiety, disarray and nostalgia."
Introduction, The Communism of Forms, Sound + Image + Time – The Strategy of Music Videos, by the curators Fernando Oliva and Marcelo Rezende.