if you liked that, you’ll love this
There’s a website where someone has compiled visual representations of the internet from patent applications. They look like clouds or blobs, weird bean-shaped things and lumps. We tend to think of the web in such abstract terms because that is how it seems to us: amorphous, incorporeal, elementally of the air rather than the earth. But it also subsists in the concrete: massive, energy-hungry data centres, and the sprawling, undersea network of cables that, following the same transoceanic trade routes that once connected the imperial powers to their various colonies and dependencies, funnel almost all of the world’s digital traffic.
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Another misconception: I can’t be alone in having, for the longest time, assumed satellites – those eerie, starlike drones of the Cold War era – were somehow responsible for carrying our data around the world. Look up into the sky on a clear night and it feels easy, intuitive even, to read into their shimmering geometry an invisible weave of data, a sort of digital murmuration. Look down into the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, on the other hand, where the seafloor can lie as deep as Mount Everest is high, and you will see only blackness, those cables – no bigger than a soft drink can in diameter, filled with optical fibres as fine as human hair – buried under layer upon layer of protective cladding.
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What is the likeness of Adhocracy? What is it like? Reflecting on ten years of the annual national hothouse, I found myself looking for clues in past programs – dogeared, scribbled on, some picked or falling apart (clues, perhaps, in themselves) – dating back to the first time I attended and wrote about the event in 2013. According to the last few programs, it is like a festival of ideas; an intense art camp; and a magic house party. In the post-post-modern era, everything, it seems, is indexed to the past, is known and knowable by reference to something else: if you liked that, you’ll love this. X meets Y meets Z. In the vein of… We have always uncovered the world by metaphor, the sideways glance into hitherto unseen interpretive possibility. In a word, poetry. But our anxious likening of one thing to another, ultimately obscuring more than it reveals, is newer, and feels more like public relations.
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A friend recently asked her Uber driver what shape he thought the internet was. Turning out to be a mechanical engineer, he replied that he thought of it as like copper telephone wire, millions and millions of strands branching out like arteries. Perhaps he was thinking of the submarine telegraph cable laid down between America and Europe in the 1850s, the first official message sent across which read: ‘Directors of Atlantic Telegraph Company, Great Britain, to Directors in America:—Europe and America are united by telegraph. Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will towards men [sic].’
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Although the word adhocracy, with its gnomic, vaguely futuristic air, seems somehow a product of the internet age, it was in fact coined in the year of the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. According to Wikipedia – itself a kind of adhocracy – the word denotes a ‘flexible, adaptable and informal form of organisation that is defined by a lack of formal structure that employs specialised multidisciplinary teams grouped by functions.’ The early internet, with its incipient blogging, file-sharing, and open collaboration platforms, was also a kind of adhocracy: spontaneous, evanescent, and, in the truest sense of the word, agile. If that sounds utopian, then that’s because it is – or rather was. The tech evangelists’ vision of Web 2.0 as an anarchic zone of potentiality has long been supplanted by a dystopian phantasmagoria of data extraction, behaviour modification and control, and what Shoshana Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’: ‘a coup from above,’ she writes, and ‘an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.’
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According to Douglas Adams, an SEP is something we can’t, don’t, or are not permitted by our brain to see, because we think it is ‘somebody else’s problem’. A mountain could be painted pink, the narrator of Adams’ Life, the Universe, and Everything muses, and an SEP field would ensure everybody walked past, round, or over it, simply never noticing that it was there. I wonder if this, too, is something the internet is like.
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Unlike the internet – or, at least, unlike how we usually think of the internet, as an inchoate, infrastructureless thing – Adhocracy is bound by the spatial and temporal. In my mind, it still takes place across the June Queen’s Birthday long weekend, even though I know in 2016 it was moved to early September where it has stayed ever since. More fundamentally, it is indivisible from place, specifically Port Adelaide, which, I recall a previous Adhocracy participant saying, is, after Bangladesh, the second most vulnerable place in the world to climate change-induced sea level rise. As I write these words, I do a quick fact check and find this, courtesy of Extinction Rebellion: ‘Current modelling of sea level rise for Adelaide predicts the Western suburbs of Glenelg, West Lakes, Port Adelaide, Largs Bay, Semaphore and the Adelaide Airport will be flooded in less than 80 years unless immediate action is taken.’
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Timothy Morton coined the term hyperobject to describe entities so massively distributed across time and space that they defeat conventional ideas about what a thing is in the first place. They are, according to Morton, viscous, nonlocal, interobjective (that is, they inhere in the interrelationships between the properties of objects), and occupy zones of temporality and spatiality such that they are invisible to humans some or all of the time. Climate change is a hyperobject. So is the internet.
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Some time ago, when starting a list of the kinds of works I have encountered at Adhocracy, I wrote:
Promenading outdoor sound work.
Something weird in the Supper Room.
Setting these words down now, I can’t remember what I was thinking of when I wrote that second dot point. Tiyan Baker’s The Witness (2017)? David Williams’ Open Your Mouth and Let Words Fall Out (2013)? Or perhaps Roslyn Helper’s The Most Glorious Disastrous Meal of My Life (2018), an opera based on Google reviews of McDonald’s restaurants? Or maybe I was thinking of the time in 2017, during the development of my own work DON’T READ THE COMMENTS, that Malcolm Whittaker and I talked about the demise of RealTime, the national experimental arts magazine we had both written for. We laughed, I remembered, for a long time when I told him the magazine’s editor had once admonished me by email for writing ‘newspaperish hyperbole’, a comically slashing phrase that, to this day, I carry like a tiny, scabbed over wound.
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‘A culture,’ wrote Laurence Scott in The Four-Dimensional Human, ‘reveals much about itself by the metaphors it uses.’
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During the life of Adhocracy, a carbon price has been repealed, greenhouse gas emissions have increased, and a new colour – a luminous, extraterrestrial purple – has been added to the Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature maps for heat of between 52 and 54C. As I write these words, it is still newsworthy that Australia’s minister responsible for water resources, drought, natural disaster, and emergency management said, in the wake of unprecedented early spring bushfires in Queensland, that he doesn’t know if climate change is manmade.
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‘Vitals,’ I once wrote, ‘is a unique place, neither regional nor exactly urban, a site both for intensely private experimentation and the generous laying bare of artistic process. All the while it feels socially embedded, part of the fabric of the community, in a way that few arts organisations do.’ Known as Port Misery to the colonial invaders who thought it ‘wretched and inconvenient’, to the Kaurna people Port Adelaide is Yerta Bulti, the ‘sleeping place’, so named because of a toxin released by mangroves that is inimical to the area’s fish. Place not only gives us things to see – the sutures and buttresses of landscape and industry – but also ways of seeing, or not seeing.
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In his poem ‘Advantages of Stopovers’, Michael Farrell wrote: ‘I would not be the writer I am if I forebore to mention the snowy peaks outside, being an analogy of actual peaks.’ And: ‘What, I’ve been asked is the tension between a sentence and a stanza? (Or you might say: between a block of flats and a plaza.)’
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Here are some of the ways I have described Adhocracy in the past:
…showings and open studios look[ing] both backwards and forwards, each grappling in some way with how the recent past has challenged our species’ capacity to survive and thrive in the years ahead.
Artists set up and perform in every part of the heritage-listed building from the cavernous main hall to the claustrophobic supper room, their disparate performative entities embryonically grappling with the hopes and anxieties of now: democracy, human rights, corruption, post-industrialisation. Almost all of the works propose questions about the nature of truth in an increasingly illusory world.
…scrappy and investigational, infused with feminist, queer, and environmental politics, it is an aesthetic light year from [George] Brandis’ beige, unthreatening prescription for the arts: canonical, formally conservative, bound to received ideas around artistic merit.
…tiny, fiery revolutions of purpose and craft.
Adhocracy is, it seems, a grappling – a word that means a close fight, a struggle without weapons.
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Here are some of the things we thought online comment threads might be like while working on DON’T READ THE COMMENTS:
A wedding.
Dogs pissing on a fire hydrant.
A brawl.
A house full of rooms, with people moving in and out of them as in a dream, spit and non sequiturs erupting from their mouths.
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I recently had lunch at a suburban restaurant where I worked about ten years ago, rudderless and adrift after finishing my bachelor’s degree. For a long time I couldn’t go back, could too easily touch the feeling of being lost, unmoored. But now it’s not so bad. Some of the same, kindly people still work there, and one of them told me I looked more ‘mature’ than I had the last time she saw me, maybe a year or two before. Ordinarily we’d laugh at such a descriptor, assume it to be code for ‘older’ (which, of course, I am, and greyer-haired). But I knew she didn’t mean that. She meant that life had happened to me, had left behind increments – on my body, on my spirit – that she could see, feel. She was right. I’d gone through three shattering breakups since I had worked at the restaurant, many changes of jobs, five different houses. There’s an old idea, sufficiently unscientific to have survived rigorous debunking, that all of the cells in our bodies regenerate after around a decade, transforming us, at the physical level at least, into completely new people.
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In his remarkable 1923 essay ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters’, Yevgeny Zamyatin attempted to describe the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 using the language of thermodynamics. In its final paragraphs, both rich and discomfiting in their use of bodily metaphor, he turns his attention to the writers and artists of his country, and their part in subverting the clichés of socialist and bourgeois art alike:
A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable. Euclid’s world is very simple, and Einstein’s world is very difficult – but it is no longer possible to return to Euclid. No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary: most of mankind [sic] suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death. The same disease often afflicts artists and writers: they sink into satiated slumber in forms once invented and twice perfected. And they lack the strength to wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved, to leave their old, familiar apartments filled with the scent of laurel leaves and walk away into the open field, to start anew.
This, too, is something Adhocracy is like.
