An exhibition at ZKM Karslruhe March 2005 http://makingthingspublic.zkm.de

Some images of the show

Curators: Peter Weibel & Bruno Latour;

Contact press: Andrea Buddensieg <buddensieg@zkm.de>

The floor of the show Saturday 5th of March 2005

Welcome to Making Things Public
You are invited here to experience in a new way the presence of political matters. We ask you to be open-minded about the object of politics. As you will discover throughout this show, politics might not be so much about opinion as about things —things made public.
You are invited to find your way through this installation of installations, all of which have been created specifically for this event. This is not exactly an art show, nor is it a political rally but an experimental assembly of assemblies.
We would like you to answer the question : « Are you well represented ? » by considering simultaneously three meanings of the word « representation » : in science, in art, in politics.
The show is divided into four zones, each corresponding to a proposition open to your exploration.
-Other civilizations and other historical periods have had very different ways of considering what is a body politic and how to compose it. What can we learn from them ?
-There exist many more parliaments than those in the ‘political sphere’ : laboratories, churches, technologies, supermarkets, ecosystems, tribunals. What are the assemblies corresponding to those assemblages ?
-Parliaments are one type of assembly with one set of techniques of representation among many. How can they be compared with all the others assemblies gathered here ?
-Many people have lost hope of being faithfully represented. After this inquiry into the many techniques of representation, what are the new options ?
Be attentive : Throughout the show you will be surrounded by the effects of your own action on all the other visitors past and present. Thanks to an innovative digital work of art, the Phantom Public, we have been able to make you experience what it is to be enveloped in the fragile and shifting climate of political concerns. The Phantom Public : it’s you plus the spirit of all the other visitors.
Have a good time at the « Thing ».
The curatorial team
 

As soon as you enter the show, you feel that something odd is happening: lights, sound and labels seem to react to your presence as a visitor in some invisible and yet palpable manner. You have just encountered the atmospheric conditions of democracy. Soon you will discover that the whole space of the show is embedded in the PHANTOM PUBLIC, a work of art that aims to lend a different, emotional colour to political involvement and political envelopment.
Without a doubt, this is an unusual exhibition. Building on the much acclaimed Iconoclash by the same curators (ZKM 2002), it aspires to nothing less than to renew what constitutes an art show as well as ways of thinking about politics and methods of establishing new forms of collaboration between artists and academics.
The reason for such an undertaking is that we live in rather discouraging times as far as political life is concerned. Just the right moment, then, to make a fresh start by bringing together three modes of representation that are usually kept apart: How to represent people? Politics. How to represent objects? Science. How to represent their collective gathering? Art.
The main idea behind this show is that politics is all about things. It’s not a sphere, a profession or a mere occupation; it essentially involves a concern for affairs that are brought to the attention of a public. The public is not cast in stone for all time. We’re not talking here about the people as represented by their elected officials. The public has to be created for each new issue, for each new matter of concern. So the question we wish to raise is: ‘What would happen if politics were made to revolve around disputed states of affairs?’
This is why the show begins with a section entitled NO POLITICS PLEASE, which takes visitors on to other types of assemblies in several different cultures. Politics is not universal and nor is democracy, but collecting people and things undoubtedly is. This issue of collection is crucial to the next sections THE PUZZLE OF COMPOSITE BODY and IMAGES OF GOOD AND BAD GOVERNMENT. At the end of the first part you begin to ask the question: WHICH COSMOS FOR WHICH COSMOPOLITICS?
It turns out that the oldest meaning of the English and German word for ‘thing’ concerns an assembly brought together to discuss disputed matters of concern. Hence the choice of the slogan “FROM REALPOLITIK TO DINGPOLITIK”, a neologism invented for the show. This major shift is reflected in the aesthetic of the show, in the ways in which the over one hundred installations and works of art are presented, and in the general physical and virtual architecture. What we are trying to do is compare modernist with non-modern attitudes to objects. In effect, we are moving FROM OBJECTS TO THINGS.
It’s at this point that you enter the great courtyard accommodating the ASSEMBLY OF ASSEMBLIES. Visiting it, you begin to see that there are many other types of gatherings which are not political in the customary sense, but which bring a public together around things: scientific laboratories, technical projects, supermarkets, financial arenas —THE MARKET PLACE IS A PARLIAMENT, TOO —, churches, as well as around the disputed issues of natural resources like rivers, landscapes, animals, temperature and air —THE PARLIAMENTS OF NATURE. All these phenomena have devised a bewildering set of techniques of representation that have created the real political landscape in which we, live breathe and argue. Hence the question that can be raised in respect of all of them is: they may be assemblages, but can they be turned into real assemblies?
After passing through the next sections making up the third part of the show, you begin to understand that PARLIAMENTS, TOO, ARE COMPLEX TECHNOLOGIES. Instead of saying that voting, talking, arguing and deciding are quaint pieces of machinery, you begin to consider them with great respect because of their delicate set of fragile mediations. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official ‘sphere’ of professional politics, this section draws attention to the new conditions enabling things to be made public. NO MEDIATION, NO REPRESENTATION.
The next logical step is to imagine what representative assemblies could become if only they could benefit from all the techniques of mediation considered earlier. Time to enter the fourth and last part of the show and to imagine the future of politics by developing A NEW ELOQUENCE and NEW POLITICAL PASSIONS.
When you leave the exhibition, it will have become clear that the repertoire of attitudes and passions that are usually associated with taking a political stand is much too narrow. There are many other ways of reacting politically in other non-Western traditions, in the old political philosophies, in most contemporary science and technology, in the new web-based spaces and in the instruments of representation, of which parliaments are only a part. So why not try an ‘object-oriented democracy’ and ‘get back to things’?!
During their stay, visitors will have left many traces for the Phantom Public to be activated and it, in turn, will have left some traces on them. Without fully realizing it, you as a visitor have become at once an actor in, and the screen of, an invisible work of art that has tried to put flesh on the bones of the new Body Politic. Collectively exploring the unintended and unexpected consequences of our actions was the only way, in the words of the great American philosopher, John Dewey, “for the Public to come into being”. This is precisely what we have tried to do with the visitors to this show: to reassemble them and make them part of a totally new Thing.

(version 02-02-05)

(for the introduction to the catalogue, see full article)

(for the scenario of the exhibition, see scenario)

EXTRACTS OF THE CALL FOR IDEAS -AUTUMN 2002
'Democracy', as Winston Churchill, famously said: "is the worst form of government, except for all the others". It would of course be much better if we, ordinary myopic citizens, would delegate our lives to the care of our betters and elders. But these super-lucid caretakers seem to have disappeared in the turmoil of the last century, together with the dream of a superior caste, superior avant-garde, superior science of history.Recently, even confidence in the benevolent invisible hand of superhumanly wise market forces has waned somewhat. Of course, it would be much more comfortable if we could still confide our biology, our ecology, our industry, our computers, our economies and our politics to scientists and engineers who know better and see farther. But the sciences that were part of the solution have become, one after the other, part of the problem. The objects of science and technology have become so controversial and so entangled that the delegation of power to experts appears no easier than the older delegation of power to members of parliament. This is has been diagnosed as the 'crisis of representation'.
So where does that leave us ? From now on, the blind are leading the blind. Good. At least we are freed from the nightmare scenarios concocted for us by the know-it-alls. And yet we have to be led; we have to come to some sort of agreement about controversial states of affairs. Although the crisis of representation is everywhere in science, in law, in ethics, in art, in politics, it has to be somehow overcome. Democracy has to be extended, it seems, to things of science and technology, even though it will certainly prove to be politically dire — but, here again, less dire than all the others. Another constitutional arrangement has become necessary — provided we somewhat extend what is usually meant by a Constitution.

Classical questions of politics were usually solved by theories of representation – leading finally to the institution of the Parliament as hortus sublimus of the Constitution. We wish to extend the search for solution by including many other technologies of representation, modeling, simulation, delegation, manipulation, influencing, selecting.The dynamics of science cannot be conceived without politics nor the dynamics of politics without science. The social, the scientific, the technological, the theoretical and the practical blend together. We want to make an exhibition where politics, science and technology explore a new future based on a diagnosis of present practices illuminated through the perspective of material history.

Hence the format of this proposed exhibition : allowing the comparison to be made not at the grandiose level of theories of representation in science, politics and art, but through the humble back door of how collective representation of things is made practically possible. For example, the invention of voting machines will interest us more than Rousseau's sublime 'general will'; the African palabre tree more than the extension of the State of Law; the scholastic disputatio techniques more than the question of religion in general; the 3D datascape of some new scientific instruments more than the question of knowing whether science offers a true representation of the world or not.

In politics, we will not be interested in the whole debate about representative democracy, but only in the intersection of those debates with the question of bringing in the public space the technical issues that have to be collectively disputed and on which conditions are the parties, lobbies, partisans, special interest group able to change their minds.
In science, it is not the entire epistemological question of accurate representation and instrumentation that interests us, but only the innovations that allow for data space of various kinds to be brought to the attention of other, less expert, stakeholders (as in what is called 'performative science').
In art, we are not interested in yet another critique of representation — which has been the topic of a former ZKM exhibition called Iconoclash — but in inventing new procedures, forms, shapes, and sites to dramatize the public space to literally, re-present them anew.
In economics, we are not interested in the critique of capitalism and of the 'reign of commodity', but in how different innovations in accounting, cost-evaluation, planning, business plans, banking, budget voting, etc. could make a small but sizeable difference in the various expression of people's preferences around 'model worlds'.
In law we are not interested in the whole history of Constitutions but only in those legal aspects that intersects with the questions raised by the new public space that deal as much with things than with people. How are the voiceless given a voice, what are the limits and possible extensions of the notion of citizenship ?
In religion, we are not interested in the grandiose question of secularization and fundamentalisms, but how practical solutions have been found to render religions comparable, disputable, to have them cohabit.
In the media, particularly the web, we are not interested in reviewing all the dreams of cyberpolitics, but in the particular innovations - web crawlers, sites, displays, hyperlinks - which provide new ideas for endowing the agents with new competences inside 'shared cyberspace'.


The show will present the history and anthropology of the mechanisms invented to make things publicly visible and accountable. We will of course do our best to propose to the visitors many lesser known sites. But even when revisiting traditional sites — like the Athenian agora, the Icelandic 'Thing', the 'palazzo della Ragione' in Padova, the new Berlin Reichstag as well as the Royal Academy of Science, the Wonder Cabinets, the Stock Exchange floor, or the Tokyo protocol, etc. — every time, we will try to highlight the new interpretations and revisions of history which have been provided of these topoï.


How can this extension of democracy be carried out while the illusion of super-human knowledge has floundered? By comparing the mechanisms, the little tricks, the clever solutions, which have allowed people to convene around disputed state of affairs. None of these procedures by itself looks very promising, but all of them taken together might go some way toward overcoming the crisis of representation. Ask visually impaired persons what a huge difference the little invention of the white cane makes for them. Similarly, if there is no alternative — and there is no alternative — every single little invention in what could allow ignorant, little persons (that is, all of us) to see a tiny bit further and faster, will have to be cherished. When the blinding lights of the Enlightenment have finally dimmed, even the smallest light bulb may offer a precious source of comfort.

Since the domains to be covered appear immense and given that we don't want to enter into an encyclopedic undertaking, we have to be somewhat selective about our focus of interest. For the three aspects of the exhibition, the general selective principle is the following:
Is it — or was it — an innovation ?
Does it lie at the intersection of information gathering and opinion making ?
Does it make a difference, no matter how small, to the question of democracy ?
Can it be exported or at least rendered comparable with other innovations in very different domains present in the project ?


Two references might be useful to locate the scope and the ambition of the exhibition.
The first is the magnificent ambiguity of the word Thing that, in all the European language signifies simultaneously 'the object out there' and 'the assembly for a quasi-political and judiciary dispute'. For a few centuries, it was thought possible to distinguish radically the things out there, which were left to experts and the political assemblies, which dealt only with human interests and passions. Now, the 'things' of science and technology are back where they should always have remained: inside the political process. In the word Republic, the word 'res' is outlined again. Things, so to speak, have become 'things' again, that is disputed assemblies. The problem is that nobody has very clear ideas about the shape those assemblies should possess.
The second reference is to John Dewey who asked the essential question in his book 'the Public and its Problems': the public for Dewey is not what exists out of the general will by suddenly converting citizens to altruism or by confiding their life to the wisdom of experts. The public is made by what affects everybody but that no one knows — especially not the experts since the unexpected consequences and causes of our collective action are just that: unexpected. Thus, to become visible to the eyes, the web of unexpected connections has to be slowly explored and frequently represented through a myriad of small inventions and little tricks. Some would find those assemblages too humble and mundane, but assembling and comparing those procedures might be the only way if we wish to still pursue the Enlightenment without its powerful searchlight.
The aim is to participate, in a very humble and material way, to the writing of an efficient Constitution for Europe, where the word 'constitution' extends not only to the usual questions of what is called 'representative democracy' but includes the complete chains of representation of which parties are only a tiny part.