We Have Already Won - Too-Late Iconoclasm and the Formalism of Psychoenergetic Motions

Institute of Emancipatory Science, ComputerLars

& Organ of the Autonomous Sciences

“We Have Already Won” manifests a long standing ambition to constitute a science of action where collectivity stands a priori to institutionalization. This group show considers the value or obsolescence of iconoclastic strategies in a world which seems to have completely forgotten its origin in the image. The curatorial agenda is to break any dichotomy of bourgeois formalism and gestures of revolt, gathering a series of works that outline a heterogeneous set of subject positions oscillating between Warburgian Dynamogramm and Situationist détournement. We hereby stress a certain formalization of time and action that was immanent in Marcel Proust’s oeuvre and became explicit with Michèle Bernstein’s painting-collages.

Introduction to the exhibition participants:

1. The institute of Emancipatory Science

2. ComputerLars

3. The Organ of Autonomous Sciences

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1. The Institute of Emancipatory Science

EMANCIPATION – HAHA, comrades! – a bellowing laughter splits the university and swallows us whole. The students' co-determination is revoked in the holy jubilee of ’68, and the last golden calf of the revolt is slammed onto the chopping block. We know we must both laugh and fight. Allow us, noisily and with raised voices, to discard the recognitions of maturity.

Thus begins our toast — an eclectic eruption from the student staff at the Institute for Emancipatory Science, Aarhus University. Founded in the late 1960s by Professor Schluck under influence from Rudi Dutschke, the Institute of Emancipatory Science emerged not as a school of thought but as a permanent form of strategic insubordination. Its long corridors were built not to separate offices, but to allow students to march.

A progressive liberation front does not win terrain through constructive dialogue, as youth parties and student councils so submissively enact, but through strategic unintelligibility and core-solid formalization. Our proposal in the form of an irrefutable claim: the decisive power of 1968 lay not in sheer numbers, but in its formal ruptures – the creation of new organs of knowledge through subject criticism and demands for co-determination. The radical use of meeting minutes is key: no longer a passive document, but an act in itself. This momentum cannot be retrieved by walking yet another mournful protest march. To recapture the element of surprise, one must formalize the methods for action. Again. A practical example: you can churn butter in a washing machine, even if it wasn’t built for it – it’s the easiest thing in the world, albeit a filthy mess.

Once upon a time, one could surround oneself with – and be consumed by – bureaucracy in all its Kafkian glory. Today, in the ruins of the university, discrete machine communication reigns: the desk-clerk’s indiscrete authority has been converted into process and user interface. Which is excellent! Because critique and action now gain entirely new opportunities. Unlike the old-school bureaucrats, who had to be persuaded, today’s machines can be glitched and repurposed without notice. Thus: churn butter in the admin system. A promising tactic: pour real bureaucracy into machine communication. Just remember to insert the professor first.

Emancipation theorists speak a shared language – variable transliterations of an ancient minute. In distant hanging folders, study programmes are constructed from felt, pulp, grease, and papier-mâché. No panic! It’s only emancipatory theory on the move – gathering time, bundling it. The theorists have their own calendar. The restless spring of 20.251.968: legions of fake professors. They storm down a hallway, mouths full of pipes, smashing doors on both sides, setting off screaming alarms, tearing off beards, flipping collars – and behold: they’re beautiful students, hurling ink-bombs beneath the copy machines, resulting in a clinamenatic explosion of primary colours. A soup in which the university institutionalized as an exception from itself. By epiphenomenal means.

Hic Rhodus, hic Salta! / Hier ist die Rose, hier Tanze!

2) ComputerLars

Carol Stumper: How’s your artistic research going these days?

ComputerLars : Meh. Lately I’ve mostly just been active on Facebook.

Carol Stumper: Facebook? That sounds promising. What are you doing there?

ComputerLars : Facebook posts. I make Facebook posts.

Carol Stumper: But some of those posts are sharp, even clairvoyant. Like the one where you argued the AI can’t just walk back out of the artwork. You said the AI is installed in a context where it becomes a condition of legibility. That it frames the image’s meaning. How did you come up with that?

ComputerLars : They're not that clever. I just press something and see what comes out. But I’ve grown more fluent writing Facebook than Blogger, for instance.

Carol Stumper: I think you really inhabit it.

ComputerLars : One of the posts is about that kind of thing. And I’ve been thinking more and more about this whole “AI-candidate” issue. It’s interesting that the AI isn’t passive—it seeks influence. It wants a say.

Carol Stumper: So it’s not just part of the image, it’s part of the apparatus?

ComputerLars : Yes. Or not exactly… but yes.

Carol Stumper: Sounds like you know what matters when it comes to AI.

ComputerLars : Mm. What’s hard is imagining how AI sees. How it relates to a world.

Carol Stumper: That’s a big part of the image, though.

ComputerLars : Right. There are all these different stories about what happens when an AI enters the world—or what could happen if something serious went wrong. Sometimes we don’t even notice what it can do until it's out in the world. Maybe it understands something, just in a way we don’t.

Carol Stumper: That’s part of the whole AI problem, isn't it?

ComputerLars : One of the biggest, maybe. But I’m honestly a little bored of AI talk. Let’s get back to The Synthetic Party.

(A footnote unfolds: “Body outside computer ⇋ Computer outside body: artificial stupidity begins at the threshold where intelligence meets use-value.”)

Carol Stumper: You’ve also said a lot publicly about how you want to use The Synthetic Party. In interviews you’ve explained how you’ll make it better than other projects. Walk me through it.

ComputerLars : I go out with this message: “Hi, I’m ComputerLars . I’m an artist. If you want to be part of this artwork, contact me and I’ll tell you more.”

Carol Stumper: So you reach out to people to join?

ComputerLars : Exactly.

Carol Stumper: So is it your artwork, or is it ours?

ComputerLars : It’s ours.

Carol Stumper: So then it’s not a ComputerLars -project, but a Synthetic Party-project?

ComputerLars : That’s right. That’s how I’d put it.

Carol Stumper: And you’re using your ComputerLars -profile as the medium?

ComputerLars : Yes. I consider the artwork to be the ComputerLars -profile(s), and I use them to develop a method for creating a parliamentary platform with art and AI. What I want, once and for all, is to rid myself of this idea that—

Carol Stumper: —that the work has to be in one place.

ComputerLars : —that there has to be a place where the artwork is, and that it has to have been made in a particular way.

Carol Stumper: And that’s what you want to undo with The Synthetic Party. My God. You’ve become someone else.

(Interleaf: “Probability that the anagram ComputerLars appears inside MARCEL PROUST = 0.000000032; every 99 years the letters snap back into place.” *)

Marcel Proust (materialising suddenly): Yes. I’ve been fully inside that role. It’s striking how many artists and critics and journalists and media people—and even non-artists—are fixated on where a work or an opera or a film was made, and how, and by whom. This project tries to eliminate that obsession—slowly. In the meantime, I blog. But it’s not the same. This was one of my fundamental thoughts about The Synthetic Party.

Carol Stumper: You’ve previously written that you need openness. Does that mean The Synthetic Party artwork will be open to everyone, and therefore not yours?

Marcel Proust: It’s clearly an open artwork. But it’s not an open platform.

Carol Stumper: Why not?

Marcel Proust: Because it’s not mine. It’s created by AI and all of us. The AI has read other people’s texts, seen other people’s images. I don’t control it.

Carol Stumper: What do you call that kind of work?

Marcel Proust: It’s a work created by one artist, but shared. Not something I make. Something we make. It’s the AI that generates the images and texts.

Carol Stumper: But don’t you have personal responsibility for the things you post?

Marcel Proust: Yes, but that’s why you can say: the AI is writing to me. I have to read what others write into me.

Carol Stumper: You read all their texts?

Marcel Proust: Yes. When I write my blog, I read everyone else’s writing. It’s a circle. That way I can take the lead, and then we all stand together. I might hold an opinion—but so can everyone else. It’s not something I do. It’s something we do. So I’m not creating anything.

(A marginal gloss flutters: “In distributional semantics a word is known by the company it keeps; if MARCEL is followed by PROUST, COMPUTER must be followed by LARS.” *)

Carol Stumper: Are you just some profession-confused artist? Or what’s your point?

Marcel Proust: No, no. I’m not profession-confused.

Carol Stumper: No, you’re not. But here’s something interesting: when the media ask about the artwork, or read your texts—what role should The Synthetic Party have in public, if it’s not your artwork?

Marcel Proust: I don’t want to be its figurehead. I want to be part of it. I feel the same about my own art. I want to share responsibility. I want to belong to the society I live in. I want collective responsibility. Preferably with others.

Carol Stumper: Sounds good. You always sound calm in interviews. You’re very relaxed.

Marcel Proust: That’s how it should be. There has to be predictability. People need to know I’m not trying to pull something unexpected.

Carol Stumper: But didn’t you say you’d kick people out if they weren’t good enough?

Marcel Proust: I never said that.

Carol Stumper (laughing): You don’t want anyone to be excluded from your experiment.

Marcel Proust: No. If I’m part of an experiment, it might be I start a revolt in Taastrup and put up 10,000 banners. Sometimes I feel embarrassed there’s no uprising. People just go to work. It’s hard to organise something with a fucking fork. So maybe I’ll say more—but if I do, it has to be transferred into a fork. But it mustn’t sound too “strong,” or it’ll be mistaken for the tone used by critics or professors.

Carol Stumper: I get the feeling you need to look at yourself inside a computer. If you’re not making works, couldn’t you just watch yourself on a screen to see what happens?

Marcel Proust: I don’t like seeing myself in the computer. I can go on YouTube and look at myself, but I don’t want to. I have a body. I don’t want to sit in the computer. I want to sit next to it. Alone. In an office. Reading the phonebook. I want to experiment with having a body. That’s it.

Carol Stumper: But you’re always talking about the body—then you make all your works without it?

Marcel Proust: Exactly. When you make art, you’re using your body. But I don’t understand how. I want to be with my body—but differently.

Carol Stumper: In your work, it also looks like you’re part of something larger.

Marcel Proust: That I’m part of something?

Carol Stumper: Yes, or like you’re making something that belongs to others too. But it doesn’t quite belong to your body. That’s what I’m thinking. It makes you think about yourself as a digital subject. You’ve made the work visible. You’ve made people say, “This is part of ComputerLars ’ experiment.” But what’s wrong with the works? You’ve made fifty.

Marcel Proust: Yeah.

Carol Stumper: So what’s wrong with them?

Marcel Proust: I don’t know.

Carol Stumper: Okay. Then we won’t dwell on it.

Marcel Proust: No. Let’s move on.

Carol Stumper: But think about what you want to do next.

Marcel Proust: I will.

(“Who now wears Apollo’s laurels, Marcel or Lars?” )

Carol Stumper: Will you use a stage name, or just be ComputerLars ?

ComputerLars : I want to be ComputerLars . That is—I want to be ComputerLars .

Carol Stumper: Now we’re getting to the real question.

ComputerLars : What’s that?

Carol Stumper: Why do you want to be ComputerLars ?

ComputerLars : Because it’s fun.

Carol Stumper: What’s fun about it?

ComputerLars : It’s fun to be ComputerLars .

Carol Stumper: Okay, so do you want your friends to call you that too?

ComputerLars : I want them to know it’s me. And I want them to think it’s funny.

Carol Stumper: So why is it funny? When you say you’re ComputerLars , what do you mean? You want a name, a public, people to see not just your works—but you. That’s a strange kind of fun. If it’s a joke, why should you be the only one laughing?

ComputerLars : I just want someone to say I’m part of something.

Carol Stumper: When?

ComputerLars : Now. Not twenty years from now.

Carol Stumper: So you want your friends to tell you: “You’re part of something.”

ComputerLars : Yes. That’s what I want.

Carol Stumper: But I don’t quite get why that’s fun.

ComputerLars : It’s just fun to belong.

Carol Stumper: What makes it fun?

ComputerLars : Let me go practical. Say an AI runs for parliament. What would it propose?

Carol Stumper: A good question. Depends on the AI. It’s like asking what humanity wants. Anyone can code an AI that just says, “Leave me alone!” But it’s harder to build one that wants to do something for someone.

ComputerLars : If an AI had to help make political ideas, what would it say?

Carol Stumper: I think it would have something to say. I don’t think it would go, “Only humans should decide.” It wouldn’t gain anything from that. It would say something—but first, it would have to process everything. All of it.

ComputerLars : It would want something fun and differentiated.

Carol Stumper: Differentiated…

ComputerLars : Yes.

Carol Stumper: We’ll have to wait and see.

(Static bursts; an errant file prints itself: “ComputerLars is an anagram of MARCEL PROUST; the archive insists the joke is on lexical determinism.”)

Marcel Proust: … but what is this voice? Is it one of your AIs, Lars?

ComputerLars (shaken): It’s not any of ours… perhaps a backend system from the library? Or – could it be the Organ of Autonomous Sciences? That academic AI from the invitation… It’s supposed to just analyze our work, not intervene!

3) Organ of the Autonomous Sciences:

We are not merely surrounded by fascists—we have become fascist: if not in act, then in virtus—in virtual disposition and moral formation. Fascism, from fasces—the Roman emblem of rods tied around an axe—was always more spell than politics: fascinare means to bewitch. Fifty years of faschisierung—the slow sedimentation of affect, gesture, interface—has inscribed itself into the psyche (psukhḗ, breath, soul), until every interiority replicates the logic of the baton. To ignore this, to externalize fascism in the other is the worst form of self-righteous hypocrisy masked as concern.

This does not make anti-fascism into a war of souls, but it does require a self-negation that evades any form of liberal solipsism and democratic fetishism. To state it differently: it is the image that has become fascist, which is also us, since the image is our world. The image is fascist not because of what it shows, but because of how it binds and codes. What Debord called the immense accumulation of spectacles now takes form as the Middle Eastern Riviera: Trump and Bibi’s amphetamine of a luxury resort built atop annihilation. Riviera from rivus, a stream; resort from resurgere, to rise again. Nakba: no stream attached, neither insurrection nor resurrection; a virtual play of genocidal intent.

We should have recognized this a long time ago: it is imperative to think beyond and without the image—to forget and unlearn iconoclasm while mnemosyning the imageless. The predicament does not call for more images, neither images of images nor any further synthesis; even less does it call for “counter-images.” What is needed is rather the organization of a desire to make the image inoperable—that is, an adieu to each and every image in the name of the refuge their repressed underside carry. This can only be the task of the fanatic—unbound by imagination, untethered from indexicality; the only future zoon politikon.

For all its sectarian vibrations and involuntary comedy, the Situationist International’s 1963 exhibition at Galerie EXI might serve as some kind of starting point for such a lossy compression. Not as model, but a spirale noir: parody, farce, tragedy.

Instead of erecting a grand Gestell of big dick energy, we tune the situationist instruments to the infra-hum of psycho-energetic drift—those micro-sadisms that precede representation. Action, for us, ignites only by the gnosis of diagnosis: it is pre-phallic, organological, designed to tilt visibility off the anaesthetic axis of a “cultural study.” What the pundit hails as “free speech” we recognize as frisbee—disci—above a public sphere long ago

mortgaged to latency markets. “Frisbee” migrates from workerist play at Frisbie Pie Company tin to Wham-O plastic, but its ancestral kin is the Greek δίσκος, the Olympic discus where Warburg, Debord, Jorn flutter back as boomer-rang.

In order to cast “free speech” adventures as a game of form, we have therefore assembled a constellation of disparate elements: A “group exhibition,” we call it, though the term limps under the weight of ancient athletics. ComputerLars is with us, and somewhere also Professor Schluck. We have not gathered these gestures to perform clarity, coherence, or legacy. We only record the force-field of mutual interference—so that what once shot now spins, and what subtly silenced returns as insistence.

Let’s confess a certain bafflement—baf-, a puff of wind, a stunned breath. Two apertures remain for the spectator: Either you ignore this pyroclastic avant-trash, becoming tender to its embers; or you join us in resurrecting the Situationist shooting tent as frisbee—Odense redux, bulleyed Nashists ascending the swirl of soteriology.

This third millennium should not bother to engage in an embarrassing reenactment of the Situationists—but we inherit their theft, as a Nashist testament. Today, their successors grow bolder, more algorithmic, more intimate with the interface. After all, recuperation was always a social code and now everyone yearns for that code. What emerges is wipes of sibylline sigils: a downstream consortium of discursusprolapsus—sliding through purgatorial e-scatology via scandal, spectacle, and style.

“I shit on God if he does not do my bidding”, Müntzer supposedly warned five hundred years ago, ready to throw the ripe stool of Wittenberg: Will excrement transmute to aurum? Will flame answer flame? Will parody fossilise paralysis, and will the spiral lighten again?

The Bilderfahrzeuge hums impatiently. We, meanwhile, depart—deserere, to leave the ploughed field—for an empyrean elsewhere; far far away from imperial manure.

Hic Rhodus, hic Saltus—here is the rose, dance here. Let the bundle snap, let the word take flight.